On anxiety - essay

I am still far too depressed to deal with politics. The election is still not necessarily over as votes are still being challenged and counted in Florida and Ohio. But probably nothing will come of it. Here's another essay:


The fear of losing one or more of my fingers has haunted me for more than sixty years. Castration Anxiety? You bet. And yes, I understand all that Freudian stuff about how I loved my mother and was an unequal rival to my father and therefore became afraid that he would cut "it" off and I have repressed the whole business and yet it has shaped my personality and is the unconscious origin of this anxiety I feel and all that bunk.
I can tell you exactly where my obsessive and neurotic concern over my digits began -- in the movies, a "B" western to be exact. Although it has been more than sixty years since I saw this gripping saga of the old west the opening scene still is still vivid in my mind. Some of the precise details may have slipped a bit but here it is: There is a mining claim. A father and his son. The bad guys ride in to jump the claim. A gun battle ensues. The father is killed. The boy is behind a log shooting at the bad guys with an oversize six-shooter. He runs out of bullets. They grab him. "It's just a kid," they exclaim. "Let's teach him a lesson." They cut off his trigger finger and leave him.
Years later he surfaces again as a gunfighter. But, as he has no trigger finger he has had to learn to "fan" his six gun with his left hand. That is to say, he has to hit the hammer with his left hand while holding the gun in his three fingered right hand. Of course he is a crack shot. Eventually he finds the bad guys who killed his father. They are, mysteriously, the same age they were when they did the foul deed. He avenges his father's death by shooting them in a few exciting gun battles the outcome of which is never in doubt.
I loved it! Must have, I suppose, to remember it this well after so many years. But to this day I'm nervous around knives. Saws are even more terrifying, and power saws, especially those huge whining table saws and loud chain saws are enough to make me want to run and hide. Oh, I still use one occasionally when I absolutely have to for some reason so I suppose the creater of this film could argue that I wasn't really harmed by it all. And I suppose that analysts might argue that the movie was not the "real" cause but served merely to activate the more unconscious mechanisms of my mind. Be that as it may, it is my conscious mind that has been troubling me all this time. It should go without saying that I am totally unaware of the unconscious dimensions of this affliction. Having spent the greater part of my life afraid of sharp objects, counting my fingers regularly, being inordinately careful with my hands, even dreaming about losing one of my precious digits, I am not really mollified when I am told that the movie couldn't have affected me in this way unless I was otherwise afflicted. Whatever it did, it certainly didn't help matters any. Furthermore, what about the whole generation of boys who went around trying to learn how to fan their six guns? What do you suppose happened to all of them?