Autoenucleation

History

In Greek mythology, Oedipus tore out his own eyes after realizing he had wed his mother, as told in Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex. In the 1200s, Marco Polo wrote of a devout carpenter from Baghdad who removed his right eye because of lustful thoughts about a young female client. Sigmund Freud's now-discredited theory of psychosexual development claimed that such self-blinding stems from psycho-sexual conflicts. During the 1800s, some Jewish people in eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement deliberately blinded themselves in one eye to evade harsh Russian military conscription. On April 1, 2004, Andre Thomas, while jailed for stabbing his estranged wife and her two children to death, pulled out his right eye with his hands; he was later found to have schizophrenia. On December 9, 2008, after being sentenced to death, Thomas removed his left eye and swallowed it, saying he did so to stop the U.S. government from reading his mind. On February 6, 2018, 20-year-old American Kaylee Muthart blinded herself in both eyes while on methamphetamine, thinking the act would save the world. In May 2019, Tanya Suárez removed her own eyes in a San Diego jail while under the influence of methamphetamine. She sued the county, claiming a deputy watched without intervening; video evidence reportedly exists but remains private. She settled for $4.35 million in October 2022.