First Penis Transplant, Part II

Talking about the transplanted penis being rejected, the New Scientist's Short Sharp Science blog reports that psychological rejection is a common and not a surprising problem among people who receive transplants from dead donors. The report goes on to say that "if you were the partner of such a transplantee, it would be pretty spooky to be caressed by the hand of a dead person. Now imagine if it was an even more intimate organ. The psychological problems of accepting someone else’s penis would be considerable."

In 2001, surgeons had to amputate the first hand transplant because the patient, Clint Hallam, a 50-year-old New Zealander, had become "mentally detached" from it. Hallam lost his hand in circular-saw accident in 1984 while in Rolleston prison where he was serving time for fraud. Surgeons reattached his own severed hand but it didn't take, and so subsequently his hand had to be amputated. Then, on 23 September 1998, A surgeons led by Australian Professor Earl Owen transplanted a new hand in a 13-hour long operation in Lyon, France. The operation was successful and Hallam could move and even write with the fingers of the new hand but over two years later he developed psychological problems and stopped taking his immunosuppressive drugs. The hand was then amputated on 3 February 2002.
Jean-Michel Dubernard, the French surgeon who performed the world's first face transplant on Isabelle Dinoire who had been attacked by a dog acknowledged this problem in his paper outlining the first face transplant performed on November 27, 2005. "...it is not so easy to use and see permanently a dead person's hands, nor is it easy to look in a mirror to see a dead person's face," he wrote in the journal.
Source:

• Hand amputee images: Professor Earl Owen, Various Uses of Microsurgery, Hand Transplantation
• Preoperative, premauling image and Postoperative image of Isabelle Dinoire, Wikipedia