“Castration Anxiety” Revisited: Especially “Female Castration Anxiety”

ABSTRACT

I find the term castration anxiety a still relevant and important key body fearful fantasy in males, especially expressing fear of the father; as is female castration anxiety an equivalent key fear of the ablation of the sexual and reproductive organs of females, especially by the avenging mother. Freud’s and his followers’ version of the female anxiety, however, has repetitively been shown to be askew since the 1930s, yet it keeps appearing again, as if still worthy of serious argument. To demonstrate its utter blindness to an emotional or imaginative appreciation of female body reproductive functioning, a detailed critique is offered of the once classic paper, “The Body as Phallus” by Bertram Lewin (1933). I recommend that a straightforward sense of female castration is helpful in exploring female body anxieties as a more defined bodily referent than can be encompassed by separation anxieties that are currently more popular.

Notes

¹ The sad and horrific current state of affairs with extensive female genital mutilation in Africa and the Mid-East cultures is well known, as well as the common initiation rites of religions that demand of males more minor genital cuts.

² Throughout the article I use sex to connote the anatomical genital morphological differences in bodies: and I use gender to connote the individual complex inner portraiture of internalized attitudes and behaviors of men and women that emerge as the individual’s view of him or herself as male or female, masculine or feminine (like Stoller, 1968). The latter adjectives, I believe, can only be applied by an individual about himself or herself. From a perspective outside that person, those judgments are too subjective and liable to bias to be a source of generalization (like Elise, 2002).

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Notes on contributors

Rosemary H. Balsam

Rosemary H. Balsam, F.R.C.Psych, M.R.C.P., is a Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; Assoc. Clinical Prof. Psychiatry, Medical School, Yale University; Staff psychiatrist, Yale Student Mental Health and Counseling; and co-editor of the book review section of JAPA. Her most recent book is Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis (2012, Routledge).