Concept
Castration complex
The cluster of fantasies and fears centred on the loss of the penis: in the boy, the dread of castration as punishment for his Oedipal wishes; in the girl, the belief that she has already been deprived of one, with the envy and grievance that follow. Freud tied it closely to the fate of the Oedipus complex, which it ends in boys and opens in girls.
Read more- Narrower concepts
- Penis envy
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 4
- Related
- Aphanisis
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1908 Freud first described the castration complex in 1908, among the sexual theories of children, and the case of Little Hans (1909), whose mother threatened to have his 'widdler' cut off, gave it its first clinical demonstration. In 1923 he tied it to the phallic phase, in which the child knows only one genital.
reworked by
- Karen Horney 1923 Horney traced the female castration complex not to anatomical lack alone but to the girl's disappointed love for her father and the identification with him that follows.
- Ernest Jones 1927 Jones recast castration fear as one special case of a more basic dread shared by both sexes.
diverged into
- Aphanisis 1927 Aphanisis was framed against castration: the loss of sexual capacity as a whole, common to both sexes, rather than the threat to a single organ.