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.
Development
1908
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909);The Infantile Genital Organization (1923)
1923
reworked by Karen Horney
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.
In On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women (1923)
1927
reworked by Ernest Jones
Jones recast castration fear as one special case of a more basic dread shared by both sexes.
In The Early Development of Female Sexuality (1927)
Relations
- 1908 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1923 reworked by Karen Horney
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.
- 1927 reworked by Ernest Jones
Jones recast castration fear as one special case of a more basic dread shared by both sexes.
- 1927 diverged into Aphanisis
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.
Works
- 1909
Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy
Freud's case history of "Little Hans", a five-year-old boy who developed a phobia of horses, published in 1909 in the first volume of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen. Freud met the boy only once: the treatment was conducted by the boy's father, a follower of Freud, and the case is written up from his notes. Freud interprets the phobia as arising from the boy's Oedipal situation (his love for his mother, his hostility toward his father, his fear of castration and his curiosity about birth and the genitals) and argues that anxiety born of repressed longing was displaced onto horses, which stood for the father. As the first analysis of a child, the case is offered as direct confirmation of the theory of infantile sexuality Freud had set out in 1905.
- 1923
The Infantile Genital Organization
A short paper of 1923, subtitled "An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality", in which Freud corrects a passage of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. There he had held that infantile sexuality resembles the adult form in its object choice but lacks, or only imperfectly achieves, the primacy of the genitals. He now argues that at the height of infantile sexual development interest in the genitals and genital activity become dominant, hardly less than in maturity. What sets this infantile genital organization apart is that for both sexes only one genital, the male one, is taken into account: there is no genital primacy but a primacy of the phallus. Freud says he can describe the process only in the boy. The boy assumes that every being has an organ like his own and directs his sexual curiosity at it. When he discovers that girls lack it, he first denies what he saw, then supposes it will grow, and at last concludes that it was there and was taken away, through castration. Freud holds that the castration complex can be understood only from this origin in the phase of phallic primacy, and traces to it much of men's contempt for and horror of women, citing Ferenczi's reading of the Medusa's head. The child generalizes the lack only slowly, keeping the penis for respected women such as the mother until his theories of birth, and the vagina remains undiscovered. The paper ends by tracing how the polarity of the sexes changes through development: subject and object, active and passive in the sadistic-anal organization, phallic and castrated in the infantile genital organization, and male and female only at puberty.
- 1923
On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women
Horney's first paper against the received psychoanalytic account of femininity was read at the Berlin congress of 1922 and published in 1923. Analysts had taken it as given that women suffer from their sex and envy the man his penis, and that the female castration complex follows from this. Horney asks whether the view owes its self-evidence to masculine narcissism. She also notes that it is unsatisfying, for biological thinking, that half of humanity should be discontented with its sexual role. She breaks the girl's penis envy into three components: urethral erotism, the wish to look and to show, and suppressed masturbatory wishes. In each the little girl is at a real disadvantage, but none of them makes her feel primarily inferior. From analytic material she argues that the decisive process lies in the Oedipal phase. The girl passes through an intense, fully feminine love for the father, including the wish for a child from him. When that love is disappointed she gives him up as an object and identifies with him instead, so that the wish to be a man covers a renounced femininity. That identification is one core of the castration complex. The other is the fantasy of having been castrated within the love relation to the father, from which women's vindictive attitudes toward men derive. Her conclusion is that wounded femininity creates the castration complex, and that women, like men, are made neurotic by their failure at the Oedipus complex. The same identification with the parent of the other sex underlies both homosexuality and the castration complex.
- 1927
The Early Development of Female Sexuality
Jones read this paper at the Tenth International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Innsbruck on 1 September 1927, and it appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis that October. He opens by endorsing Karen Horney's warning that knowledge of early female development is distorted by bias, suggesting that male analysts have taken an unduly phallocentric view that underrates the female organs. The paper draws chiefly on deep analyses, conducted at the same time, of five women with manifest homosexuality, and sets out to answer two questions: what in women corresponds to the male fear of castration, and what distinguishes the development of homosexual from heterosexual women. Jones argues that the first question is wrongly put. Because the genital plays so large a part in male sexuality, analysts tend to equate castration with the abolition of sexuality altogether, whereas in both sexes castration is only a partial threat. For the total and permanent extinction of the capacity, and the opportunity, for sexual enjoyment he proposes the Greek term "aphanisis", and he holds that this is the fundamental dread underlying all the neuroses; castration fear and thoughts of death are its nearest clinical expressions. Both sexes dread the same thing; they differ in how they imagine it coming about. For the boy it takes the active form of castration as punishment for a forbidden act. For the girl, who depends more on her partner's willingness for her gratification, the primary fear is separation: that the rival mother will come between her and the father or send her away for ever, or that the father will simply withhold gratification. Hence the deep fear of desertion. Jones connects this dependence on the partner's approval with Helene Deutsch's observation that the female super-ego, like the male, derives chiefly from reactions to the father. Building on Freud's account of the female Oedipus complex passing away through continued disappointment, Jones arrives at the formula that privation is equivalent to frustration: sheer non-gratification comes to mean deliberate deprivation by others. He goes further, proposing that guilt, and with it the super-ego, is built up from within to protect the child from the stress of ungratified libido and so to ward off aphanisis, by damping down wishes that cannot be fulfilled. External disapproval, once held to be the whole cause, is largely exploited by the child, who projects the inner danger outward and seizes on whatever "moral complaisance" (moralisches Entgegenkommen) the environment offers in order to signal the danger and erect a barrier against it. For the girl's early development, Jones accepts Freud's account but adds, in line with Melanie Klein's early analyses, direct transitions from the oral stage to the Oedipal situation: oral tendencies bifurcate early into clitoral and fellatio directions. In development towards heterosexuality, sadism sets in late, sucking passes into the anal stage, and mouth, anus and vagina form an equivalent series of receptive organs, a stage that amounts to identification with the mother. Penis envy always appears, but Jones, agreeing with Horney, Deutsch and Klein, distinguishes a pre-Oedipal (auto-erotic) from a post-Oedipal (allo-erotic) penis envy and holds the latter to be clinically the more important. It is a regressive defence, revived by the privation of never being allowed to share the father's penis or to obtain a child from him. Faced with aphanisis through this inevitable privation, the girl must renounce either her object, the father, or her sex, that is, her femininity. In the first case her feminine wishes develop on the adult plane and pass to more accessible objects; in the second the bond with the father is kept but turned into identification with him, a penis complex. The boy faces the parallel choice between renouncing his mother and renouncing his masculinity, so that one formula holds for both sexes: they must give up either their sex or their incest. In the homosexual solution the individual makes sexual integrity depend on possessing the organ of the opposite sex, directly or through identification. Jones suggests that the "phallic phase" Freud described in girls is probably a mild form of this father-penis identification, a secondary and defensive formation rather than a true developmental stage. Among homosexual women Jones distinguishes two main groups: those who keep their interest in men but want to be recognised by them as one of themselves, and those who have little interest in men and enjoy femininity vicariously through identification with a feminine woman, whom they gratify with a substitute for the penis, most typically the tongue. The decisive and apparently inborn factors are an unusual intensity of oral erotism and of sadism, which converge in an intensified oral-sadistic stage that he regards as the central characteristic of homosexual development in women; oral erotism predominates in the second group, sadism, with its biting and castrating phantasies, in the first. He adds that the heterosexual woman dreads the mother more, the homosexual woman the father, whose punishment is feared as desertion on the oral level and as beating or anal assault on the anal one. The paper introduced the term aphanisis and opened Jones's side of the debate with Freud on female sexuality.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Early Development of Female Sexuality1927Evidence for a relation
- On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women1923Evidence for a relation
- Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy1909Evidence for a relation
- The Infantile Genital Organization1923Evidence for a relation