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“The Most Unkindest Cut of All” 2
Published in Paul Ian Steinberg, Psychoanalysis in Medicine, 2020
Taylor (2016) describes varieties of castration experience and their relevance to contemporary psychoanalysis and psychiatry, showing how this “concept has broadened and is currently used not only to signify fear of damage to or loss of the genital, but also metaphorically to indicate a threat to or loss of any valued human characteristic or function” (2016: 39). I suggest that castration anxiety can represent a primitive fear of destruction, death, or loss of bodily intactness, and therefore the loss of the integrity of a sense of self, including gender identity. Taylor distinguishes between castration anxiety, referring to fear of future injury, and castration depression, referring to a reaction to an already-experienced injury. He emphasizes early trauma in intensifying castration anxiety, concluding, “with many traumatized patients, castration conflicts are in the foreground … the therapist needs to focus on the patient’s proneness to humiliation, powerlessness, and shame” (2016: 39).
Contact: William S. Burroughs’s philosophy of love
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2023
The child’s effort to increase pleasure while also heeding the commands of a parental authority is complicated further during the phallic or Oedipal phase (around 4–5 years [Sandler et al., 1997, pp. 23–24]), during which the anal phase’s toilet training is succeeded by a more paramount task: that of sublimating the love and hate felt by the youth towards parents who place ever-greater and ever-more-intricate demands upon their child (Klein, 1928/1986). What is not often understood is that the child is rarely aware that he has any erotic or violent feelings towards parents, since the process of sublimation is constantly forming a cathectic bridge between the self and the parents. This is done by a psychic binding of the internal object that represents castration anxiety (i.e., the situation of being at the mercy of the father who could, if he wished, annihilate the child).2 The binding process allows the child to draw back from the archaic responses of aggression and lust that are programmed into the pregenital stages, and to spend his energies developing skills that befit a relatively independent schoolboy who pleases his parents with his obedience, and is paid for his trouble with a certain measure of independence that includes activities with his school-aged peers.
Self(ie)-Recognition: Authenticity, Passing, and Trans Embodied Imaginaries
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2022
I conceptualize this conflict in the liminal space around castration anxiety. Legibility and acceptance, as I have thus far presented, depends upon performativity, not anatomy. Instead of fear of losing what dangles between one’s legs, a fear of gendered illegibility reflects anxiety over the loss of the historical penile dichotomy that divides the haves from the have nots, and the potential loss of societal values and opportunities corresponding to male anatomical assignment. Historically, corporeal sexual dimorphism facilitated physical demands of daily labors: Hunting, farming, and building require more power output than cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. Such traditional masculinity does not require a penis, but implies the presence of one. Finnish sociologist Jan Wickman (2003) asserts that in the late 20th century, dominant masculine epistemologies evolved to become paradoxically hypermasculine in both muscularity and performativity,10This hypermuscular masculinity is racialized, limiting affirmation for those who face intersecting prejudices. as survival increasingly depended on cognitive output rather than physical, and corporeal ideals became defined by form over function (e.g., S. M. Alexander, 2003; Jefferson, 1998). Muscles now approach the vestigial, and, like peacock feathers, are used to signal virility. With the shift from manual labor to ungendered desk work, clear divisions in gendered expectations blend and blur. Failure to recognize a stranger’s gender sparks anxiety that maybe the penis has become vestigial as well (i.e., aforementioned inverse castration anxiety). If the penis no longer means manhood, what does? If manhood no longer portends privilege and prosperity, what does?
The Locker Room
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2019
In such spaces as the MLR, castration anxiety silently dictates an assumed code of conduct. Weary and wary still of what may be derived from internality or externality, I remain curious. In other words, is my dread, and that of others, rooted in what is real, projected, or a combination of both?