“The Most Unkindest Cut of All” 2
Paul Ian Steinberg in 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).
Developmental Issues in Recovery
Jacqueline Wallen in Addiction in Human Development, 2014
In the girl, the process is slightly different, according to Freud. Although the girl also fantasizes about having an exclusive relationship with her father, she does not need to be as afraid of her mother as a boy might be of his father. First of all, the mother is probably less powerful than the father. Also, the girl does not have the "castration anxiety" that a boy experiences because she does not have a penis. Her problem is "penis envy" and the fact that she must reconcile herself to the fact that she feels less valuable because she does not have a penis. When she "identifies with the aggressor" (e.g., her mother) to possess her father symbolically, she is identifying with someone whom she also sees as less valuable because her mother also lacks a penis. Because he saw fear as a less important factor in the formation of girls' superegos, Freud felt that girls did not ever develop quite as strong a conscience as boys did.
Questions and Answers
David Browne, Brenda Wright, Guy Molyneux, Mohamed Ahmed, Ijaz Hussain, Bangaru Raju, Michael Reilly in MRCPsych Paper I One-Best-Item MCQs, 2017
Answer: C. The Electra complex is the female equivalent of the Oedipal complex. Castration anxiety in males resolves the Oedipal complex. Oral envy and frustration are from Kleinian theory and are stages in development of the child during the first year of development. [G. p. 101; H. p. 335]
The Matrixial Gaze: Transgender in Boys Don’t Cry
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2022
Feminist film theorists have been concerned about how the female-feminine appears or, conversely, does not (fully) appear in Hollywood film since at least 1975, when Laura Mulvey published her groundbreaking paper on how the phallic gaze operates on the cinematic screen. In her analysis, Mulvey contends that female genital “lack” (associated with male “castration anxiety”) is often managed through the disavowal and fetishization of female anatomy. Female genitals and the sexual difference of the feminine Other, more generally, are fetishized or associated with lack. The feminine is, in other words, used to disavow a lack the heterosexual and white cis-male viewer cannot (easily) tolerate in himself. We might say that the phallic gaze does not register aspects of the feminine, much like the cisgender gaze does not register aspects of trans- subjectivity. Of course, the phallic gaze and the cisgender gaze are not mutually exclusive. The problem of representation concerning feminist film theorists is not unlike the problem of representation concerning trans- studies scholars. While trans- identity cannot be reduced to the feminine, there is an analogous problem concerning representation. The Woman in Hollywood cinema, like the trans-masculine character in Boys, does not fully cohere in the visual field.
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?
Related Knowledge Centers
- Circumcision
- Oedipus Complex
- Psychoanalysis
- Psychoanalytic Theory
- Penis REMoval
- Castration Complex
- Emasculation
- Phallic Stage
- Psychosexual Development
- Masturbation