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100-452: Freud's ideas of castration anxiety and penis envy refer to the differences of the sexes in their experience of the Oedipus complex. The complex is thought to persist into adulthood as an unconscious psychic structure which can assist in social adaptation but also be the cause of neurosis . According to sexual difference, a positive Oedipus complex refers to the child's sexual desire for

200-484: A phallic stage fixation that leads to the boy becoming an aggressive, over-ambitious, and vain man. In Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy (1909), the case study of the equinophobic boy " Little Hans ", Freud claimed that the relation between Hans's fears—of horses and of his father—derived from external factors, the birth of a sister, and internal factors, the desire of the infantile id to replace his father as companion to his mother, and guilt for enjoying

300-413: A 'substitute for castration', and an 'expression of submission to the father's will'. This view was shared by others in the psychoanalytic community, such as Wilhelm Reich , Hermann Nunberg , and Jacques Lacan , who stated that there is "nothing less castrating than circumcision!" Themes central to castration anxiety that feature prominently in circumcision include pain, fear, loss of control (with

400-462: A contrived understanding of women as inverse men. She charges that he does not explore mother–daughter relationships and that he dogmatically assumes female sexuality will be a perfect mirror of male sexuality. Castration anxiety Castration anxiety is an overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of , the penis—a derivative of Sigmund Freud 's theory of the castration complex , one of his earliest psychoanalytic theories . The term refers to

500-504: A difficulty in distinguishing between truth and fiction. Therefore, according to Gay, there was no sinister motive in changing his theory; Freud was a scientist seeking the facts and was entitled to change his views if new evidence was presented to him. Many scholars and psychologists observe that, because the theory of the Oedipus complex assigns distinct roles to a mother and father, it is a poor fit for families that do not use traditional gender roles. As of November 2022 same-sex marriage

600-477: A discrete sexual identity ( ego ). Whereas a boy develops castration anxiety , a girl develops penis envy , for she perceives that she has been castrated previously (and missing the penis), and so forms resentment towards her own kind as inferior, while simultaneously striving to claim her father's penis through bearing a male child of her own. Furthermore, after the phallic stage, the girl's psychosexual development includes transferring her primary erogenous zone from

700-403: A girl – letting the boy's hair grow and even dressing him in girl clothes – were said to be the most effective means to avoid her harm, until they were ritually circumcised on the eighth day of life as part of a covenant with God. The figure of Judith , depicted both as "a type of the praying Virgin... who tramples Satan and harrows Hell," and also as "seducer-assassin" archetypically reflects

800-464: A normal, non-traumatic childhood is able to contain and assimilate sexual feelings into a continuous sense of self. Freud proposed that adults who experienced sexual abuse as a child suffer from unconscious memories and feelings incompatible with the central mass of thoughts and feelings that constitute his or her experience. Psychic disorders are a direct consequence of experiences that cannot be assimilated. Unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse

900-448: A result, "Bion regarded the central crime of Oedipus as his insistence on knowing the truth at all costs". Jacques Lacan argued against removing the Oedipus complex from the center of psychosexual developmental experience. For him, the Oedipus complex "—in so far as we continue to recognize it as covering the whole field of our experience with its signification—may be said to mark the limits that our discipline assigns to subjectivity". It

1000-404: A rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex. He does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness. Freud and others eventually extended this idea and embedded it in a larger body of theory. In classical psychoanalytic theory,

1100-424: Is "a critique of psychoanalytic normativity and Oedipus" according to Didier Eribon . Eribon criticizes the Oedipus complex described by Freud or Lacan as an "implausible ideological construct" which is an "inferiorization process of homosexuality". According to psychologist Geva Shenkman, "To examine the application of concepts such as Oedipus complex and primal scene to male same-sex families, we must first eliminate

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1200-436: Is explored in the story Tupik by French writer Michel Tournier in his collection of stories entitled Le Coq de Bruyère (1978) and is a phenomenon Freud documents several times. Kellogg recounts one case of castration used as a cure and punishment for masturbation , although he did not advocate it. Castration anxiety can also refer to being castrated symbolically. In the metaphorical sense, castration anxiety refers to

1300-608: Is from the repressed desires for sexual contact with women. It was thought that these desires are trying to reach the men's consciousness. The experimenters deduced that unconscious anxiety of being castrated might come from the fear the consciousness has of bodily injury. The researchers concluded that individuals who are in excellent health and who have never experienced any serious accident or illness may be obsessed by gruesome and relentless fears of dying or of being killed. In another article related to castration anxiety, Hall et al. investigated whether sex differences would be found in

1400-403: Is legal in 31 nations. Same-sex couples start families through adoption or surrogacy. The pillars of the family structure are diversifying to include parents who are single or of the same sex as their partner along with the traditional heterosexual, married parents. These new family structures pose new questions for the psychoanalytic theories such as the Oedipus complex that require the presence of

1500-577: Is named for the mythological figure Oedipus , an ancient Theban king who discovers he has unknowingly murdered his father and married his mother, whose depiction in Sophocles ' Oedipus Rex had a profound influence on Freud. Freud rejected the term Electra complex , introduced by Carl Jung in 1913 as a proposed equivalent complex among young girls. Some critics have argued that Freud, by abandoning his earlier seduction theory (which attributed neurosis to childhood sexual abuse) and replacing it with

1600-409: Is no father present there is no reason for a boy to have castration anxiety and thus resolve the complex. Psychoanalysis presents non-heteronormative relationships a sort of perversion or fetish rather than a natural occurrence. To some psychologists, this emphasis on gender norms can be a distraction in treating homosexual patients. The 1972 book Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

1700-401: Is not universal." Feminist views on the Oedipus complex include criticism of the phallocentrism of the theory by philosopher Luce Irigaray among others. Irigaray charges that Freud's work assumes a masculine perspective, epitomized by the centrality of the penis (or lack of a penis for girls) in the Oedipus complex. She thinks that Freud's desire for a neat, symmetrical theory leads him to

1800-448: Is that Amalia Nathansohn Freud was relatively young during Freud's childhood and thus of reproductive age, and Freud having a wet-nurse , may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother." In Esquisse pour une autoanalyse , Pierre Bourdieu argues that the success of the concept of Oedipus is inseparable from the prestige associated with ancient Greek culture and

1900-409: Is that rather than instinctual sexual desire, there is instinctual sexual aversion against these unions (See Westermarck effect ). Steven Pinker wrote that "The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. Of note

2000-404: Is that which superimposes the kingdom of culture upon the person, marking his or her introduction to the symbolic order . Thus "a child learns what power independent of itself is as it goes through the Oedipus complex ... encountering the existence of a symbolic system independent of itself". Moreover, Lacan's proposal that "the ternary relation of the Oedipus complex" liberates the "prisoner of

2100-460: Is thought to be experienced, in differing ways, by both sexes. In the literal sense, castration anxiety refers to a child's fear of having their genitalia disfigured or removed as punishment for Oedipal desire. In Freudian psychoanalysis , castration anxiety ( Kastrationsangst ) refers to an unconscious fear of penile loss that originates during the phallic stage of psychosexual development and continues into adulthood. According to Freud, when

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2200-515: The Oedipus myth's timeless appeal thus: His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. Freud also claims that

2300-518: The Sigmund Freud Archives , Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson , adopted the view that Freud's work was a cover-up for abuse after reading Freud's unpublished letters. In his book The Assault on Truth , Masson argues that Freud misattributed accounts of sexual abuse to fabrications and fantasies of children because, for personal reasons, he was unable to accept that the accounts were real. According to Masson, among Freud's reasons to suppress

2400-480: The id , governed by the pleasure principle , but the pragmatic ego , governed by the reality principle , knows that the father is an impossible rival to overcome and the impulse is repressed . The boy's ambivalence about his father's place in the family, is manifested as fear of castration by the physically superior father; the fear is an irrational, subconscious manifestation of the infantile id. In both sexes, defense mechanisms provide transitory resolutions of

2500-456: The masturbation normal to a boy of his age. Little Hans himself was unable to relate his fear of horses to his fear of his father. As the treating psychoanalyst , Freud noted that "Hans had to be told many things that he could not say himself" and that "he had to be presented with thoughts, which he had, so far, shown no signs of possessing". Freud applied the Oedipus complex to the psychosexual development of boys and girls, but later modified

2600-415: The psychodynamic Object relations theory in 1925. Whereas Freud proposed that the father (the paternal phallus) was central to infantile and adult psychosexual development, Melanie Klein concentrated on the early maternal relationship, proposing that Oedipal manifestations are perceptible in the first year of life, the oral stage . Her proposal was part of the " controversial discussions " (1942–44) at

2700-496: The super-ego , "the heir to the Oedipus complex", is formed as the infant boy internalizes the familial rules of his father. In contrast, in the early 1920s, using the term "pre-Oedipal", Otto Rank proposed that a boy's powerful mother was the source of the super-ego, in the course of normal psychosexual development . Rank's theoretic conflict with Freud excluded him from the Freudian inner circle; nonetheless, he later developed

2800-506: The "primordial urges and fears" that are his concern and the basis of the Oedipal complex are inherent in the myths the play is based on, not primarily in the play itself, which Freud refers to as a "further modification of the legend" that originates in a "misconceived secondary revision of the material, which has sought to exploit it for theological purposes". Before the idea of the Oedipus complex, Freud believed that childhood sexual trauma

2900-419: The 1970s, social worker Florence Rush wrote that Freud's seduction theory , which came early in his career, correctly attributed his patients' memories of childhood trauma to the patient's family, often the father, implying that widespread sexual abuse of children by parents was common in his society. According to Rush, the discovery of this abuse made Freud uncomfortable, so he abandoned the theory and invented

3000-780: The Aetiology of Hysteria.) There was no summary and no discussion. Freud published it a few weeks later in the Wiener klinische Rundschau . On the other hand, Freud had no trouble publishing three papers on the subject in a matter of months. Doubt has been cast on the notion that the occurrence of child sexual abuse was not acknowledged by most of Freud's colleagues. It has been pointed out that they were skeptical about Freud's claims of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory, and would have been aware of criticisms that his suggestive clinical procedures were liable to produce findings of doubtful validity . Freud's seduction theory emphasizes

3100-459: The April 21 meeting (p. 420). Two of the papers were reported in the usual manner. Invariably, the practice was to give the title of a paper, a brief summary of its contents, and an account of the ensuing discussion. But in the citation of the last paper, there was a break with tradition. The report reads as follows: Docent Sigm. Freud: Über die Ätiologie der Hysterie (Sigmund Freud, lecturer: On

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3200-528: The British Psychoanalytical Association. The Kleinian psychologists proposed that "underlying the Oedipus complex, as Freud described it ... there is an earlier layer of more primitive relationships with the Oedipal couple". She assigned "dangerous destructive tendencies not just to the father but also to the mother in her discussion of the child's projective fantasies". Klein's concept of the depressive position , resulting from

3300-663: The Freud Archives, Freud did not in any sense reject the reality of childhood sexual trauma, but realized that actual abuse was not the universal cause of neurosis he had thought it to be. New York psychiatrist Dr. Frank R. Hartmann said that "Freud realized he made a mistake in attributing all neurosis to repressed memories of actual abuse. He discovered a much broader theory which explained much more." The historian Peter Gay , author of Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), emphasizes that Freud continued to believe that some patients were sexually abused, but realized that there can be

3400-413: The Oedipus complex is considered important in developing the male infantile super-ego . By identifying with the father, the boy internalizes social morality , thereby potentially becoming a voluntary, self-regulating follower of societal rules, rather than merely reflexively complying out of fear of punishment. Unresolved son–father competition for the psychosexual possession of the mother might result in

3500-460: The Oedipus complex occurs during the phallic stage of psychosexual development (age 3–6 years), although it can manifest at an earlier age. In the phallic stage, a boy's decisive psychosexual experience is the Oedipus complex—his son–father competition for possession of his mother. It is in this third stage of psychosexual development that the child's genitalia is his or her primary erogenous zone ; thus, when children become aware of their bodies,

3600-529: The Oedipus complex theory yields few testable predictions. They find no evidence of the Oedipus complex in people. There is evidence of parent–child conflict but it is not for sexual possession of the opposite sex-parent. According to psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman , Freud and his followers resisted subjecting his theories, including the Oedipus theory, to scientific testing and verification. Lieberman claims that investigations based in cognitive psychology either contradict or fail to support Freud's ideas. In

3700-409: The Oedipus complex to eliminate "automatic associations among sex, gender, and the stereotypical psychological functions deriving from these categories" and make it applicable to today's modern society. From its Freudian conception, psychoanalysis and its theories have always relied on traditional gender roles to draw itself out. In the 1950s, psychologists distinguished different roles in parenting for

3800-486: The Oedipus complex to replace it. The Oedipus complex allowed him to attribute stories of childhood sexual abuse to the children themselves. Freud came to the conclusion that the stories were fantasies of hidden desires, rather than factual descriptions of trauma. Thus, Rush argues, Freud covered up illegal and immoral sexual abuse by undermining the perceptions of his patients, particularly his female patients. Rush's theory became known as The Freudian Coverup . A director of

3900-407: The abuse was that he did not want to be confronted by the father of a patient who was accused of committing abuse. Late in his career Freud sought to prevent colleague Sandor Ferenczi from delivering a paper that reasserted the seduction theory. Freud had hoped that his former student would abandon the theory as he himself had done, but Ferenczi delivered the paper in 1932. Masson writes that, because

4000-496: The age of eight for the latter. In the traditional account of development of seduction theory, Freud initially thought that his patients were relating more or less factual stories of sexual mistreatment, and that the sexual abuse was responsible for many of his patients' neuroses and other mental health problems. Within a few years Freud abandoned his theory, concluding that the memories of sexual abuse were in fact imaginary fantasies . An alternative account that has come to

4100-588: The automatic associations among sex, gender, and the stereotypical psychological functions based on these categories." Postmodern psychoanalytic theories, which aim to reestablish psychoanalysis for modern times, suggest modifying or discarding the complex because it does not describe newer family structures. Shenkman suggests that a loose interpretation of the Oedipus complex in which the child seeks sexual satisfaction from any parent regardless of gender or sex , would be helpful: "From this perspective, any parental authority, or institution for that matter, may represent

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4200-443: The bodies of other children, and the bodies of their parents, they gratify physical curiosity by undressing and exploring themselves, each other, and their genitals, so learning the anatomic differences between male and female and the gender differences between boy and girl. Despite the mother being the parent who primarily gratifies the child's desires , the child begins forming a discrete sexual identity—"boy", "girl"—that alters

4300-495: The case of Little Hans, could not be verified through research or experimentation on a larger population. Adolf Grünbaum argues that the type of evidence Freud and his followers used, the clinical productions of patients during analytic treatment, by their nature cannot provide cogent observational support for Freud's core hypotheses. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson , in their 1988 book Homicide , argue that

4400-456: The castration threat they experienced in childhood. Therefore, these men may be expected to respond in different ways to different degrees of castration anxiety that they experience from the same sexually arousing stimulus. The experimenters aimed to demonstrate that in the absence of a particular stimulus, men who were severely threatened with castration, as children, might experience long-lasting anxiety. The researchers claimed that this anxiety

4500-403: The causative impact of nurture : the shaping of the mind by experience. This theory held that hysteria and obsessional neurosis are caused by repressed memories of infantile sexual abuse. Infantile sexual abuse, the root of all neurosis, is premature introduction of sexuality into the experience of the child. Trauma creates affects and thoughts that simply cannot be integrated. The adult who had

4600-417: The cause of much unconscious guilt. Freud believed that the Oedipal sentiment has been inherited through the millions of years it took for humans to evolve from apes. His view of its universality was based on his clinical observation of neurotic or normal children, his analysis of his own response to Oedipus Rex , and on the fact that the play was effective on both ancient and modern audiences. Freud describes

4700-403: The cause of the emotional distress. Because of unconscious thoughts, as theorized in the ideas of psychoanalysis, the anxiety is brought to the surface where it is experienced symbolically. This will lead to the fear associated with bodily injury in castration anxiety, which can then lead to the fear of dying or being killed. Freud had a strongly critical view of circumcision, believing it to be

4800-399: The character is the subject of a play by Sophocles ( Electra ) from the 5th century BC. Orthodox Jungian psychology uses the term "Oedipus complex" only to denote a boy's psychosexual development. Freud himself rejected the equivalence, arguing that at this stage of development it is only the male who experiences a simultaneous love for one parent and competitive hatred for the other. For Freud,

4900-420: The chick, it is the most formative, significant, moulding experience of human life ... If you take a person's adult life—his love, his work, his hobbies, his ambitions—they all point back to the Oedipus complex". Studies conducted of children's attitudes to parents at the oedipal stage do not demonstrate the shifts in positive feelings that are predicted by the theory. Case studies that Freud relied upon, such as

5000-470: The child adapts by incorporating, into his or her (super)ego, the personality characteristics of the same-sex parent. In the case of the boy, this diminishes his castration anxiety , because his likeness to his father protects him from the consequences of their rivalry. The little girl's anxiety is diminished in her identification with the mother, who understands that neither of them possesses a penis, and thus are not antagonists. The satisfactory resolution of

5100-416: The child's forced restraint, and in the psychological effects of the event, which may include sensation seeking, and lower emotional stability ) and the perception that the event is a form of punishment. The ritual's origination as a result of Oedipal conflict was tested by examining 111 societies, finding that circumcision is likely to be found in societies in which the son sleeps in the mother's bed during

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5200-575: The child's mind ... this provides us with a capacity for seeing us in interaction with others, and ... for reflecting on ourselves, whilst being ourselves". As such, in The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes (2000), Michael Parsons proposed that such a perspective permits viewing "the Oedipus complex as a life-long developmental challenge ... [with] new kinds of Oedipal configurations that belong to later life". In 1920, Sigmund Freud wrote that "with

5300-493: The complex is "You have to stop trying to be everything for your primary carer, and get on with being something for the rest of the world". This post- Lacanian interpretation of the complex diverges considerably from its description in 19th century. Eribon writes that it "stretches the Oedipus complex to a point where it almost doesn't look like Freud's any more". Parent-child and sibling-sibling incestuous unions are almost universally forbidden. An explanation for this incest taboo

5400-422: The conflict between the drives of the id and the drives of the ego. Repression , the blocking of unacceptable ideas and impulses from the conscious mind, is the first defence mechanism, but its action does not resolve the id–ego conflict; it merely confines the impulse in the unconscious, where it continues to exert pressure in the direction of consciousness. The second defense mechanism is identification , in which

5500-432: The consequences are extreme, the fear can evolve from potential disfigurement to life-threatening situations. Essentially, castration anxiety can lead to a fear of death, and a feeling of loss of control over one's life. To feel so powerless can be detrimental to an individual's mental health. One of the most concerning problems with all of this is the idea that the individual does not recognize that their sexual desires are

5600-403: The data (his psychoanalytic technique), he instead addressed only the evidence that the data he reportedly acquired were accurate (that he had discovered genuine abuse). He thought that the community could not yet handle the clinical case stories about sexual abuse. He did not want to present these stories before the seduction theory had become more accepted. Freud made several arguments to support

5700-467: The dichotomous themes presented by castration anxiety and circumcision: sexual purity, chastity, violence, and eroticism. Judith defeats Assyrian General, Holofernes by cutting his head off – decapitation being an act that Freud equated with castration in his essay, "Medusa's Head". It is implied in Freudian psychology that both girls and boys pass through the same developmental stages: oral , anal , and phallic stages. Freud, however, believed that

5800-454: The difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as

5900-411: The dual relationship" of the son–mother relationship proved useful to later psychoanalysts; thus, for Bollas , the "achievement" of the Oedipus complex is that the "child comes to understand something about the oddity of possessing one's own mind ... discovers the multiplicity of points of view". Likewise, for Ronald Britton, "if the link between the parents perceived in love and hate can be tolerated in

6000-407: The dynamics of the parent and child relationship; the parents become objects of infantile libidinal energy. The boy directs his libido (sexual desire) toward his mother and directs jealousy and emotional rivalry against his father. The boy's desire for his mother is concomitant with a desire for the death of his father and even an impulse to instigate that death. These desires manifest in the realm of

6100-456: The father, student–collaborator Carl Jung proposed that girls experienced desire for the father and aggression towards the mother via what he called the Electra complex . Electra was a Greek mythologic figure who plotted matricidal revenge with Orestes , her brother, against their mother Clytemnestra and their stepfather Aegisthus , for the murder of her father Agamemnon . Like Oedipus,

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6200-529: The fear of emasculation in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Freud regarded castration anxiety as a universal human experience. It is thought to begin between the ages of 3 and 5, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. In Freud's theory, it is the child's perception of anatomical difference (the possession of a penis) that induces castration anxiety as a result of an assumed paternal threat made in response to their sexual proclivities. Although typically associated with males, castration anxiety

6300-429: The female aspects of the theory as "feminine Oedipus attitude" and "negative Oedipus complex". His student–collaborator Carl Jung , in his 1913 work The Theory of Psychoanalysis , proposed the Electra complex to describe a girl's daughter–mother competition for psychosexual possession of the father. In the phallic stage , the feminine Oedipus attitude is the little girl's decisive psychodynamic experience in forming

6400-399: The fore in recent Freudian scholarship emphasizes that the theory, as posited by Freud, was that hysteria and obsessional neurosis result from unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy. In the three seduction theory papers published in 1896, Freud stated that with all his current patients he had been able to uncover such abuse, mostly below the age of four. These papers indicate that

6500-400: The girl. The contemporary culture assumes that penis envy is the woman wishing they were in fact a man. This is unrelated to the notion of "small penis syndrome" which is the assumption by the man that his penis is too small. According to Freud's beliefs, girls developed a weaker superego , which he considered a consequence of penis envy. Among his many suggestions, Freud believed that during

6600-507: The idea of feeling or being insignificant; there is a need to keep one's self from being dominated; whether it be socially or in a relationship. Symbolic castration anxiety refers to the fear of being degraded, dominated or made insignificant, usually an irrational fear where the person will go to extreme lengths to save their pride and/or perceive trivial things as being degrading making their anxiety restrictive and sometimes damaging. This can also tie in with literal castration anxiety in fearing

6700-491: The idea of the Electra complex assumes an analogous relation between boys and girls, in relation to their same and opposite sex parents, that does not actually exist. According to Freud, the Electra complex fails to take account of the differing effects of the castration complex, and the significance of the phallus , in the two sexes, and overlooks the girl's preoedipal attachment to the mother. In classical Freudian psychology

6800-408: The infant's ambivalence toward the mother, lessened the central importance of the Oedipus complex in psychosexual development. "For the post- Kleinian Bion , the myth of Oedipus concerns investigatory curiosity—the quest for knowledge—rather than sexual difference; the other main character in the Oedipal drama becomes Tiresias (the false hypothesis erected against anxiety about a new theory)". As

6900-405: The infantile clitoris to the adult vagina . Freud considered a girl's negative Oedipus complex to be more emotionally intense than that of a boy, resulting, potentially, in a woman of submissive, insecure personality. In response to Freud's proposal of the Oedipus complex, which was initially more focused on the little boy's experience of desire for the mother and jealous rivalry in relation of

7000-426: The infantile male becomes aware of differences between male and female genitalia he assumes that the female's penis has been removed and becomes anxious that his penis will be cut off by his rival, the father figure, as punishment for desiring the mother figure. In 19th-century Europe , it was not unheard of for parents to threaten their misbehaving sons with castration or otherwise threaten their genitals. This theme

7100-414: The loss of virility or sexual dominance. According to Freudian psychoanalysis, castration anxiety can be completely overwhelming to the individual, often breaching other aspects of his or her life. A link has been found between castration anxiety and fear of death. Although differing degrees of anxiety are common, young men who felt the most threatened in their youth tended to show chronic anxiety. Because

7200-717: The manifestations of castration anxiety in their subject's dreams. The researchers hypothesized that male dreamers would report more dreams that would express their fear of castration anxiety instead of dreams involving castration wish and penis envy. They further hypothesized that women will have a reversed effect, that is, female dreamers will report more dreams containing fear of castration wish and penis envy than dreams including castration anxiety. The results demonstrated that many more women than men dreamt about babies and weddings and that men had more dreams about castration anxiety than women. Freud%27s seduction theory Freud's seduction theory ( German : Verführungstheorie )

7300-419: The mind of the child itself. There were some serious negative consequences of this shift. The most obvious negative consequence was that a limited interpretation of Freud's theory of infantile sexuality would cause some therapists and others to deny reported sexual abuse as fantasy; a situation that has given rise to much criticism (e.g. The Freudian Coverup by social worker Florence Rush ). However, without

7400-435: The mother and father. The role of primary caregiver is assigned to the mother. Motherly love was considered to be unconditional. While the father is assigned the role of secondary caregiver, fatherly love is conditional, responsive to the child's tangible achievements. The Oedipus complex is compromised in the context of modern family structures, as it requires the existence of the notions of masculinity and femininity. When there

7500-509: The mother and the father in the successful development of a child. Evidence suggests children who have been raised by parents of the same sex are not much different from children raised in a traditional family structure. The classic theory of the Oedipal drama has fallen out of favor in today's society, according to a study by Drescher, having been criticized for its "negative implications" towards same sex parents. Many psychoanalytic thinkers such as Chodorow and Corbett are working towards changing

7600-526: The myth, Oedipus Rex , was written by Sophocles , c. 429 BC. Modern productions of Sophocles' play were staged in Paris and Vienna in the 19th century and were phenomenally successful in the 1880s and 1890s. The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) attended. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams , first published in 1899, he proposes that an Oedipal desire is a universal psychological phenomenon innate ( phylogenetic ) to human beings, and

7700-597: The nursing period in bodily contact with her, and/or the father sleeps in a different hut. A study of the procedure without anaesthesia on children in Turkey found 'each child looked at his penis immediately after the circumcision 'as if to make sure that all was not cut off'. Another study of 60 males subject to communal circumcision ceremonies in Turkey found that 21.5% of them "remembered that they were specifically afraid that their penis might or would be cut off entirely," while 'specific fears of castration' occurred in 28% of

7800-447: The opposite-sex parent and aversion to the same-sex parent, while a negative Oedipus complex refers to the desire for the same-sex parent and aversion to the opposite-sex parent. Freud considered that the child's identification with the same-sex parent is the socially acceptable outcome of the complex. Failure to move on from the compulsion to satisfy a basic desire and to reconcile with the same-sex parent leads to neurosis. The theory

7900-553: The patients did not relate stories of having been sexually abused in early childhood; rather, Freud used the analytic interpretation of symptoms and patients' associations, and the exerting of pressure on the patient, in an attempt to induce the "reproduction" of the deeply repressed memories he posited. Though he reported he had succeeded in achieving this aim, he also acknowledged that the patients generally remained unconvinced that what they had experienced indicated that they had actually been sexually abused in infancy. Freud's reports of

8000-491: The phallic stage, young girls distance themselves from their mothers and instead envy their fathers and show this envy by showing love and affection towards their fathers. According to Cohler and Galatzer, Freud believed that all of the concepts related to penis envy were among his greatest accomplishments. However, these are also his most criticized theories as well—most famously by Karen Horney . Sarnoff et al. surmised that men differ in their degree of castration anxiety through

8100-540: The play Hamlet "has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex ", and that the differences between the two plays are revealing: In [ Oedipus Rex ] the child's wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and—just as in the case of a neurosis—we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences. However, in The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud makes it clear that

8200-546: The position that the memories he had uncovered were genuine. One of them was, according to Freud, that the patients were not simply remembering the events as they would normally forgotten material; rather they were essentially reliving the events, with all the accompanying painful sensory experiences. On two occasions Freud wrote that he would be presenting the clinical evidence for his claims, but he never did so, which some critics have contended means that they have had to be taken largely on trust. Freud's clinical methodology at

8300-405: The progress of psychoanalytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become, more and more, clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psychoanalysis from its opponents"; thereby it remained a theoretic cornerstone of psychoanalysis until about 1930, when psychoanalysts began investigating the pre-Oedipal son–mother relationship within

8400-484: The reasons that led to his abandoning the seduction theory in 1897–1898. For these we have to turn to a letter he wrote to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess dated 21 September 1897. The collapse of the seduction theory led in 1897 to the emergence of Freud's new theory of infantile sexuality . The impulses, fantasies and conflicts that Freud claimed to have uncovered beneath the neurotic symptoms of his patients derived not from external contamination, he now believed, but from

8500-563: The rejection of the seduction theory, concepts such as the unconscious, repressions, the repetition compulsion , transference and resistance, and the unfolding psychosexual stages of childhood would never have been added to human knowledge. In 1998, a century after Freud abandoned the Seduction Theory, a group of analysts and psychologists, including Stephen Mitchell , George Makari , Leonard Shengold , Jacob Arlow , and Anna Ornstein , met at Mount Sinai Hospital to reconsider

8600-499: The relations of domination that are reinforced in the use of this myth. In other words, if Oedipus was Bantu or Baoulé , his story would probably not be viewed as a human universal. This remark recalls the historically and socially situated character of the founder of psychoanalysis. Sex and Repression in Savage Society is considered "a famous critique of psychoanalysis, arguing that the 'Oedipus complex' described by Freud

8700-468: The results may be different because the anatomy of the different sexes is different. The counterpart of castration anxiety for females is penis envy . Penis envy, and the concept of such, was first introduced by Freud in an article published in 1908 titled "On the Sexual Theories of Children". The idea was presumed that females/girls envied those (mostly their fathers) with a penis because theirs

8800-680: The seduction theory episode went through a series of changes over the years, culminating in the traditional story based on his last account, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis . On the evening of April 21, 1896, Sigmund Freud presented a paper before his colleagues at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna , entitled " The Aetiology of Hysteria ". Using a sample of 18 patients—male and female—from his practice, he concluded that all of them had been

8900-498: The taboo that gives rise to the complex". Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein proposed a theory which broke gender stereotypes but still kept traditional father-mother family structure. She assigned "dangerous destructive tendencies not just to the father but also to the mother in her discussion of the child's projective fantasies". Anouchka Grose understands the Oedipus complex as "a way of explaining how human beings are socialised ... learning to deal with disappointment ". Her summary of

9000-400: The term "Oedipus complex" in a 1910 article titled A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men . It appears in a section of this paper describing what happens after a boy first becomes aware of prostitution : When after this he can no longer maintain the doubt which makes his parents an exception to the universal and odious norms of sexual activity, he tells himself with cynical logic that

9100-556: The theory of psychosexual development . Janet Malcolm reports that by the late 20th century, to the object relations psychology " avant-garde , the events of the Oedipal period are pallid and inconsequential, in comparison with the cliff-hanging psychodramas of infancy. ... For Kohut , as for Winnicott and Balint , the Oedipus complex is an irrelevance in the treatment of severe pathology ". Nonetheless, ego psychology continued to maintain that "the Oedipal period—roughly three-and-a-half to six years—is like Lorenz standing in front of

9200-447: The theory of the Oedipus complex became widely popular, psychoanalysts continue to do damage to their patients by doubting the reality of the patient's early memories of trauma. Other Freud scholars argue that Masson and Rush have misrepresented the reasons and intention behind Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory and adoption of the theory of the Oedipus complex. According to Dr. Kurt R. Eissler , who replaced Masson as director of

9300-443: The theory of the Oedipus complex, instigated a cover-up for sexual abuse of children. Some scholars and psychologists have criticized the theory for being incapable of applying to same-sex parents, and as being incompatible with the widespread aversion to incest . Oedipus refers to a 5th-century BC Greek mythological character Oedipus , who unknowingly kills his father, Laius , and marries his mother, Jocasta . A play based on

9400-407: The time, involving the symbolic interpretation of symptoms, the use of suggestion and the exerting of pressure to induce his patients to "reproduce" the deeply repressed memories he posited, has led several Freud scholars and historians of psychology to cast doubt on the validity of his findings, whether of actual infantile abuse, or, as he later decided, unconscious fantasies. Freud did not publish

9500-538: The victims of sexual assaults by various caretakers. The cause of the patient's distress lay in a trauma inflicted by an actor in the child's social environment. The source of internal psychic pain lay in an act inflicted upon the child from outside. This led to his well-known "seduction theory". The medical journals of that time did not report Freud's lecture. In the Wiener klinische Wochenschrift , published weekly in Vienna, on May 14, 1896, three papers were reported from

9600-624: The village-reared men. Fear of the authoritarian father increased considerably in 12 children. Psychoanalytic interpretation of Biblical stories shows themes of castration anxiety present in Judaic mythology concerning circumcision. The figure of Lilith , described as "a hot fiery female who first cohabited with man" presents as an archetypal representation of the first mother of man, and primordial sexual temptation. Male children were said to be at risk of Lilith's wrath for eight days after birth. Deceiving Lilith into believing newborn babies were

9700-420: Was a hypothesis posited in the mid-1890s by Sigmund Freud that he believed provided the solution to the problem of the origins of hysteria and obsessional neurosis . According to the theory, a repressed memory of child sexual abuse in early childhood or a molestation experience was the essential precondition for hysterical or obsessional symptoms, with the addition of an active sexual experience up to

9800-411: Was a necessary condition for the development of certain disorders, hysteria in particular. But another condition had to be met: There had to be an unconscious memory of the abuse. Freud had a lot of data as evidence for the seduction theory, but rather than presenting the actual data on which he based his conclusions (his clinical cases and what he had learned from them) or the methods he used to acquire

9900-423: Was taken from them—essentially they were already "castrated". Freud entertained that the envy they experienced was their unconscious wish to be like a boy and to have a penis. Penis envy, in Freudian psychology, refers to the reaction of the female/young girl during development when she realizes that she does not possess a penis. According to Freud, this was a major development in the identity (gender and sexual) of

10000-437: Was the cause of neurosis. This idea, sometimes called Freud's seduction theory , was deemphasized in favor of the Oedipus complex around 1897. Freud's original examples of the Oedipus complex are applied only to boys or men; he never fully clarified his views on the nature of the complex in girls. He described the complex as a young boy's hatred or desire to eliminate his father and to have sex with his mother. Freud introduced

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