Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/15

 MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FEMALE CASTRATION COMPLEX 7

man, and in particular to the facts of male and female genitality ; she desires passive gratification and longs for a child. The castration complex then gives rise to no disturbing effects.

Daily observation, however, shows us how frequently this normal end-aim of development is not attained. This fact should not astonish us, for a woman's life gives cause enough to render the overcoming, of the castration complex difficult. We refer to those factors which keep bringing back to memory the 'castration' of the woman. The primary idea of the 'wound' is re-animated by the impression created by the first and each succeeding jnenstruation, and then once again by defloration; for both processes are connected with loss of blood and thus resemble an injury. A girl need never have experienced either of these events ; the very idea of being subjected to them in the future has the same effect on the growing-up girl. We can readily understand from the standpoint of the infantile sexual theories that delivery (or child-birth) is conceived of in a similar manner in the phantasies of young girls ; we need only call to mind, for example, the 'Caesarian section theory' which conceives of delivery as a bloody operation.

In these circumstances we must be prepared to find in every female person some traces of the castration complex. The individual differences are only a matter of degree. In normal women we perhaps occasionally come across dreams with male tendencies in them. From these very slight expressions of the castration complex transitions lead to severe and complicated phenomena of a pro- nounced pathological kind, and it is with these latter that this investigation is principally concerned. In this respect also, therefore, we find a similar state of affairs to that obtaining in the male sex.

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In his essay on ' Das Tabu der Virginitat ' Freud contrasts the normal outcome of the castration complex, which is in accord with the prevailing demand of civilisation, with the 'archaic' type. With many primitive peoples custom forbids a man to deflorate his wife; the defloration has to be carried out by a priest as a sacramental act, or must occur in some other way outside wedlock. Freud shows in his convincing analysis that this peculiar precept has arisen from the psychological risk of an ambivalent