Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/25

 MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FEMALE CASTRATION COMPLEX l^.

The same patient, whose libido was very strongly fixed on her father, once had a short dream previous to her marriage, whicfi she related to me in very remarkable words. She said that in the dream her father had been run over and had thereby 'lost some leg or other and his power'. The castration idea is here not only expressed by means of the Meg' but also by the 'power'. Being, run over is one of the most frequent castration symbols. One of my patients whose 'totem' was a dog dreamed how a dog was run over and lost a leg. The same symbol is found in a phobia that a definite male person may be run over and thereby lose, an arm or a leg. One of my patients was the victim of this anxiety with reference to various male members of her family.

For many years and especially during the late war I have come across women who take particular erotic interest in men who have lost an arm or a leg by amputation or accident. These are women with particularly strong feelings of inferiority; their libido prefers a mutilated man rather than one who is physically, intact; the mutilated man has also lost a limb. It is obvious that these women feet themselves physically closer to the mutil- ated man, they consider him a companion in distress and do not need to reject him with hate like the sound man. The interest of some women in Jewish men is explicable on the same grounds;, the circumcision is looked upon as at any rate a partial castration,, Eind so makes possible a transference of libido to the man. I know cases in which mixed marriages were contracted by women chiefly as a result of an unconscious motive of this nature. The same interest is also shown in men who are crippled in other ways and have thereby lost the masculine 'superiority'.

It was the psycho-analysis of a girl seventeen years old that gave me the strongest impression of the power of the castration complex. In this case there was an abundance of neurotic con- version phenomena, phobias, and obsessive impulses, all of which were connected with her disappointment at her femininity and with revenge phantasies against the male sex. The patient had been operated on for appendicitis some years previously, i The surgeon had given her the removed appendix preserved in a bottle of spirit, and this she now treasured as something sacred. Her ideas of being castrated centred round this specimen, and

' The removal of the vermiform appendix in men also often stimulates their castration complex.