Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/29

 MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FEMALE CASTRATION COMPLEX 21

It will probably be expected that a marked activity on the part of the man is the most favourable condition to call forth sexual sensation in such relatively frigid women. This, however, is not always the case; on the contrary, there are many women in whom a humiliation of the man is just as essential a condition of love as is the humiliation of the woman to many neurotic men.» A single example may be given in illustration of this by no means rare attitude. I analysed a woman whose love-life was markedly polyandrous, and who was constantly anesthetic if she had to acknowledge that the man was superior to her in some way or other. If, however, she had a quarrel with the man and succeeded in forcing him to give in to her, then her frigidity dis- appeared completely. Such cases show very clearly how necessaiy acknowledgement of the male genital function is as a condition of a normal love-life on the part of the woman. We here arrive at a source of the conscious and unconscious prostitution of women.

Frigidity is a necessary condition of the behaviour of the prostitute. Full sexual sensation binds the woman to the man, and only where this is lacking does the woman go from man to man, just like the continually ungratified Don Juan type of man who has constantly to change his love-object. The Don Juan avenges himself on all women for the disappointment which happened to bim once on the part of the first woman in his life, and the prostitute avenges herself on every man for the gift she had expected from her father and did not receive. Her frigidity signifies a humiliation of all men and therefore a mass castration in the sense of her unconscious; her whole life is given up to this tendency.*

While the frigid woman unconsciously strives to diminish the importance of that part of the body denied her, there is another form of refusal of the man which strives for the same aim with the opposite means. In this form of refusal the man is nothing else than a sex organ and therefore consists only of coarse sen- suality. Every other mental or physical quality is denied him. The effect is that the neurotic woman imagines that the man is an inferior being on account of his possession of a penis. Her selF-

' See Freud, Beitrage zur Psychologie des Liebeslebens, sections 1 and n, ' Kleine Schriften zur Neurosenlehre ', Bd. IV.

= The remarks of Dr. Theodor Reik in a discussion at the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Society have suggested this idea to me.