Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/24

 180 AUGUST STARCKE

this attitude I also iaclude in this discussion. Viewed in this way the castration wishes and fears can be classified under the following four types,

1. I am castrated (sexually deprived, slighted), I shall be castrated.

2. I will (wish to) receive a penis.

3. Another person is castrated, has to (will) be castrated.

4. Another person will receive a penis (has a penis).

The first three types are manifest as wishes, strivings or fears. The fourth type is principally expressed in the infantile theory of the "woman with a penis".^

i f

II

The castration complex is usually traced to a "threat of ca- stration" on the part of one or other of the child's parents, in which cutting off the penis is threatened as a punishment for some ofience, generally masturbation. We find the best description of this threat in Freud's "Analyse der Phobic eines fiinfjahrigen Knaben" « (Analysis of the phobia of a boy five years old).

"When he was three and a half his mother caught him meddling with his penis. She threatened, 'If you do that I shall send for Dr. A., and he will cut off your wee-wee-maker. Then how will you make wee-wee?'"

"Hans: 'With my Popo (buttocks)'".

"He answered innocently enough, but for all that the 'ca- stration complex' was formed. This complex has often to be in-

1 That a woman has no penis though originally she possessed one occurs as an intermediate idea, which belongs to the third type. It is to be noted that the reverse theory occurs. I recall an anecdote related to me by Prof. ,j

Wertheim Salomonson fifteen years ago in the course of a conversation on i

the sexual factor in the neuroses: Little EUy was seated at table with the '

adults. Suddenly to her parents' horror she remarked, "Hermann (her little i

brother) has a little lump on his legs". "But it will go away", she added to |

their — and her own— relief. "Whether this is only an anecdote or a fact,.

at any rate it proves the occurrence of this phantasy in the human mind. r should like to think it probable that such "compensatory" theories actually occur, but they cannot be distinguished In the large complex of the castration wishes.

» Jakrbttch fur psychoanalyt. und psyckopatkol. Forsch., 1909, Bd. I, S. 3.