The Female Castration Complex and its Repercussions in Modesty, Appearance and Courtship Etiquette

Although Freud used in his documentation many data not obtained in the course of analyses, the use of extra-analytic data for the demonstration of dynamic processes is, today, the exception rather than a commonplace procedure. This must be viewed as self constricting overmeticulousness, since occasionally one hears of daily occurrences which reveal quite deep unconscious material.

The documentation of the present article was primarily obtained in analytic situations, though not necessarily by the present writer. The remaining illustrative data were obtained under conditions comparable to the manner in which an anthropological field worker obtains new data while listening to a conversation between members of the native village which he is studying and therefore have the same validity as anthropological data obtained by these means. Data having this type and degree of validity are perfectly suitable for the documentation of an article which only seeks to clarify conscious and unconscious attitudes and does not attempt to ascertain the course of actual events. Thus, as regards Case 12, what matters is not whether one of a group of psychiatrists joking about a woman colleague actually hallucinated that this woman's vagina dentata was armed only with a dental plate; what matters is that he did joke about that possibility,