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DR. K. ABRAHAM, Berlin. Forms of Expression of the Female Castration Complex.
There are various possible outcomes of the female castration complex. The normal or cultural form, as Freud calls it, is that the woman is reconciled to her femininity; the desire to possess a male genital organ is given up and in its place appears the wish to have a child (really as a gift from her father). This enables the woman to obtain gratification from the female sexual rôle and to develop maternal feelings.
The ambivalent (archaic) attitude is opposed to this outcome. Besides the love for the man to whom she at first belonged, the woman produces feelings of hate in connection with her defloration, because the injury to her physical integrity re-awakens the castration complex. Traces of this form of reaction can still be observed in civilised conditions.
A third outcome is the turning to homosexuality. This possibility is based on the bisexual disposition of human beings. In some of the cases the homosexuality is principally expressed in a sublimated form.
The neurotic outcomes, which are really the object of this paper, are extremely multiform, and many of them up to the present have hardly been noticed.
These neurotic symptoms partly express the wish to be male and partly are directed against the man in the sense of revenge (castration, killing). A number of symptoms and dreams, which agree in content with the symptoms, were discussed. In those mentioned first the patient unconsciously plays the male rôle or she expects to become male. Certain of the neurotic symptoms