Response to ‘Castration Desire’ by David Mann

I much enjoyed and was fascinated to read David Mann's paper ‘Castration desire’ (Mann 1994). Recently, as I was reading Freud's ‘A seventeenth-century demonological neurosis’, I came across a reference to the same subject (Freud 1923). Freud, however, approaches it from a slightly different perspective, which I thought might be usefully set alongside Mann's, not because it contradicts anything he says but because it expands his suggestions and, as it were, fertilises them. (Although Freud's remarks on this subject pertain to the central figure of his study, Christoph Haizmann, he explicitly uses the insights he derived from the Schreber case to make his point.)

In his paper Mann emphasises that the desire for castration is primarily regressive, embodying not only the young boy's emphatic wish not to be different from his mother, but also his craving ultimately to return to the womb. Mann also says that he wishes to distinguish castration desire from vagina envy, but it is here that I think Freud has something useful to add which lies between (and beyond) these two categories of envy and desire. For when Mann articulates what he means by vagina envy he emphasises emotional components pertaining particularly to the mother, especially the son's desire to be able to bear a child just as she can, and thus to become like her. The desire to be like her could correctly be construed, I think, as evolving from the child's envy of his mother, but equally from his love for her. Feelings, of whatever quality, about the father are conspicuous by their absence. The desire evolves on the part of the child neither to be separated from his primary object nor to be unable to do anything that his mother can; and so a yearning arises to disavow any growing awareness of difference from her.

But what Freud underlines are emotional components related particularly to the father, i.e. elements of the inverted Oedipus complex, primarily the son's desire to be castrated in order to be able to b