Oral Components of the Castration Complex1

The topic of this paper is not a new one. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, for example, Freud wrote: 'Castration can be pictured on the basis of the daily experience of the faeces being separated from the body or on the basis of losing the mother's breast at weaning'. Several other authors have made contributions to the subject.2 The first, and in my opinion still the best, is Dr. Stärcke's paper published in 1921. Stärcke went much further than Freud and assumed that the emotional weight of the castration complex is mainly derived from oral frustration.

The reason I take up the subject again is its great practical importance, which is perhaps not always sufficiently appreciated. Even Freud, the originator of the concept of the close relationship between genital and pregenital instincts, might have laid still more stress on the therapeutic value of his discovery. In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, he wrote: 'We often feel that when we have reached the wish for a penis and the masculine protest, we have penetrated all the psychological strata and reached bedrock and that our task is accomplished', and in a footnote: 'What they (men) reject is not passivity in general but passivity in relation to men. That is to say, the masculine protest is in fact nothing other than fear of castration'. The expression 'our task is accomplished' suggests that castration anxiety and penis envy must be accepted as ultimate facts, which should be independent of earlier experiences. Freud must have meant those primary reactions in living beings that can so easily and in their purest form be demonstrated in animals. Von Uexküll and Lorenz call them angeborene Reaktionsschema, congenital reaction schemes. Animal psychology offers many examples of such reactions.

I will give two examples: Woodgrouse react at the sight of a sparrow-hawk in the air in typical fashion: the cock takes up a defensive position, the hen huddles up and seeks shelter. Young birds that have