Psychoanalytic experience has taught us that when a man bleeds,—in dreams and in fantasies, or actually from his nose or anus, or from a wound—he is unconsciously suffering castration. It is my suggestion that after a man has been psychologically emasculated he is not simply a castrated man. He has been turned into a woman and bleeds as the woman does; he menstruates, is deflowered, gives birth. Castration is thus the bloody bridge that leads from masculinity to femininity. It is conceivable that bleeding for a man is always unconsciously experienced as meaning both castration and one or more of the various ways of genital bleeding as a woman.