In a wide-ranging study that includes a scholarly historical survey of his subject, the author contends that there is a need to distinguish castration and mutilation anxiety from anxiety about fertility. The latter is an adolescent addition to the infantile Oedipal conflict and may fuse with it. However, its chief concern is the loss of the procreative function as opposed to the organ detachment or damage of the earlier conflict. Unfortunately, the clinical material in this paper does not clearly illustrate the theoretical distinctions which, nevertheless, remain convincing categories.