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The term “castration anxiety” is used throughout the psychoanalytic literature as an organizing concept regarding a variety of anxieties in both males and females. This paper is a proposal that the continued automatic application of the concept of “castration anxiety” for all of a female's anxieties about her genitals is inappropriate because it is not consistent with clinical data. Using accurate terminology in important because the conceptual language we use can significantly influence the way we think, and thereby can influence the way we listen to patients. I propose that in regard to girls and women we use “female genital anxieties” as a general term, and reserve “castration anxiety” to refer to certain specific manifestations of those anxieties.
The insights emerging from Freud's understanding of his own unconscious conflicts were for many years extended to include the psychology of the female. Actually, Freud himself invited his female colleagues to make revisions in his theories about women. Much has been written to revise the older views and to develop a description of the unique characteristics of female development that conforms to modern psychoanalytic thinking. However, the psychoanalytic lexicon has not yet confronted the problem of using “castration anxiety” as a wide net to describe a girl's anxieties.
Horney (1924) and Jones (1927) were lonely voices strongly questioning whether Freud's descriptions of boys' development was applicable to girls. Horney advised that many phenomena representing a girl's “dread of vaginal injury” should be separated from “castration fantasies in the male sense” (p. 65). However, it was fifty years before analysts responded vigorously to Freud's suggestion for revision.
Brenner (1982) included “castration anxiety” in the list of the