Of all the central images of psychoanalysis, none is more formidable than that of the phallic mother, a grown woman with breasts and a penis who awakens both desire and fear in men. Freud theorized that the phallic mother was of crucial importance to both male and female sexuality, symbolizing castration fear in men, penis envy in women, and perversions in general. In Freud's phallocentric view, both male and female children originally believe that the mother, like the father, has a penis. The infantile assumption of a maternal penis, Freud speculated, was the origin for the androgynous formation of maternal deities.

According to classical psychoanalytic theory, the child's discovery that the mother does not have a penis—is, in fact, “castrated”—has momentous implications for later sexual development, causing both sons and daughters to devalue their mother's genital equipment. Sons turn away from their castrated mothers in