Prologue: Sex, Gender, and Identity

In this issue, contributors were asked to consider the concept of castration anxiety in light of contemporary psychoanalytic thought and practice. Freud’s original formulations of castration anxiety assumed a model of sex and gender identification that does not correspond with contemporary experience or understanding of the complexities involved. The range of possible sex and gender identifications as complex combinations of sex plus gender self-identifications is noted in many of the contributions.

In Rosemary Balsam’s contribution, reference is made to the shift from a “one sex” to a “two sex” model. In both Balsam and Marie Rudden’s articles there is discussion of female genital anxiety, rather than castration anxiety. Cultural factors play a prominent role in Anna Migliozzi’s article. Danielle Knafo emphasizes relational experience in castration anxiety and focuses on transsexual experience in a case study. Martin Silverman explores the relationship of castration and death anxieties. Nicola Abel-Hirsch relates a Bionian perspective and Patricia Gherovici explores the perspective of the later work of Lacan. Jani Santamaría offers two clinical cases that demonstrate the life-long nature of struggles with castration anxiety.

In this prologue, a structure is suggested for understanding the range of complexities involved in sex, sexuality, and gender identity formation and the contributions to this issue are described. An aspect of early, pre-Oedipal development is described, which has been called the Electral phase. In formulating this early developmental process and its consolidation into a dynamic constellation called the Electra complex, paths of initial sex and gender identity emerge. The Electral phase is proposed as resulting in sex and gender self-identification and contains antecedents to the Oedipal phase, a subsequent, and often overlapping, part of the process of identity formation. To describe the Electral phase, this discussion will focus on early phases