The Psychobiology of The Castration Reaction

(Continued from Vol. XIV, page 446)

The psychological relations between castration and its symbolic manifestations have occupied the minds of the psychoanalytic group of students for some time and so numerous are the points of importance and so frequently are they hidden in unexpected places, or have been mentioned in literature bearing other titles, that a thorough comprehensive review of this subject would require a minute perusal of the entire mass of psychoanalytic literature. This I have attempted to do only in small part, but it has been done with the hope that in spite of its obvious limitations, a small service will be rendered by way of bringing together some information which was formerly widely scattered.

Particularly by those who have to do with mental disorders, suggestions of the universal castration complex are constantly noted among the symptomatic expressions of the patients, as examples, suicide as castration—a desperate elimination compulsion to escape perverse cravings; attempts on the part of the patient to locate symptoms to be removed surgically are castration compulsions; castration phantasies as ideas or comments on having genitalia cut away or expressions on the part of the patient that he deserves to have them cut off; castration fears, or ideas of emasculation by enemies, supposed threats of surgeons, fears of pathologic atrophy, etc.; and finally the whole group of traumatic self-castrations for the self-cure of masturbation, or as part of the struggle to protect himself from perverse homoerotic cravings.

The psychic relations between and substitutions of other parts of the body for the genital organs are also well recognized among the initiated. Particularly is this true of the eye substitutions for castration of which there are many examples in the literature, and recently Bryan (29) has given us a short but adequate account of a