The Significance of Castration Anxiety in Rabbinic Mythology

One of the socially useful aspects of anxiety seems to be its capacity to act as a deterrent against behavioral deviance. This aspect of anxiety was stressed by Freud, especially with regard to the passing of the Oedipus complex, the onset of the castration complex and the formation of the superego as an internalized agency of social control.

Freud and many of his followers within psychoanalysis have noted that religious institutions frequently represent group manifestations of individual neurosis. Analytic thinkers have tended to identify God with the superego and have located castration anxiety as a decisive deterrent fostered by religious institutions to moderate behavioral deviance. In general, there has been a tendency to follow Freud in regarding religion as a group expression of many of the decisive strivings of the individual. Although Freud was by no means concerned to enhance the status of religious ritual and belief by this identification of religion as a group obsessional neurosis, his theoretic constructions have had precisely this effect. Freud's insights have done much to enlighten that which had previously been thought to be opaque, irrational, or inaccessible to dispassionate study. One has but to compare the enormous growth of interest in religious ritual and myth in the Twentieth Century with the rather negative view taken in the Nineteenth Century to note a radical change in cultural sentiment. Furthermore, there has been a surprising element