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A central hypothesis in Freud's developmental psychology is his theory of the castration complex: that the young boy comes to fear that he will lose his penis as a punishment for masturbation, or out of revenge from his rival father, or by some mysterious process of nature by which his genitals will be repaired to look more like little girls'. The nuclear problem in Freud's only case history of a child, “Little Hans,” was a castration complex. The general theory that all male children experience castration anxiety was one of the most speculative elements of Freud's thought, and it was also one of the most original.1 Though there appear to have been no anticipations of the precise idea of castration anxiety in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, there was a growing interest in the psychological consequences of castration as well as the problem of fear in childhood.
Family relations were occasionally considered as a source of fear in children along with the more commonly accepted causes: noise, animals, and darkness. In 1881 the French psychologist Félix-Louis Debacker described the first great shock to the nervous system—birth.
The child's first cry upon his entrance into the world is only an outburst of pain resulting from the passage from a warm to a cold environment. This moment of intense nervous stimulation continues to be manifested in two correlated phenomena: convulsions and the hallucinations of nightmares.2
Other general causes of excessive nervous excitation are fear, anger, jealousy, and separation from parents.