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At puberty a normal boy has already acquired a conscious knowledge of the vagina but what he fears in women is something uncanny, unfamiliar, and mysterious.
Freud (1919) in The Uncanny discusses the uncertain boundaries between living and inanimate bodies, the figure of the double, involuntary repetition, the occult, and womb phantasies. An uncanny effect is produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is blurred, when things that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appear before us in reality, or when a 1 symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes. The womb as an uncanny Otherness, is a double—me and yet not me—within the self. We are attached to this double by an imagined umbilical cord where the death drive is at work through a lethal desire for fusion with the (m)other (Horney, 1923, p. 139). Using Kristeva's (1993) formulation, the womb as a form of “abjection” calls into question borders that threaten identity through the ambiguity and violence of rejection (negativity) from the (m)other s body (p. 219).
As I was reading for this essay about womb envy, I reflected upon my own life and my own body, questioning how it was that I ended up with an empty womb. I asked myself: Was the political-legal system responsible for forcing me to have an illegal abortion in the mid-1960s, when I was twenty-four, possibly damaging my ability to reproduce? Was the man who got me pregnant responsible for not marrying me and keeping the fetus as I wished? Or was it my ambivalence regarding sharing mothering with men who were not that interested in family life, for whom