CaringCthulhu (imported) wrote: Fri Nov 12, 2021 11:45 pm
I'm frankly surprised there aren't more stories that capture Freud's concept of 'castration anxiety' surrounding the Oedipus complex. Who knows if there's anything to his psychology, but his work should be rich material for kinky authors.
Freud, Sigmund & and other authors
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/me ... on-anxiety
Freud and Stress
Freud viewed anxiety as a signal that could refer to a number of different dangers. He was especially concerned with anxiety arising from intrapsychic threats, such as the impending emergence of repressed wishes or conflicts. In many of these situations, even the anxiety itself would be unconscious; its existence could only be inferred or deduced by the psychoanalyst. Castration anxiety, anxieties concerning unconscious homosexual wishes, and anxieties concerning unconscious incestuous wishes were frequently invoked in the formulation and interpretation of patients' experiences and symptoms. Freud's work did not direct attention to the biological aspects of states of anxiety, nor to the role played by overwhelming external stressors. Even in his brief discussions of war neuroses, Freud emphasized intrapsychic conflict as the essential element that either made these neuroses possible or promoted them. Freud's influence was reflected in the official diagnostic terminology of American psychiatry codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) (1952) and retained in the DSM-II (1968). These listings explicitly described anxiety as an intrapsychic signal, included anxiety disorders as neuroses, and excluded any anxiety disorder specifically related to an external stressor (such as the current posttraumatic stress disorder).
Phallic Stage
This occurred between 3 and 6 years of age. The erogenous zone was the genitals. This phase was characterized by an increase in masturbatory behavior. Children were now beginning to get interested in members of the opposite gender. They examined each other as a result of sexual curiosity. Freud's conceptualization of this stage was one of the reasons his theory came into attack in the late twentieth century, because of his problematic theorization about women, at least by today's opinions.78 According to Freud, the conflict at this stage arose from love of the parent of the opposite gender and competition with the parent of the same gender. For the boy, he named this phenomenon the “Oedipal complex,” after Oedipus Rex in Greek mythology, who unknowingly fell in love with his mother and killed his father.
According to Freud, the boy desired to have his mother sexually. However, this filled him with anxiety because the father was big and strong, and could punish him if he were to know his desires. Furthermore, the little boy could have noticed that his sister, or some other girl, did not have a penis. He hypothesized that her penis was cut off as punishment for desiring her mother sexually. He feared that the same fate would befall him. This fear filled him with castration anxiety. Due to this anxiety, he repressed his desire for the mother and his rivalry to the father. He identified with the father by copying his characteristics so that he could avoid castration but at the same time enjoy his mother sexually vicariously through the father.
The same dynamics occur in the girl, but Freud named the phenomenon the “Electra complex” in this case. His hypothesis was that after discovering that she had no penis, the girl became hostile to her mother for cheating her by not giving her a penis. She desired to have a penis (what Freud called “penis envy”). So, she turned her erotic desire to the father in the hope of sharing with him his phallus. However, for the girl, the situation was even more complicated because she had to shift her primary object of love, from the mother (every child's first object of love) to the father. She therefore had more difficulty developing her heterosexuality. Similarly, however, her erotic feelings toward her father made her anxious. To alleviate the anxiety, she repressed the erotic feelings toward her father and the hostility toward her mother, and identified with her mother in order to share the father vicariously through the mother. Obviously, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Freud's insinuation that women were lacking because they did not have a penis and envied men for possessing that organ is outrageous. But considering the status of women at the time Freud was developing his theory, this suggestion made sense. It would have been similar to someone arguing that black people envied and desired to be white. No one would have thought that it would not have been so. After all, the white male held a particularly prestigious place in society.
A feeling of rejection by the parent of the opposite sex at this stage, Freud hypothesized, led to development of feelings of self-hatred, humility, plainness, shyness, isolation, and shyness as an adult. In other words, the child seemed to think that since the parent of the opposite sex did not hug or kiss him or her, he or she had to be undesirable. Therefore there was no need to flirt, dress stylishly, be outgoing, or take pride in oneself. Overindulgence by the parent of the opposite sex led to an adult who was vain, proud, stylish, flirtatious, gregarious, and brash.
