Interiority and Inner Genital Space in Men: What Else can Be Lost in Castration

Abstract

The author reassesses castration anxiety in men in light of advances in psychoanalytic theory. Castration anxiety arises when any crucial part of mature psychic life is threatened. As in women, oedipal-level and adult male psychic functioning contains powers rooted in the body-mind that are distinct from those we designate as phallic. The author struggles for a comparable word to represent devalued aspects of higher-level development that are primary, "feminine," essential for psychic mastery, and threatened by loss, i.e., by castration. Defining this aspect of mental life is difficult, but it includes receptivity, groundedness, connectedness to self and others, and tolerance of ambiguity. Without access to this interior and more ambiguous continent, a man is castrated, less than whole. Clinical examples are provided.

“Fathers” and “Daughters”

“…What Faimberg (2004) has called an Oedipal constellation includes the narcissistic, as well as more usually oedipal, conflicts over sexuality and identity. A number of writers are interested in the vitality and maturity in bisexual bidirectional identifications in post-Oedipal life (Bassin, 1996;Benjamin, 1991;Chodorow, 1992;Fogel, 1998;Cooper, 2003;andDavies, 2003a, 2003b, among the most prominent). What this would potentiate for fathers and daughters is a complex and multiply configured experience of admiration, compe-FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS tition, excitement, and containment.…”

Phallic and seminal masculinity: A theoretical and clinical confusion

“…675–88). Cloacal fantasies are common to male and female: for the male, a body‐based location of his feminine parts (Fogel, 1998, p. 695; cf. Freud, 1905, p. 196).…”

Cloacal Anxiety in Female Development

“…Derivatives of cloacal anxiety are ubiquitous in work with female patients, both children and adults, and, I believe, are common in male fantasies and fears about the female genital (Fogel 1998). Naturally, it is often impossible to unravel their complex relation to castration themes and other feminine genital anxieties, or to object-related anxieties and narcissistic issues, since the layering and oscillation of defense and anxiety recruit the dynamics from the various developmental levels.…”