HOMOSEXUALITY: CASTRATION FEAR
Certainly in nearly all cases of homosexuality, castration anxiety is important. But castration anxiety itself does not exist in a vacuum. The fact of castration anxiety suggests the failure to achieve a healthy resolution of the oedipal crisis, but the castration anxiety may also be riding on a more primitive level of anxiety that relates to the failure of much earlier pre-oedipal concerns. Consequently, we must be careful about assessing pathological aspects of homosexuals. Clearly there is no uniform pathology, but rather, each case must be individually assessed for its developmental achievements and the level at which the anxiety is operating. We can argue only for the presence of some developmental failure and by inference, some degree of psychopathology related to that failure. What the degree of failure and the extent of psychopathology may be in any given individual requires specific evaluation and identification.
The male homosexual essentially protects himself from the retaliatory fears of castration by shifting his sexual impulses away from a heterosexual object to a homosexual object. The origin of such castrative fears lies in the oedipal situation in which the child’s sexual wish to possess the mother raises the fear of retaliatory punishment in the form of castration from the father. Why a homosexual object in the adult should seem safer than a heterosexual one, however, is not at all clear, but it seems certain from clinical experience that a confirmed homosexual is inordinately afraid of women as sexual objects. The male homosexual is literally fleeing from women. As a neurotic symptom, male homosexuality can be understood as a phobic avoidance of the female genital. Many homosexuals in fact tend to view the vagina with disgust and revulsion. Often such individuals have an intense vagina dentata fantasy, that is, the fantasy that the vagina is like a devouring mouth which can somehow consume and destroy the penis.
The castration fear can be related either to the mother or to the father. The typical family configuration in which male homosexuality is fostered generally has a domineering, overpowering, seductive, and excessively intimate mother together with an emotionally detached, hostile, aloof, and rejecting father. The son of such a mother would be expected to have a great deal of anxiety about separating from her and also to fear that she would devour him should he get too close to her or hold on to her for too long. The dependency on the mother, so essential to sustain life and to psychic growth early in the child’s experience, becomes associated with aggressive and destructive elements.
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