Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2018
A fundamental anxiety, if not the fundamental anxiety, in males, according to classical Freudian psychoanalysis, is the fear of castration. According to Freud (1953, pp. 120–121; 1933a, p. 267) this is the fear of being castrated by the father as a reprisal for incestuous desires toward the mother. Nonetheless, the concept of the castrating mother also plays a prominent role in psychoanalytic literature, e.g. De Monchy (1952), Blos (1950), Fairbairn (1952), Klein (1948), and Bergler (1949).
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