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The actual effect of castration takes place for the boy following the [[perception]] of the [[female]] genitals and the acknowledgement that the [[organ]] in which he has invested such [[value]], and which is so essential to his [[self]]-[[image]], is not [[present]] on the [[body]] of the girl. At this structuring [[moment]] the boy remembers the [[threats]] made concerning his masturbatory habits which at an earlier moment had little effect.
This deferred [[action]] now comes into effect with the [[fear]] of castration, a powerful influence in all his subsequent [[development]]. Interestingly, the effects of castration can be experienced without it being carried out and expressly formulated. This indicates the [[Freudian]] [[thesis]] of the structuring function of the [[Oedipus Complex|Oedipus complex]].
The girl's castration complex is also started by the [[sight]] of the boy's [[genital]]. She notices the [[significance]] placed on it and resulting from this perception is a [[feeling]] of having been wronged. The subsequent '[[envy]] for the penis' leaves a permanent trace on the girl's [[psyche]], persisting in the [[unconscious]]. Freud argues that in the case of [[women]] the castration complex does not work so well. There is something problematic in woman's relation to castration and to the [[Oedipal law]], due to the girl only partially being able to resolve her Oedipus complex. This is because she is not as vulnerable to the threat of losing a penis that she does not have. The girl's vulnerability shows itself in an [[anxiety]] related to the [[loss]] of [[love]].
The castration threat and the Oedipal law, which articulates a prohibition and a prescription, both give an orientation to the child. Without it, the child is stuck within a world of incestuous [[objects]] and a constant fear of actual loss.
In 1923 Freud (1951) introduced the primacy of the phallus. Although the boy and the girl initially share the same object — the mother and a '[[masculine]]' or [[phallic]] sexuality — Freud argues an asymmetry between the [[sexes]]. The castration complex and [[The Oedipus Complex|the Oedipus complex ]] work differently for the boy and the girl. The Oedipus complex in the boy illustrates the separating function of the [[law of the father]] and its conversion in the [[super-ego]].
The function of the castration complex is to end the boy's Oedipus complex. For the girl, the castration complex inaugurates her into an Oedipus complex which will succumb to repression. She will transfer her love to the one who seems to have the phallus, the father or [[substitute]]. The girl will desire to have the phallus in the [[form]] of a [[baby]] along the lines of [[the symbolic]] equation that will make the phallus equal a baby.
In 1933 Freud elaborated [[three]] possible outcomes of the castration complex for women. The first is a total [[repudiation]] of sexuality, the second is the adopting of a masculine position and the repudiation of [[penis envy]] and the [[third]] solution is that of [[motherhood]] as a [[treatment]] of [[Penis Envy|penis envy ]] through [[The Symbolic|the symbolic ]] equation of penis equals child.
The asymmetrical situations of the boy and the girl were what Freud (1951) returned to when he wrote in 1937 of the limits of an [[analytic]] treatment. The man will forever fear castration and the woman will forever endure envy of the penis, the castration complex contributing to a basic [[rejection]] of [[femininity]] for both sexes.
As Freud increasingly placed the castration complex at the centre of his [[theoretical]] and clinical writings, there developed [[resistance]] in the analytic world, particularly in the debates of the 1920s and 1930s on [[female sexuality]]. For a [[number]] of [[analysts]] the castration complex did not have the major structuring [[role]] in the [[construction]] of sexual [[difference]] and they turned rather to [[biological]] and [[developmental]] theorization.
Freud's very last paper in 1938 referred to the castration complex and its effects on the very construction of [[The Subject|the subject]]. It illustrates clinically that the ego, in a moment of [[encounter]] with the threat of a loss, undergoes a [[split]] which is insistently maintained. As a reaction to the castration complex a [[fetish]] is constructed, confirming that the object is lost and the subject is split (1951).
==Jacques Lacan==
It is in the 1950s that the function of castration is discussed in reference to the [[Name]]-of-the-Father and the paternal law which forbids the mother and the child the satisfaction of being the sole desire of each other. The paternal law installs the phallus as [[signifier]] of a lack which refers mother and child to the dimension of the symbolic. The mother does not have the phallus and therefore desires it elsewhere. Thus castration orients the child and the mother beyond each other.
In his [[seminar]] of 1956-57, Lacan (1994) delineates the difference between privation, frustration and castration in relation to [[The Symbolic, Imaginary and Real|the symbolic, imaginary and real]]. Lacan emphasizes that it is not possible to articulate anything [[about]] castration without this [[distinction]]. He claims that it is the confusion of castration with privation and frustration that has led a number of [[psychoanalysts]] to founder in their theoretical and clinical orientation. He singles out Ernest [[Jones]] who substitutes for castration his [[concept]] of [[aphanisis]], [[disappearance]] of [[desire,]] as an example of an [[analyst]] unable to surmount the difficulties of managing the castration complex.
It is also in this seminar that Lacan elaborates the relation between castration and the phallus. Lacan attributes to Freud the introduction of the phallus as a third imaginary term between the mother and the child. The phallus thus has a major signifying role.
It is in 1975 that Lacan (1998) breaks from the Oedipus complex as [[myth]] and develops a logification of [[sexual difference]] based on the different relationship of man and woman to the signifier. Here the [[phallic function]] refers to a castration brought about by the use of [[signifiers]].
Where for Freud, the castrated one is the woman, for Lacan it is the man who is castrated, in so far as he is completely subjected to the signifier which says 'no' to complete satisfaction. The boy is totally subjected to the law and thus to symbolic castration. It is only at [[The Imaginary|the imaginary ]] level that he appears not to be castrated in his possession of a penis. The only exception to this rule that all men are castrated is that of the father of the [[primal]] [[horde]]. In its connection with the incest [[taboo]], the effect of castration is to [[divide]] women into those who are accessible and those who are not.
The only one who has not succumbed to castration is Freud's [[mythical]] [[primal horde]] father who considers himself as being able to have access to all women including those to whom he is related. This uncastrated exception confirms the rule of castration following the [[logic]] that every rule requires at least one exception.
==Clinical application==
In his 1937 paper, Freud (1951) discusses the bedrock of castration around which the analytic work so often founders. The [[neurotic]] protests against castration, the sacrifice to be made, retaining the [[demand]] for the phallus, the major focus of the [[whole]] imaginary play in the [[analysis]] of a subject. For a woman, penis envy and the demand to the analyst to compensate for her lack is ever present. For a man, the difficulty in subjecting himself to another man remains a constant concern in [[terms]] of his [[Castration Anxiety|castration anxiety]].
Lacan follows Freud in pointing to the rejection of castration as the fundamental problem at stake in all the psychopathological [[structures]].
:What the neurotic does not [[want]], and what he strenuously refuses to do [[right]] up until the end of his analysis, is to sacrifice his castration to the [[Other]]'s ''[[jouissance]]'', allowing it to serve the Other. (''[[Écrits]]'', p. 323)
It is beneath his or her ego that the neurotic covers the castration that he or she denies yet clings to. The [[structure]] of fantasy, $()a, contains within it the imaginary function of castration. This hidden function has an effect on one or other of the terms of the [[Unconscious Fantasy|unconscious fantasy]], for the [[hysteric]], the object, and for the [[obsessional]], the subject.
Instead of [[seeing]] the [[lack in the Other]] and correlatively in him or herself, a [[recognition]] that is part and parcel of symbolic castration, the hysteric maintains desire only in the form of lack of satisfaction and eludes him- or herself as object. The obsessional denies the desire in the Other and emphasizes the impossibility of him- or herself disappearing as subject. In both cases there is an incomplete symbolic castration with castration being attributed to the [[demands]] from the Other for his or her castration rather than what is essentially required from a [[speaking being]].
