Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: The Denial of Death

Titel: The Denial of Death

Stichwort: Kastration, Kastrationskomplex; Phantasie des Kindes (Abhängigkeit von d. Mutter)

Kurzinhalt: the "horror at the mutilated creature" is contrived, but it is the child who contrives it; the horror is the child's "own invention; it is a tissue of fantasy

Textausschnitt: ... In the newer understanding of the castration complex it is not the father's threats that the child reacts to. As Brown so well says, the castration complex comes into being solely in confrontation with the mother. This phenomenon is very crucial, and we must linger a bit on how it happens. (37f; Fs) (notabene)
It all centers on the fact that the mother monopolizes the child's world, at first, she is his world. The child cannot survive without her, yet in order to get control of his own powers he has to get free of her. The mother thus represents two things to the child, and it helps us understand why the psychoanalysts have said that ambivalence characterizes the whole early growth period. On the one hand the mother is a pure source of pleasure and satisfaction, a secure power to lean on. She must appear as the goddess of beauty and goodness, victory and power; this is her "light" side, we might say, and it is blindly attractive. But on the other hand the child has to strain against this very dependency, or he loses the feeling that he has aegis over his own powers. That is another way of saying that the mother, by representing secure biological dependence, is also a fundamental threat. (38; Fs)

The child comes to perceive her as a threat, which is already the beginning of the castration complex in
confrontation with her. ...

The fact is that the "horror at the mutilated creature" is contrived, but it is the child who contrives it. Psychoanalysts reported faithfully what their neurotic patients told them, even if they had to pry just the right words into their expressions. What troubles neurotics-as it troubles most people-is their own powerlessness; they must find something to set themselves against. If the mother represents biological dependence, then the dependence can be fought against by focussing it on the fact of sexual differentiation. If the child is to be truly causa sui, then he must aggressively defy the parents in some way, move beyond them and the threats and temptations they embody. The genitals are a small thing in the child's perceptual world; hardly enough to be traumatic just because they lack protuberance. As Brown so well put it, the horror is the child's "own invention; it is a tissue of fantasy inseparable from his own fantastic project of becoming father of himself (and, as fantasy, only remotely connected with actual sight of the female genitalia)," Or, put another way, ...