ABSTRACT
The author examines the child’s developing mind in relation to the genital reality first represented by the parents for their child, and the significance of castration anxiety in this context. The primal phantasy of castration forms a ubiquitous threat to an individual’s psychic development towards an integrated love life. It is only after integrating this threat into an advanced psychic organisation that the comprehension of genital reality, as well as full participation in it, becomes possible. By the same token, castration takes on significance as a preconscious metaphor for individual vulnerability.
Castration occupies a specific position among the instinctual dangers because it can subordinate other instinctual dangers. For this reason, also, psychotic pathology becomes ultimately integrated into this context. The successful integration of the idea of castration restores living contact with the body, while sexuality takes on not only the quality of pleasure but also the seriousness belonging to it. The solution of the castration complex is simultaneously a key to the psychic integration of human destructivity.
