ABSTRACT
Abraham’s ‘Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex’ is an amplified version of a paper read at the Sixth International Psychoanalytical Congress in 1920 at The Hague. It was published in English two years later.
Drawing on a number of clinical examples, Abraham rigorously explores some of the manifestations of the female castration complex. The paper starts with the observation that many women want to be a man and dislike being a woman. Abraham cites the ‘poverty in their external genitalia’ as the basis for this envy and later psychopathology. He then draws on Freud and sets the evolution of woman in developmental stages, discussing both its normative aim and some of its deviations. For Abraham, the girl mistakes her primary ‘defect’, which is that in comparison with the boy she lacks a penis, as secondary: she had a penis, but it was taken away. This idea that she has been robbed combines with the associated idea of female genitalia as a wound to explain the hostility or wish for revenge sometimes expressed by women towards men.
Abraham describes the normal attitude for the woman as one of reconciliation with her sexual role—desiring passive gratification and longing for a child. It is important to note, however, that this normal outcome is rarely achieved. The trauma of castration is apt to be reactivated at key points in sexual development, such as menstruation, defloration and childbirth, whether in the actual experience or in fantasies about them. Traces of the castration complex, he argues, are universal and differ only in their severity and specificity.
Woman’s primary idea of the wound has three possible outcomes: normality, homosexuality and neurosis. The two deviations are elaborated upon: their homosexuality is either lived out (women who adopt a masculine role in relationships with other women), or sublimated (those who take up masculine interests of an intellectual and professional order); neurotic transformations are either of the wish fulfilment type (this entails repression of the desire to be male, which Abraham links to van Ophuijsen’s masculinity complex) or of the revenge type.
He concludes with a warning against the tendency to overestimate a single determinant in psychopathology, given that all psychical ideas are fundamentally overdetermined.
