ABSTRACT
The most famous answer to the questions posed by Augustine of Hippo came from Freud of Vienna, fifteen centuries later. Freud of course was not a Christian or a doctor of theology, but a Jewish medical doctor, and in the psychoanalytic Gospel according to Dr. Freud castration has a secular meaning, a meaning not confined to one sect or another of a Mediterranean religion, but as universal as the difference between a penis and a vagina. Young children will eventually notice the difference between their own genitals and those of the other sex. To these two undeniable observations-the anatomical fact of genital difference and the social fact that the difference gets noticed, usually in childhood-Freud appends a hypothesis about how that difference, when noticed, is
interpreted. Both male and female children, Freud contends, sooner or later ask themselves a question very like Augustine’s: What does the girl’s “lack of a penis” mean? And they answer that the girl’s lack is “a result of castration.” The female child believes that she has been castrated; the male child believes that he may be castrated. And just as the child in Freud’s text asks a question that echoes Augustine’s, so the emotions recorded by Freud echo the emotions recorded by Augustine. For Augustine, horror and disgust were the appropriate reactions to a castrated half-man (quasi hominem); for Freud, every woman’s genitalia could be “regarded as a mutilated organ,” with the result that they arouse “a feeling of disgust” or “horror instead of pleasure.”
