Preface

In Part II of this book I will explore a dimension of the monstrous-feminine that is not specifically related to woman’s maternal and reproductive functions. Freud argued that woman terrifies because she is castrated. I will argue that woman also terrifies because man endows her with imaginary powers of castration. Because the Freudian theory of woman’s castration has provided the dominant theoretical justification for analyses of woman as monster in the horror film, it is necessary to return to Freud in order to evaluate critically the origins of his theory. In the next two chapters I will present, first, a rereading of his Little Hans case history (‘Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy’) and, second, I will examine the repression of the figure of the castrating woman in Freud’s other writings and in his dream analyses. An extensive rereading of the Hans case is necessary because it is probably the most often quoted of all Freud’s case studies in relation to his theory of the Oedipus complex and castration crisis. A critical rereading of Freud is also necessary because the view that woman terrifies only because she is castrated has led to a serious misunderstanding of the nature of the monstrous-feminine in critical writings on the horror film. The following critique of Freud will also provide the theoretical groundwork for the later analyses of specific faces of the monstrous-feminine: the femme castratrice in Sisters and I Spit on Your Grave and the castrating mother in Psycho and other horror films that deal with the psychotic mother. (Unless otherwise stated, all quotations of Freud’s works in Chapter 7 are from ‘Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy’.)