Castration anxiety

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Important figures Abraham Adler Balint Bion Breuer Chodorow Erikson Fairbairn Ferenczi Freud (Anna) Freud (Sigmund) Fromm Guattari Horney Irigaray Jacobson Jones Jung Kohut Klein Kristeva Lacan Laing Laplanche Mahler Rank Reich Spielrein Stekel Strachey Sullivan Winnicott Žižek
Important works The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) The Ego and the Id (1923) Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964) Anti-Oedipus (1972) The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)
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Castration anxiety is an overwhelming fear of damage to, or loss of, the penis—a derivative of Sigmund Freud's theory of the castration complex, one of his earliest psychoanalytic theories.^[1] The term can refer to the fear of emasculation in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Freud regarded castration anxiety as a universal human experience. It is thought to begin between the ages of 3 and 5, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development.^[2] In Freud's theory, it is the child's perception of anatomical difference (the possession of a penis) that induces castration anxiety as a result of an assumed paternal threat made in response to their sexual proclivities. Although typically associated with males, castration anxiety is thought to be experienced, in differing ways, by both sexes.^[3]