Penises concrete,abstractand symbolic. The preoccupation ofour civilization with fighting with all possible means any manifestation of childhood masturbation, as well asdenying that it is practiced by adults who are not mental patients orblue collar workers - apreoccupation which has abated to acertain extent onlyin the last decades - resulted among other things in very acute 'castration anxiety' (or at least reinforced it) whichdr Freud encountered and described.
This fear ofbeing punished
for inappropriate (mainly sexual) behaviorby the removal of the
penishe encountered in boys, as well
as girls, the latter having to struggle withaccepting the idea that
Helene Deutsch, 'The Psychologyof Women, a psychoanalytic interpretation, Grune
& Stratton, 1944 'Cannibal Corpse', 'Avulsed', 'Necrotorture' etc., a
subgenre of 'death metal' which appears in the late
1980s, but develops rapidly currently, see web links at 'internet resources' section
of bibliography.
Style of adult cartoons originating in contemporary Japan, with depictions of
child rape, sexual torture, murder, disembowelment,skinning alive, hanging, squashing, etc.,
see weblinks at 'internet resources' section of bibliography.
they cannot have the privileges of the males, in their terms -because they did
not have a penis - and standard childhood anxiety + guilt produced the
feelingamongboys and girls, that girls are boys who had alreadybeen punished -
castrated. Indeed, as already mentioned above, insome
Muslim societies the girls are 'castrated' when they pass from childhood
to womanhood.
In our civilizationthough, especiallysince the medical amputation of clitorises
hasstopped, the girls also, like the boys, try to
deny the existence of the vagina, repressing all
sensation of it infavor of the clitoral - 'masculine' sensations. After all, the
vagina is connected toterrible events
inthe future which threatenpain, like giving birth, defloration,
menstruation, and although the little girl is not aware of the details of
these events, the implications inher unconsciousness isclear -
'I'm betteroff without all this stuff'.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her book 'The Second Sex'13 brings forth examples of girls 'practicing' for the
future, 'steeling' themselves by doing 'bad' and 'disgusting' things like
swallowing insects or worms, putting slugs on their skin, cutting themselves with
knifes and razors, preparingwith
these neurotic ritualsfor the trials that await them. The not unfounded
suspicionof girls that they, unlike boys are destined for
a futurelife of painful, disgustingthings, without much fun,
the envy towards the
privileges of males (not least of all the privilege of not suffering
physiologically), as well as the
smugness of the boys, become focusedon having or not
having the penis, the desire to have one bythe girls, was termed
'penis envy'.
Later inlife, this desire to escape their deadend
fate, hence a desire for the penis, woulddevelop in some
girls into the compulsive desire to have a penis inside them,
or to give birth at all costs. The
penis in this sense represents everything which the males have
and females are, to a larger or smaller extent, denied. French postFreudian
Lacan proposes lookingat the 'penis' as symbolic not only of
the 'phallic' properties of our civilization, but as a relevant to the
specific places in space and time representationof the main missing thing in
life which can not be defined.