castrate this

One of the most frustrating and, unfortunately, deeply embedded concepts in 20th-century psychoanalysis is the castration complex, first articulated by Freud then dilated by countless other psychoanalysts to follow, including Jones, Horney, Lacan, and Irigaray. Each of these thinkers attempts--and fails, I suggest--to show how the castration complex inescapably causes gendered subjectivity while deserving no blame for the violences of such an interpolation. Among the various interpretations of the phallus, Irigaray perhaps comes closest to a bearable explanation, though she, too, fails to recognize some fundamental problems with the phallus and woman's apparent yearning for it.

Briefly: the castration complex for women begins with the pre-Oedipal phase, in which the girl loves and desires the mother. Around this time the girl, erstwhile satisfied with her clitoris, sees and somehow comprehends the penis, and realizes not only that her clit is a poor substitute for it, but also that her mother does not possess a penis, as she previously thought. Unlike the male child, who fears castration when he understands that some people lack a penis, the female child feels like she was born castrated, as was her mother. She thus begins to hate the mother and transfers her love from mother to father, in the hope that the father will eventually provide her with a penis—a hope that, somewhere along the line, gets transformed into the wish for a baby. This summary, reductive and biased as it is, will nevertheless allow us to see some of the fundamental problems with the castration complex.

so much depends
upon
a phallus

… but why? Why is the assumption that to have is more desirable in this instance than, to use the fraught word employed by so many psychoanalysts, to lack? When did lacking earn such a negative connotation and, for that matter, why is lack the term of choice when other, less negative concepts could have been used? No theorist in my ken has thought to reframe the genitalia in terms of a female purity and a male surplus—an odd oversight in light of the historical connotation of women as excessive, leaky, and uncontainable. Isn’t the penis just that, though? It is in excess of the body by virtue of its exterior position, while the female genitalia is contained and safe, so to speak. (There are some notable objections to this characterization—I am thinking particularly of Gail Kern Paster’s The Body Embarrassed, in which she explores the English Renaissance woman’s portrayal as a leaky vessel—but they’ll have to wait for a longer exploration of this topic, as will further consideration of Lacan's idea of lack.)

The point of this post is not to right the wrongs of the castration complex or to make a feminist argument for the supremacy of the vagina over the penis. It is, instead, to point out an unchallenged assumption in a concept that still holds sway in the 21st-century western psyche, and to set the stage for more musings on the concept of lack, particularly with regard to gender, affect, and kinship.