Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Castration

From fashion to football, in our dreams and epiphanies, through jealous rages and moments of genius, the effects of castration anxiety, so claims Ivan Ward, are ever-present. Freud's famous "castration complex" is met with continually in analytic experience. Yet it seems an unbelievable idea. Taking his evidence from myth, clinical practice and the sexual theories of children, Freud established the castration complex as one of the determining factors of human sexual desire and personality development.