experienced, so in what sense can they be said to be real, unless we employ the “real” in a purely subjective, impressionistic way of speaking? In spite of this theoretical ambiguity, Freud insisted that reality was an outside, hostile force, represented by the father’s interference in his child’s libidinal strivings toward his (or her?) mother. Yet this position apparently conflicts with Freud’s observation in Civilization and Its Discontents that “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection” (1961a, 72). Loewald said that this apparently positive view of the father “harks back to Totem and Taboo where the longing for the father is described as ‘the root of every religion’” (1980, 8). Also, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggested that “the origins of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness” (1961a, 72). Loewald concludes that “religious feelings, thus, are understood as originating in an attempt to cope with hostile reality forces. . . . The longing for the father, seeking his help and protection, is a defensive compromise in order to come to terms with this superior, hostile power” (9; emphasis added).
Understand that “castration”—a concept—is supposed to symbolize in some concrete way the child’s encounter with reality, implemented by the fear of a threatening father. According to Freud, the ego was initially formed out of the infant’s experience of frustration. The ego is supposed to protect the infant from (a) its own wishes and (b) the reality of the world’s potential opposition. After Freud’s adoption of the structural model, the ego was conceived as the seat of identity that comes under assault from three sides: (a) the id (that is, the ego’s libidinal yearnings), (b) the superego (its—that is, its parents’—morality, right and wrong, conscience and ideals) and (c) the outside world, in other words—other people—what Freud calls “external reality.” Where is the rest or sanctuary for an existence so essentially at sea, at war with its environment and with itself, when even a son’s longing and positive regard for his father is merely a way of protecting himself from that very father? Freud was so confident that anxiety is always provoked by an external threat that he came to view our wishes as “external” also. In The Ego and the Id, he observed that “all the experiences of life that originate from without enrich the ego; the id, however, is its second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself” (196Id, 55; emphasis added). And again, “Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id” (56; emphasis added). But, in what way can the id be conceived as real unless (a) reality is not objective or external, but rather experienced as such; and (b) reality is a metaphor? And why was Freud so insistent that (a) reality is always external; (b) that this reality, external or no, is always dangerous; and (c) that the prototypical embodiment of this reality is the father? Loewald summarizes Freud’s view:
Reality, then, is represented by the father who as an alien, hostile, jealous force interferes with the intimate ties between mother and child, forces the child into submission, so that he seeks the father’s protection. The threat of the hostile reality is met by unavoidable, if temporary, submission to its demands, namely to renounce the mother as a libidinal object, and to acknowledge and submit to paternal authority. (1980, 7)
How did Freud become convinced that reality accounts for neurotic conflict? What did he actually mean by reality? Remember the impact, the near-crippling effect, on Freud when he discovered that his patients’ accounts of seduction weren’t “real,” after all. Yet, when Freud, years later, was continuing his search for the cause of repression, he was still looking for something that really happens, something that concretely threatens the child in an actual way. Freud’s conception of castration, in its specifically anatomical context, is insupportable, and every psychoanalyst knows that. It becomes even more untenable as a universal symbol of anxiety when we search for castration fears in girls, who, after all, haven’t a penis to lose. Sometimes Freud characterizes her anxiety as essentially envious; and sometimes he attributes her anxiety to the “loss of her mother.” In fact, Freud could never finally determine the nature of anxiety in girls because he never determined its source in boys, the standard by which he continued to compare and contrast the nature of feminine anxiety.
What is it about castration anxiety that can be said to be real? Does the father actually threaten to cut off his son’s penis because he covets his mother? Does the father ever, directly and unequivocally, confront his son about their “rivalry”? Freud says the answer to these questions is “no.” The boy, he suggests, more or less puts it together. He takes this piece of evidence (“Don’t play with your penis”) and that (“That’s naughty!”), and another (“Why don’t girls have penises?”) and interprets these (presumed) experiences and (possible) observations and, in his imagination, concludes he is at risk because the world, his father, forbids him from enacting his sexual phantasies. But if the experience of this prohibition isn’t actually conveyed to him, then on what is the child’s intuition founded?
Freud hoped to couch his theories in scientific terms, seeking to prove his “findings” through a scientific—in the main empirical—definition of reality. We can see the problem he faced when trying to define his notion of reality logistically, as though situating it “outside” settles the matter.
The distinction between “internal” and “external” may be valid in scientific experiments concerned with physics or mechanics, or even chemistry. But it falls short when applied to a specifically human reality, because for us there is no way of existing “outside,” strictly speaking. That which exists beyond our imagination is social, not “external.” They aren’t the same thing. Although there is an inside and outside to a house, there is no inside and outside to a person. This is only apt in terms of anatomy or physiology, but not in terms of experience. The social world isn’t “outside” of me. In fact, I am in a social world. I inhabit that world. Freud’s depiction of an external reality that presumably causes castration anxiety in boys is actually the social world to which boys belong. It isn’t dangerous because it poses an “external threat”—it’s threatening because boys are involved in a setting that includes fathers, a situation that interferes with—and to that degree endangers—what they want to be to their mothers, that is, the object of unrealizable phantasy. Trying to distinguish between internal and external aspects of reality only confuses the actual sources of anxiety: the world to which one belongs.
Reality, in essence, is social. It is life. This conceptual problem eluded Freud because he insisted on couching his observations about human nature in scientific terms. This problem was only compounded later by object relations theorists such as Melanie Klein (1937), who based her conception of anxiety on the notion of internal and external “objects.” How is one to reconcile the difference if the one is always “invading” the other? When human experience is conceived as a mere reflection of “internal” phantasies, is it any wonder that some analysts reject the concept of reality entirely, replaced with “operations” that purportedly determine our experiences for us? These developments are a far cry from Freud’s efforts to determine what is real and why we’re so afraid of it.
The world to which we belong includes our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about it. When Freud finally traced the source of castration anxieties to the beliefs that children have about their fathers, he was describing a social—actually, an existential—conception of reality, not a “scientific” one. This is a conception of reality that science has no access to. It has to be thought, experienced, and eventually realized. What threatens children most are the limitations society imposes on them. Transformed into phantasies, their unbridled wishes become treasures they are afraid they’ll lose if discovered. The reality they encounter doesn’t merely conflict with their desires—it threatens to displace them. Reality challenges them to accept the limits to what is obtainable through their experience of frustration. Reality isn’t inherently ominous; it entices and threatens at the same time. Its blows can be harsh, but they also transform. Freud discovered that children haphazardly experience these disappointments through anticipation and belief. If his term for this experience—castration—seems so literal,
