ABSTRACT
I have known a number of neurotic patients who were peculiarly ready to adopt the use of the word
castration as soon as they had heard me employ it. Their reminiscences then tended to assume some such form as the following: "My mother castrated me when I was a very little boy. But the one who especially castrated me was my paternal grandfather • • •. " Or they will report of a mistress who is no longer wholly congenial: "Yesterday Mitzi castrated me." One unfamiliar with Freud's expansion of the idea of castration, who should hear such phrases for the first time, would faney that he must have found his way into a lunatic asylum!
