858
PARTISAN REVIEW
As
we saw, the castration fear, embodied in woman as the
castrated being, lies at the core of the tale of
The Black Cat.
Never–
theless,
all
the primitive anxieties of the child, which often remain
those of the adult seem, as by design, to be gathered here, as though
to express the utmost extreme of anxiety.
In
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Freud sets forth in
chronological sequence the development of the primary forms of
anxiety in the child. Each such anxiety state corresponds to a specific
danger which the child is called on to meet. First to appear is the
anxiety connected with birth
(birth-anxiety),
which anxiety of phy–
siological origin derives from the actual experiences of the fcetus in
its egress at birth-the cardiac disturbances and semi-asphyxia that
provide the pattern from which all later anxiety derives. This is suc–
ceeded by
separation-anxiety
in various forms, the most purely
physiological being that connected with weaning, though every
separation from the mother rouses fears of losing her love and
protection, with the concomitant anxiety that inspires. When the
child is somewhat older, we find a third anxiety, fear of castration
(castration-anxiety),
which determines the repression of the child's
sexuality-masturbation and CEdipus complex included. This dread
of the worst imaginable mutilation, the loss of the penis, which
nothing could ever replace-unlike the womb which the warm bed
replaces, or milk and its substitutes of warm pap and food- this first
anxiety-fraught realization of a definitive and irremediable threat
to the child's most treasured organ, represents its first great fear in
relation to the community and, more even than separation anxiety,
determines what its future moral code will be. The danger of castra–
tion, little as it need be feared nowadays, doubtless once existed in
prehistoric times. Then the father of the primal horde, originator of
our earliest morals, would doubtless have thought little of killing or
castrating his rebellious sons when they coveted his females. The
fourth type of anxiety,
tear of conscience,
directly derives from the
preceding type, by way of the child's introjection of those it will
think of as potential castrators, which also includes the prohibiting
and morality-enforcing mother. Thus, the moral injunctions of the
child's elders are internalized in its psyche, and survive to become
the moral conscience of man. The child, the man, are now moral
beings, who tremble at the reproaches of this conscience. Finally .and
