Article: Phallic Mother

PHALLIC MOTHER

The so-called phallic mother is a mother who is fantasmatically endowed with a phallus. Among the male child's earliest sexual theories, he believes that all people have the male genital. By substituting the phallus for the organ that the child thinks the female is lacking, he tries to protect himself from the castration anxiety that arises from the primal fantasies of the mother. The fear of the phallic mother imago tacitly affirms the threat of castration, while at the same time defensively negating it along with all its oral and anal pregenital foundations.

A theory of the phallic mother existed in Sigmund Freud's work from his earliest formulations on the sexual ...

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