The male's castration anxiety leads him to regard the fetish with a peculiar form of intrapsychic splitting in which the fetish is both a denial and a confirmation that It would seem as if Midge has stepped out of bounds in this moment, and the film reprimands her as a result. I couldnt agree more with you regarding appreciating the films but still understanding why and how theyre problematic and why that matters. Why is it that these perfectly competent and capable female characters so willingly subject themselves to the authority of a male figure who is not at all strong enough to exert any sort of control over them? :180). According to Mulvey, the figure of the woman, like that of the monster, also mobilizes castration fears in the male subject. The book does, however, contain an essay on the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami, whose work she terms as a cinema of uncertainty and of delay. Hall, C., & van de Castle, R. L. "An empirical investigation of the castration complex in dreams", International Psychoanalytical Association, "The Psychological Impact of Circumcision", "Ritual Circumcision and Castration Anxiety", "Neonatal male circumcision is associated with altered adult socio-affective processing", "Circumcision's Psychological Damage | Psychology Today Australia", "A cross-cultural test of the Freudian theory of circumcision", "Neonatal circumcision could increase the risk of sudden infant death syndrome in babies new research", "Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Lucas Cranach the Elder (c1530)", "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes", Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood, Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Castration_anxiety&oldid=1138595179, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 10 February 2023, at 14:24. This will lead to the fear associated with bodily injury in castration anxiety, which can then lead to the fear of dying or being killed. In Mulveys view, male spectators project their look, and thus themselves, onto the male protagonists. Despite being the films hero (or, perhaps, anti-hero), Scottie is heroically impotent due to his own acrophobia, a condition imposed upon himself which he is unable to overcome. It is to the possibility of this romantic individual and his or her liberation from that order that the essay is addressed.