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In psychoanalysis, the word "castration" is associated with several others that define it and that it in turn defines. These include "anxiety," "threat," "symbolic," "fear," "terror," "disavowal," and above all "complex." Beyond the everyday connotations of the term, the specifically psychoanalytic definition of castration is rooted in the act feared by male children, namely the removal of the penis. The essential connection between "castration" and "complex" derives from the fact that psychoanalysis views the castration complex, in tandem with the Oedipus complex, as the organizing principle of psychosexuality and, more broadly speaking, of mental life in general.
Although such instinctual sacrifices were injurious to the individual, they were essential to the "process of civilization," that is, to the development of conscience and thought. This process was subject, like the individual, to that instinctual duality which, we must not forget, was based at once upon an antagonism and an inextricable connection between the life and the death instincts. The great lesson of Civilization and Its Discontents was that "This conflict is set going as soon as men are faced with the task of living together" (1930a, p. 132). Living together indeed requires at the very least the symbolic marks of sacrifice (circumcision, for instance), and such marks are planted on the sexual body, thus clearly demonstrating the power of the notion of castration in the various registers of human reality.