The adaptational responses of women to these institutional pressures in many ways are similar to the responses of members of the minority group in a caste system! Many women although by no means all consciously reject this prejudicial picture of themselves, but it is doubtful that few, if any, completely escape its deleterious effects on an unconscious level. Women must struggle against deflation of the self esteem and the self contempt that goes with it. There is a measure of resentment against men, and there are some wishful fantasies of exchanging places with them. These are normal responses to the social institutions that provoke them, and they do not seriously interfere with the acceptance of womanhood and of woman's sociobiological role.

The normal aspiration to be a man that has just been described may undergo a neurotic integration. This occurs through a symbolic extension in which the unconscious symbol par excellence of masculine superiority becomes the penis. Conversely, the symbol of feminine inferiority becomes the absence of a penis that is, a castration. These unconscious symbolic extractions from the social institutions are common occurrences among patients in dynamic psychotherapy. They are used by male patients as well as by female, and every therapist is regularly a witness to them. They form the basis for a process of magical repair by means of which the neurotic woman in fantasy gains access to masculine traits and the boons that go with them. This process consists of the magical acquisition of the penis. The manner of its acquisition is derived from the woman's early developmental responses to sexual institutions.

Attitudes toward sex in this society are still predominantly punitive. The growing child unconsciously believes that sexual transgressions will be punished by withdrawal of parental love, loss of dependency, castration, and death. Clinical studies demonstrate that the little girl frequently invokes the castration fantasy to explain the anatomical difference between herself and the little boy. She believes that she once had a penis and that it was cut off as a punishment for her sexual misdeeds. The fantasy is usually integrated through the oedipus complex, in which the punitive figure is the parent of the same sex, and for this reason the little girl commonly blames her mother for the lack of penis. The castration anxiety may give rise to magical reparative fantasies through which a new penis is acquired. The original purpose of these fantasies in the child is to reinstate the bodily integrity and thus to allay the castration anxiety. Once the fantasies are laid down, the woman thereafter may 'resort to them whenever such an anxiety is aroused. These fantasies take various forms. The woman may simply appeal to her mother to return the penis to her; or she may seek to borrow the penis from her father or from a fantasied phallic mother, or from their symbolic surrogates. More complicated forms of the fantasy are based on the equations, baby = penis or feces = penis, through which the woman regenerates a penis within her own body. These are all harmless wishful fantasies. They do not solve the problem of castration, but neither do they aggravate it. More often, however, the repair is conceived as an act of destruction in which the penis is taken by force from an unwilling male donor, originally the father, later a father substitute. Most frequently the penis is incorporated orally or vaginally. Sometimes it is torn manually from the donor and in some magical fashion attached to the perineum of the recipient. Rarely, it is incorporated per anum. In all of these cases not only fails to alleviate the castration anxiety, but even adds to it because it carries with it the threat of violent retaliation. To make matters worse, this threat, as I shall show, can create serious disturbances in the woman's relationships with men in both the sexual and nonsexual areas of behavior.

It is common knowledge that castration anxiety in the adult woman occurs in those sexual situations that revive the infantile expectation of punishment for sexual transgression. It is not so well known that the same anxiety can be aroused by an adaptative failure in nonsexual assertion. Such failures may set in motion a symbolic equation that recapitulates the infantile castration. The equation is the following: I am a failure = I am not a man = I am a woman = I am castrated. The reparative fantasies that follow in the wake of this equation are exactly the same as those originally used by the little girl to undo her castration. Their purpose now, however, goes far beyond mere anatomical repair. The woman does not want a penis just for its own sake, but conceives of it as a magical instrument that will improve her performance. She hopes through its incorporation to acquire masculine adaptive capacities, reverse her failure, and guarantee a successful adaptation. Thus, in an adaptational context, the neurotic aspiration to be a man emerges as a wish for magical aid. This wish is integrated behaviorally through the motivations of dependency and power.