castration anxiety

castration anxiety (countable and uncountable, plural castration anxieties)

1. (psychology) The literal or metaphorical fear of emasculation; associated with the early psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud.
   • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 133:

     If we wonder now how easily men are threatened by women, and how the slightest expression of feminine power can generate castration anxieties in even a big man, then perhaps we would do well to think back on the origins of agriculture.

• vagina dentata