Quotes About Castrating

So long as the man loves only the bounteous mother in woman, he remains infantile. And if he fears woman as the castrating womb, he can never combine with it and reproduce himself. What the hero kills is only the terrible side of the female, and this he does in order to set free the fruitful and joyous side with which she joins herself to him.

Wilson provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic context for her claim; the flâneur is the Oedipal under threat. The city is a castrating labyrinth that feminizes all who enter it.22