“What a cramp on philosophy was the castration complex with its insistence that the bottom of all buried fear in man was his fear that the penis would be lost; no, the PW had often been tempted to write in parallel to Millett that fear of losing the penis was not the root of other fears so much as it was the final product of social fears, that one would, for example—let us enjoy the example—not be afraid of a maniacal Amazon in a dark alley so much because one had harbored the terror from the age of three that the penis could be lost at a clip, as from fear that the huge murderess upon one was so dangerous, so voracious, that nothing, not even one’s buried prick, was safe; to the contrary, the PW had often thought that the castration complex was more likely to be a trauma which had struck Freud personally, struck him on the instant of his circumcision. No mean trauma. That the first searing, sense-shattering pain after birth should explode on the sense from there, there! in that region of the body, would be cause enough for later fear of castration. Freud never cared to question the rite of circumcision but we can suspect how his unconscious must have worried the possibility that circumcision was the fastest way to relocate libido from the genitals to the brain and the mouth.”
