Phallic woman

Phallic mother

Freud considered that at the phallic stage of early childhood development, children of both sexes attribute possession of a penis to the mother—a belief the loss of which helps precipitate the castration complex. Thereafter males may seek fetishistic substitutes in women for the lost penis in the form of high heels, earrings or long hair to alleviate the castrative threat—terrifying phallic women such as witches (with their broomsticks) representing the failure of such substitutes to cover the underlying anxiety. The female, whose love (in Freud's view) was originally "directed to her phallic mother", may thereafter either turn to her father for love, or may return to an identification with the original phallic mother in a neurotic development.

The phallic mother can be (though need not necessarily be) an actively castrative figure, stifling her children by pre-empting all room for autonomous action.

Elements of the phallic mother concept may persist in men through the misconception of one's mother as castrated rather than naturally non-phallic, which the gives rise to castration anxiety in oneself, embodied in turn by the castrating mother and vagina dentata.