"castration complex" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when referring to a psychoanalytic theory developed by Sigmund Freud whereby boys experience feelings of rivalry and hostility towards their fathers and animosity towards women because of their desire to possess the same (missing) genitalia as their fathers. For example, Freud suggested that a boy's actions and behavior may be influenced by feelings of anxiety resulting from his castration complex.
Last week, artist Anish Kapoor accused the Tories of having a "castration complex" about the arts.
The regular Freudians dismiss the Kleinian reconstructions as crazy and fantastic (as if their own reconstructions of the castration complex described perfectly ordinary, everyday events).
Judith was in the news at the time of the opera's creation: Klimt painted her as an erotic icon, while Freud argued that her murder of Holofernes was emblematic of the castration complex.
"I would advise opponents of the psychoanalytical outlook against referring precisely to Hoffmann's story The Sandman in order to support the view that the fear for one's eyes is completely unrelated to the castration complex," he goes on to say.
They were the subject of a celebrated Spare Rib essay by film-maker Laura Mulvey, "You Don't Know What Is Happening, Do You Mr Jones?", which drew on Freudian theory to brand the work as fetishistic and to essentially claim it was the result of a castration complex about which Jones was unaware.
Dali's use of anamorphosis is seen at its eeriest in the 1933 painting "Myself at the Age of 10 When I Was the Grasshopper's Child (Castration Complex)." Dressed in the sailor suit Dali used as a symbol of himself when young, a boy sits before a table, his enormously elongated, fishlike head stretched out on it.
Practical-minded Americans, for their part, would not seem to have provided a receptive audience for his arcane theory of mind, with its id, ego and superego, and its references to Oedipal crises, castration complexes and penis envy.
Their respective views can perhaps best be captured with respect to their attitude toward the symbolic violence of castration (the Oedipal Complex) and the social contract.
The phallic stage can only be successfully surmounted if the Oedipus complex with its accompanying castration anxiety can be resolved.
For the girl, in other words, castration does not resolve the Oedipal Complex but leads her to enter it, and for this reason Freud claims that it is never wholly brought to a conclusion or demolished, thus accounting, in his view, for girls' weaker super-egos and lesser capacity for sublimation.
