Psychological sterility and the imago of a phallic mother

Abstract

This thesis covers major psychoanalytic theories and previous studies on the psychology of women and the influence of the imago of a phallic mother on a young womans life resulting in her psychological sterility. Helene Deutsch, a very well known Austrian-American psychoanalyst and a colleague of Freud, had embarked in research topics about the sterility of women and had observed many types of psychological sterilities in women none had dealt with the notion of the imago of a phallic mother as a contributor in the psychological sterility of the daughter. Starting with the Object Relation theory in how the ego develops and how an anxious, humiliating and phallic mother is a main contributor to the disturbance of the girls psychological development and the formation of an archaic maternal super-ego which in adulthood might result in repetitive traumatic experience with motherhood ambivalence seeking to ease its inner infantile anxieties and destructive tendencies, a profound descriptive literature of how daughters grow up to become their own phallic mothers, their unconscious fears and psychological structure, and finally three case studies done on psychologically sterile women.