Vagina Dentata

Wow, you can really tell I'm trying to write an essay cos I'm posting so much. Anyway, I was looking up 'normative beliefs' in my very trusty Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, and like I always do I started flicking through the back to get to the letter N, and the first page I stopped on was a V page (accidentally!). Underneath vagina there's this definiton, which made me giggle, mainly because I'm bored, and it reminds me of a film which recently came out. It amused me mainly because I had no idea that it was an actual psychological disorder.

Vagina Dentata
n. a fantasy of a toothed vagina, a legendary hazard associated with sexual intercourse. The Austrian psychoanalyist Otto Rank (1884 - 1939) first identified it, in his book The Trauma of Birth (1924) as a widespread cause of anxiety amongst neurotic men (obviously women were the cause of men's prolems!), and it was explored further by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi (1873 - 1933). The counterpart fantasy among women, called penis dentata (toothed penis) is less commonly observed. [From Latin vagina a sheath + dentata toothed, from dens, dentis a tooth].

Ooh, I have to get ready for dinner now, boo.