Jonathan Hoyer
LIT 369: Short Fiction/Honors
Dr. Quan Ha
4/9/13

Psychoanalytic Objectification of Women – When Women Literally Become Objects (Revised) The story “The Babysitter” is fraught with sexual language, addressing sexual behavior directly and nonchalantly in discussing characters’ interactions with non-sexual objects. Psychoanalysis relies on the Oedipus Complex; the assumption that male behavior is a result of a deep-seeded unconscious “castration anxiety,” whereupon a young boy loves his mother and wants to have sex with her and competes with the father, resulting in an unconscious fear that his father will castrate him. In adulthood, a male “fetishizes female beauty as a way of defending against the anxiety brought about by the spectacle of woman as representing ‘lack’ or castration” (Gabbard, 161). This fetishizing female beauty, or in other words, objectifying women, is a defense mechanism against castration anxiety. Psychoanalysis offers multiple explanations for the objectification of women.
Objectification is also considered to be a result of the disturbance of the relationship between mother and baby. Objectification is a compensation for the loss of “the blissful relationship with a mother who has no autonomy or otherness but exists only to serve the baby’s needs” (Gabbard 166). Objectification, then, is a result of the male trying to recreate this perfect maternal symbiosis in which the mother serves the baby’s needs, and is essentially used as an object of need-fulfillment in this way. Thus, the characters’ objectification of women, as well as the narrator’s, can be examined under a psychoanalytic lens. Sexual objectification “is the experience of being treated as a body (or collection of body parts) valued predominately for its use to (or consumption by) others” (Frederickson & Roberts 174), and while there are countless instances