In Freudian psychoanalysis, a Madonna–whore complex is a psychological complex that is said to develop in the human male when he sees all women not as individuals, but as either saintly Madonnas or debased prostitute-like personalities. This dichotomy limits women's sexual expression because it offers two mutually exclusive ways to construct a sexual identity.[1] The duality implies that women must assume subservient roles, either as madonnas to be protected or as whores to be punished by men.[2]
The term is also used popularly, often with subtly different meanings.
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Freud argued that the Madonna-whore complex is caused by oedipal castration fears which arise when a man experiences the affection he once felt for his mother with women he now sexually desires. In order to manage this anxiety, the man categorizes women into two groups: women he can admire and women he finds sexually attractive. Whereas the man loves women in the former category, he despises and devalues the latter group.[3] Psychoanalyst Richard Tuch suggests that Freud offered at least one alternative explanation for the Madonna-whore complex:
This earlier theory is based not on oedipal-based castration anxiety but on man's primary hatred of women, stimulated by the child’s sense that he had been made to experience intolerable frustration and/or narcissistic injury at the hands of his mother. According to this theory, in adulthood the boy-turned-man seeks to avenge these mistreatments through sadistic attacks on women who are stand-ins for mother.[3]
According to Freudian psychology, this complex often develops when the sufferer is raised by a cold and distant mother. Such a man will often court someone with qualities of his mother, hoping to fulfill a need for intimacy unmet in childhood. Often, the wife begins to be seen as mother to the husband—a "Madonna" figure—and thus not a possible object of sexual attraction. For this reason, in the mind of the sufferer, love and sex cannot be mixed. The man is therefore reluctant to have sexual relations with his wife for, according to his unconscious mind, this would be incest. He will reserve sexuality for "bad" or "dirty" women, and will not develop "normal" feelings of love in these sexual relationships. This introduces a dilemma where a man may feel unable to love any woman who can satisfy him sexually and is unable to be sexually satisfied by any woman whom he can love.
Another theory claims that men's preference for virginity in the woman he marries is a matter of the heart and nothing to do with control, religion or jealousy. When a man is "falling in love", her lack of sexual experience will make her more special to him. This causes a distintion for men.
Another theory claims that the Madonna-whore complex derives from the representations of women as either madonnas or whores in mythology and Judeo-Christian theology rather than developmental disabilities of individual men.[2]
Alfred Hitchcock used the Madonna-whore dichotomy as an important mode of representing women. In Vertigo (1958), for example, Kim Novak portrays two women that the hero cannot reconcile: a virtuous, blonde, sophisticated, sexually repressed "madonna" and a dark-haired, single, sensual "fallen woman".[4]