Psychoanalytic theory also describes what these representations are about. In essence, it tells us that children experience primitive desires involving sex, aggression, safety, independence, admiration and power; which are attached to -- and enacted through -- the body, particularly the mouth, anus and genitals. As children experience feeding at a nipple, toilet training and genitality, the desires attached to these regions of the body profoundly influence their interactions with their parents.

These developments culminate in the oedipal period when psychoanalytic theory says children experience sexual and genital desires for the parent of the opposite gender. As a result, in the case of males, the boy begins to fantasize about displacing his father and sexually possessing his mother.

Seen from one perspective, the boy's desire for the mother is a way of remaining a child, because he has chosen the source of comfort and nurturing as his love object. But it can also be viewed as a premature expression of sexuality and the urge to overcome the limitations of childhood and grow to adulthood, a set of urges that will later help propel him to maturity. Among other things, it involves a desire to end his status as a member of the family who is excluded from adult life. In place of being on the outside looking in at the parental bedroom, at the marital relationship and its confidences, and at the mother's body, the child moves in the oedipal fantasy to the center of power and privilege in the family universe.

But, psychoanalytic theory tells us, the boy recognizes, as a result of expressions of disapproval from parents and others, and as a result of his perceptions of reality and his love for his parents, that these desires are unacceptable. He feels guilt and fears retaliation involving a loss of love or support, castration, or other forms of injury, entrapment or death for the "crime" of his desires.

Fearing retaliation, the boy may harbor fantasies that his mother or father will undergo a malevolent transformation and turn into a persecuting figure who will castrate or torture him for his crime. As noted in the previous section, he may have fantasies that his mother and women are already castrated, since children -- as a result of primitive cognitive abilities -- frequently misperceive the genitals of girls and woman as injuries resulting from the castration of a penis. These misperceptions can occur independently of oedipal conflict but become associated with it.

The boy may also fear that his mother will swallow him or cut off and swallow his penis with her mouth or vagina, since he is smaller and vulnerable. And he may misperceive sexual intercourse between his parents as an attack -- a horrific scene of entry-assault and subjugation -- which enhances his own fears that something similar might happen to him.

By now there is a good deal of evidence that children don't create these fantasies entirely out of their own minds. In addition, parents, who have failed to resolve these issues themselves, covertly communicate these fears and desires to them. A system of covert communication is formed involving  seductiveness, threats, pleas for safety, collusive cover-ups, and so on, and this creates a shared world of fantasy and motivation between parents and children. 

As part of this system of communication, parents can covertly communicate the idea that their children will suffer castration for their desires. If the mother has significant unresolved conflicts over these issues, she may be covertly seductive toward the child, arousing oedipal desires, while trying to infantilize him and keep him bound to her, as a kind of prisoner of love. She may threaten castration, devouring, and so on, if the child leaves her, or engage in implied blackmail in which she threatens to reveal the child's forbidden desires to the father. She may also communicate the idea that the child is being punished for his incestuous desires and, as a result of her own unconscious perception of herself as castrated, she may be jealous of his genitals and threaten to castrate them in revenge.

We thus have three "crimes" the child may fear retaliation for: the "crime" of incestuous desires toward the parent of the opposite gender (or the same gender) and of aggressive desires, as well; the "crime" of having a penis when the child views his mother as lacking one; and the "crime" of wanting to grow up and leave. All of these may have a complex relationship to each other.

It should be noted that this is a schematic description focusing on the primitive underside of the development of males, which is counter-balanced to one degree or another by healthier responses. Among these healthier responses, there are  powerful urges in most parents and children for the child to grow up, to become sexually mature, and to exchange love in a nonsexual way. Much of this too is communicated covertly in messages that tell the child it is good to be autonomous; that he is safe; that his relationship to his parents is essentially nonsexual; that the female genitals are whole and not a wound, and so on.

As a result of the way the mind functions, the perceptions described above tend to be organized in primitive and simplified images of good and bad selves in relation to good and bad parents. With healthy maturity, these images become integrated so we experience ourselves, our parents and others as complex individuals, with characteristics we judge to be good or bad. But the more primitive and one-sided images will co-exist in the mind, giving us fantasies about castrating, persecuting, fathers and benevolent, protective fathers; about criminal selves with evil desires and good, loved, selves; about nurturing, supportive, mothers and jealous, castrating, devouring, and infantilizing mothers.

All of this can leave children uncertain which perceptions and fantasies to believe. They monitor what adults say and do, largely outside of awareness, in part, to determine which of a number of ways of interpreting events they should believe. Was an apparently routine comment made by a parent really a covert threat? Are women castrated or whole? Are the female genitals a wound or a normal structure? Will the female genitals devour the child or are they a source of pleasure? Is sex a form of assault and exploitation or an act of love? Is it evil or good? Is the child being told he can be independent and grow up or that he will suffer negative consequences if he does? Was the nightmare that expressed these fears real or a fantasy?

In each case, children are faced with competing hypotheses. If they accept the negative interpretation, that road leads to a malevolent transformation in their view of the world, one truly worthy of a reaction of horror.

Psychoanalysis says that one way boys resolve these issues is by identifying with, and desiring to become like, their fathers instead of supplanting them, although this isn't the only reason they engage in identification. It also says that children go into a less sexualized latency period after the oedipal period, starting at about five and a half. When they emerge from it, as a result of the maturing of the body and the influence of hormones in adolescence, many of the conflicts over these fears and desires are revived, but now in the mind and body of a sexually maturing teenager, which contributes to the driven quality and rebelliousness of adolescence. In this period,  teenagers have to move from oedipal desires to desires for a partner who is a peer. They have to solidify their sexual identities, while defending against regressive and disturbing urges,. They have to deal with desires to assert their independence even as they are still emotionally and practically dependent, and they have to deal with desires to be admired along with fears of humiliation.

As part of the process of maneuvering through this phase, the young male may need to decide, outside of awareness, that it is safe and desirable to mature sexually and transfer his sexual desires to females more or less his own age; that sex holds no danger of castration or retaliation; that the mother and father want him to grow up and leave the nest or, at least, that he can do so even if they don't; that sex is love not violence;  that the vagina is a source of pleasure and life, rather than of castration, oral devouring and death. If the parents and caretakers have been comfortable with their own sexuality and independence, and tolerant of the child's primitive fears and desires while appropriately encouraging him to grow out of them, there is a better chance the child will "graduate" from this tumultuous phase of development.

But, to the degree sexuality is laden with anxiety and intense fears, the normal progression will be distorted or arrested. These distortions make up a large part of the neuroses and sexual fixations. To give a few examples, the individual may develop a fetish in which he is excited by certain inanimate objects such as a piece of clothing. Outside of awareness, he may perceive these objects as male genitals in order to deny the anxiety-producing perception of women as castrated. Or he may regress to the earlier anal period of development as a defense against the threatening sexual desires of the oedipal period. As a result, he will manifest numerous anally-based characteristics in disguised form, collecting, ordering, abstracting, messing up, holding in, tearing apart, destroying, and so forth. In the obsessional forms of intellectualization and abstraction, and ordering, these symptoms are purified of physicality and anality, but the individual is still, in his mind, controlling, organizing and admiring dead things that are seen as an extension of the self. 

We see these themes expressed throughout popular fiction and in all of the science fiction stories about negative utopias described on this site. These works typically depict dictators who oversee false paradises that are really intended to suppress and control the freedom-seeking characters. Among other things, these are disguised expressions of fantasies about parents who pretend to be benevolent while they refuse to let their children grow up and become sexually mature.

Some, such as "The Cage", The Futurological Congress and The Truman Show, appear to be depictions of fathers trying to prevent children from growing up. Others, such as Logan's Run and The Machine Stops, depict infantilizing mothers. In some, it is obvious to the audience and/or the main characters right off that the apparent benevolence of the surroundings isn't what it appears to be. But,  often, a process of discovery takes place in which the characters see through the false benevolence of their surroundings and reject their infantilized status, choosing to escape and become independent.  All of these stories -- so long as they have a happy ending -- invite audiences to vicariously indulge the fantasy of growing up and leaving the comforts of home, despite the efforts of fantasized parents to stop them.

In other works, such as Dracula, we see a corrupt father as vampiric seducer and symbolic castrator trying to pervert and corrupt young people just at the time they would marry. Here, the fight isn't by one character to escape an established order of parental oppression, but of a malevolent parent to take control of the child and create an order of oppression. 

Many of these works about parents as pseudo-benevolent dictators and attackers don't depict the classical Oedipus complex in which the emphasis is on the child as actively desiring the parent of the opposite gender. Instead, it is typically the parent figure who is depicted as seducing, sexually stunting and blocking the child, as part of an effort to keep him or her infantilized and, at times, turn him into a child-lover. 

Them! follows this pattern. Like these other works, it offers a disguised depiction of human development in which the mother tries to stop children from growing up. But unlike the false utopias described above, there is no benevolent face that is first put forward. The mother is depicted unambiguously as a monster, although the threat she poses  takes time to be revealed.

When translated back into the underlying fantasy that is depicted in disguised form by the movie, the story of Them! goes like this: a young person, who is primarily depicted as  male, is growing up and has an increasing interest in the opposite sex. But his effort to mature and mate are interfered with by his fear that the jealous mother is a monstrous revenge-seeker who will devour and castrate him for choosing a sexual partner his own age. 

In response to this fear, he denies the existence of the mother as an attacker and retreats into a paralyzing neurosis of obsessional deadness. But he overcomes his fear by confronting it and by refusing to be put in the position of a child who doesn't understand the meaning of events or who is on the outside looking in. At the end, having overcome the threatening image of the mother through insight and the courage to face the truth, he grows into adulthood and pairs off.

The movie tells this story by showing us characters who represent various aspects of the child and other family members. The story of their overcoming of the monster is the story of the child's successful effort to overcome his fears and grow up.

Let's translate the elements of the movie back into their original form so we can see this underlying story of the development of a young person into sexual maturity:

* It is clear that the ants are images of monstrous mothers and reproduction. The ant society is governed by queens whose existence revolves around reproduction. It is located inside nests that are an image of the interior of a woman's reproductive system, with a maze of tunnels leading to a womblike enclosure with growing offspring. Why a maze of tunnels? Because this is a disguised depiction; because that is what ant hills have and because this is the interior of a reproductive system (as well as the intestines) as a child might imagine it.

But the fact that the nests include entire families, with males (fathers) who mate with the queens (mothers), to produce a new generation of queens, males, and workers, alerts us to the fact that the nests are the womb of the persecutory mother as the matrix for the evil side of the family. When we see the ants, we see the faces of the evil mother and the family.

All of the nests in the movie are representations of the same womb of the persecutory mother. In the manifest story, of course, there is a single nest which produces two queens that escape and form new nests. While, technically, the new queens are the offspring of the queen in the original nest, in the underlying story, the various nests are all the same, just as the queens are all the same monstrous, enraged, mother giving birth to herself.

* While the ants are clearly images of monstrous mothers, virtually all of their victims are male. They kill a male police officer, a male store owner, men on a ship, and a father, and they trap the father's two male children with the intent of eating them. Even the smaller male ants (representing the father) are found dead, after performing the sole function for which they exist. Only the family killed at the beginning presumably includes at least one female, the mother.

This suggests that the young person who fears attack is primarily intended to be thought of as male although, as we will see, this young person is also depicted as a female or, more specifically, as a budding male and female couple.

* The modus operandi of the ants is to constantly create holes, which are disguised depictions of mothers creating vagina-like wounds -- in other words, engaging in castration.  The ants tear a hole in a trailer, a store and a boxcar. Sgt. Peterson says the hole in the trailer was "caved out", rather than caved in. The entrance to their nests are also large holes. They create a wound in the chest of the store owner and they tear off -- castrate -- a father's arm and cut a gash in his chest, another image of the castration of the male genitals and its replacement with a vagina as a wound. The weapons used by the ants are castrating mandibles and a piercing stinger.

These elements -- a female nest of horrific monsters  attacking smaller male victims and creating holes -- make clear that we are dealing with a disguised fantasy of a powerful, large, mother devouring and castrating a smaller male or males. This is a rendering of the child's fear that the mother will attack and castrate him and give him a wound-like vagina. 

But not every opening in the movie is intended to represent a vagina (and anus) as a castration wound. In addition, the openings to the nests represent the genitals as an engulfing opening into the analized reproductive system of the mother. The entryway to the anti-ant headquarters does, as well.

* The movie also shows various human characters who represent the person or members of the family who have reason to fear the attacking mother. The most important are Agent Graham and Pat Medford as young adults who are ready for marriage but who are held back from taking their relationship to the next step while they fight the attacking mother. Both are representations of the person whose fantasy and story this is, although the more important role played by Agent Graham and the fact that it is males who are being attacked suggests that he is the central representation around which the story revolves.

Other characters, most importantly Sgt. Peterson and his partner, also represent the person the story is about.

Dr. Harold Medford is the good father, and various leaders who threaten to obstruct the war against the ants and deny the danger are less-than-ideal fathers who hinder growth. The female doctor who spouts psychiatric jargon  as she takes care of the young girl, may be an image of the mother in denial.

We thus have a young person -- represented most essentially by Agent Graham and also by Pat Medford -- who wants to mature sexually and settle down with a mate, but who is stopped by his fear that his rampaging mother will castrate and devour him. 

* The movie also depicts various devices the characters use to protect themselves, which can easily be seen as a depiction of psychological defenses the person uses against the fear of being castrated and devoured. We already saw that the characters use denial -- they refuse to recognize what is happening or the danger it poses. And they use obsessionality, escaping into abstract and overly intellectualized descriptions of what is taking place. In addition, we see some of the characters decked out in hyper-masculine military and police uniforms, using heavy artillery. Making oneself ultra-masculine is a common device to protect against fears of castration and feminization. In the end, it is this (heavily analized) masculinity, in the form of the military and its urethral-anal-phallic weapons, that overcomes the mother and the fears of her. We thus see the psychological defenses the person uses against his fear of the mother -- denial, obsessionality, and hyper-masculinity.

* There are also a great many elements that depict the way this person overcomes his fears and grows to maturity by actively seeking insight into what he is afraid of and by overcoming his exclusion from information and decision-making. For example, throughout the movie there are depictions of the human characters being treated like children or in a situation like that of children, in which they are bewildered by anomalous information or left out of the information loop. Thus, the reporters are excluded from meetings attended by authority figures; a number of characters are on the outside looking in at giant nest openings; Agent Graham listens to experts use technical terms he doesn't understand; and many of the characters are bewildered about the meaning of events that take place around them. The entire direction of the plot is a depiction of the successful efforts of the central characters to overcome all of this by actively seeking information and insight. Time after time, they defeat confusion, exclusion and a lack of knowledge with assertiveness and insight and then act on what they know, which makes it possible for them to overcome and destroy the monstrous castrators and devourers.

Once again, since the characters are images in the mind of one person and aspects of this person, we are seeing a depiction of this person's success in overcoming exclusion and lack of knowledge as he develops the power to defend himself against his fears.

Dr. Harold Medford plays a number roles when it comes to this movement away from ignorance, exclusion and powerlessness. He conceals the truth about what is going on, which makes him a less-than-ideal parent. He also seeks the truth, which makes him much like a child trying to learn the secrets of adulthood and grow up, as well as a father and psychoanalyst trying to uncover the secret of the mother and the family. And he shares his knowledge and helps those younger than him overcome the beast, which makes him a good father and de facto psychoanalyst. Primarily, he is an image of a good father.

Agent Graham, as the central image of the healthy side of the male self growing to maturity, insists on knowing the truth, facing danger, and being included in anything that will affect him. When Dr. Harold Medford at first refuses to reveal his theory that it is giant ants, Agent Graham tells him they resent being treated like children. Agent Graham also ridicules the use of scientific jargon,  which excludes people by making it impossible for them to understand what is being said. And he valiantly goes into the nests and has a moment of recognition, when, as a result of competent investigation, he realizes the ants are in the storm drains. It is these qualities of actively seeking insight, overcoming exclusion and facing danger that embody his will to grow up.

Interesting, Agent Graham also plays a lesser role suppressing the desire for truth, as seen when he instructs a physician to keep a pilot locked up in a hospital, to prevent the pilot from telling the world about his encounter with the ants. Here, Agent Graham is following the lead of Dr. Harold Medford, the father, in keeping the truth about the mother quiet.

Like Agent Graham, Dr. Pat Medford insists on being included and she goes into the nest after Agent Graham decides it is no place for a woman. She is lucky in that she is being brought up by a good parent, Dr. Harold Medford, who is her role model as a scientist and who manifests courage and the willingness to face the truth.

Pat Medford is one of various female characters in movies from this period who are assertive and have a hint of traditional masculine qualities, while still being presented as desirable. Her role makes clear that, while this is primarily a story about a male, it is also a story about male and female growing up. Or, more to the point, the movie tells the story about young people growing into sexual maturity by depicting a male and female overcoming their fear of the attacking mother and growing into a couple.

In the end, the characters achieve adulthood by finding out everything they need to know and entering the nest of the body and the unconscious so it conceals no more dark secrets, at least none that anyone needs to worry about in the near future. By filling in the holes in their knowledge and putting the fragments of information together, they end the ant rampage of castration in which physical holes were being torn open and everything was in fragments. In other words, by developing a coherent and correct story about what is going on, and acting on it, the children are able to bring their body image together and feel safe from castration and disarray.

Finally, only after the persecuting mother is destroyed by insight combined with the anal and phallic firepower of men, does Pat Medford express a romantic interest in Agent Graham. They become a couple and will presumably now start a family.

Thus does the movie show us healthy and unhealthy responses to castration anxiety that lead to neurosis and growth. Among the unhealthy responses it depicts are denial; obsessional abstraction, ordering and intellectualization, and dehumanization. The healthy responses, which make growth possible, are: seeking knowledge, having insight, insisting on being included in on information, working together, and facing fears. Analization (the use of analized weapons) and hyper-masculinization are also depicted as being mobilized in the service of overcoming fears, although they are primitive  responses.

This is the basic story. It is one commonly found in drama and fiction, (and comedy, as referred to by the critic Northrop Frye), in which an obstructing parent or parents try to stop a child from growing up and picking the mate of his or her choice. As we also learn from Frye, in many of these stories, the father or parents (or disguised representations of them) oversees a corrupt society that is in a battle with the livelier and more alive society of youth. Such is the case in Them!, in which the corrupt society of age, embodied in the ants, is depicted, not as already in control, but as trying to take over a society that is partly alive but in danger of becoming corrupt.

Given this imagery, it is clear that the conflict is ultimately over two visions of the future. It is a battle to determine whether the modern age will be inhuman, as represented by the analized and castrating mother and the human society lost in denial and obsessionality, or whether it will be fully human, as embodied in the compassion and wisdom of Dr. Harold Medford, the courage of Pat Medford, and courage and common sense of Agent Graham.

The conflict is framed by a combination of romance and irony, with a hero and heroine who come together for a happy ending after slaying the beast, amid the disturbing deadness and sterility of a human world in danger of losing its soul.

These are some of the elements of the castration fantasy underlying Them!, grouped by what they represent. The next page and the one after will expand on these ideas in an examination of how all of this unfolds chronologically in the movie. Or, if you feel you have enough information on this domain of meaning, you can jump to the conclusion.