Sigmund Freud's works on psychoanalysis theorizes that women once had penises, and are themselves castrated, resulting in the formation of female genitalia, and due to this "penis envy", seek to castrate men of their penises to make them as lacking as women. The questions children have regarding the genitals are not explained by rational adults, so the child is left to fill in the blanks.

The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. According to Kristeva, abjection is the failure to distinguish what constitutes as "self", and what is "other". This opening session traces the history of monstrous women, through the gorgons and sirens of Greek mythology to Early Modern witch hunts and 21st-century media narratives, before turning to two enduring archetypes: the witch and the mother. Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine is one of the most influential books to emerge in the early 90s. Overall, Creed's work is of interest to feminist theory and psychoanalysis and how these theories can be applied to horror films.

The bottom line is, Creed has traced these archetypes of the Monstrous Feminine to childhood experience.

She includes a definition of "Matrix" in the book's introduction, which she describes as a, " womb; place in which thing is developed", which closely relates to her discussion of the monstrous feminine. Moving from mothers to maidens, this session delves into the terrifying bodily transformation of adolescence through two contrasting figures: the mermaid and the werewolf. So one of the faces of the Monstrous Feminine, therefore, is the "femme castratrice", or female castrator. With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, The Exorcist and Psycho, Creed analyses the seven `faces’ of the monstrous-feminine: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. Creed challenges this masculine viewpoint by arguing that when the feminine is fabricated as monstrous, it is commonly achieved through association with [female] reproductive bodily functions, or through matriarchal traits and tasks.

In Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema, Barbara Creed examines the uncanny through Charles Darwin's works regarding sexual selection and origins. Kristeva's theory therefore can be applied to the monstrous feminine, particularly the themes of the mother-child relationship and the mother's womb, which both relate to the ‘ archaic mother’. Creed places emphasis on this idea of the monstrous-womb, as the maternal body has been considered a source of anxiety to the male gaze.

Creed's ideology of the woman's reproductive system is similarly analyzed within the works of Kristeva. In her profoundly original analysis of horror films, Creed upended a concept emanating from psychoanalysis, traditionally perceived as scaffolding supporting patriarchy, to demonstrate how women could be seen as the agents of abjection rather than as its passive victims.Barbara Creed has published a multitude of material on gender and horror, including: The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism.