Psychodynamic explanation of gender development

• 5 stages to gender development

  • Oral
  • Anal
  • Phallic
  • Latency
  • Genital
• How does a person progress in gender development?

  • Each stage is marked by a different conflict that must be resolved in order to progress successfully to the next stage.
  • An unresolved conflict leads to fixation.
  • This is where the child is ‘stuck’ and carries certain behaviours associated with that stage through to adult life.
• Oral stage

  0-1 years

  • The mouth is the focus of pleasure.
  • The mothers breast is an object of desire
  • Consequences: Oral fixation, e.g smoking, nail biting, sarcastic, critical
• Anal stage

  1-3 years

  • The anus is the focus of pleasure.
  • Child gains pleasure from withholding and excreting faeces.

  Consequences

  • Anal retentive: obsessive, perfectionist.
  • Anal expulsive: thoughtless, messey
• Phallic stage

  3-5 years

  • Focus of pleasure is the genital areas.
  • Child experiences the oedipus or electra complex.

  Consequences

  • Phallic personality: narcissistic, reckless, homosexual
• Latency stage

  • Earlier conflicts are repressed.
• Genital stage

  Around puberty

  • Puberty brings to onset of sexual drives

  Consequences

  • Difficulty forming heterosexual relationships
• Pre-phallic children

  • Freud argued the phallic stage is when gender development occurs.
  • Prior to the phallic stage, children do not have any concept of gender identity.
  • In the phallic stage, the focus of pleasure switches to the genital this where children experience to oedipus and electra complex.
• Oedipus complex

  • Boys develop feelings towards their mother and a murderous hatred towards their father.
  • Fearing castration, they repress feelings for their mother, identify with father and adopt his gender and moral identity.
• Electra complex

  • Girls experience penis envy, seeing themselves as their mothers as competition for their father’s love.

  Girls develop double resentment

  • Mother is a love rival standing in the way of the father
  • Mother is blamed by the daughter for having no penis.
• How do girls resolve the Electra complex?

  • Over time, girls give up this desire for their father and replace it with a desire for a baby.
  • identifying with the mother in the process.
• Identification

  • Children identify with the same-sex parent as a way of resolving their respective complexes.
  • Boys adopt the attitudes and values of their father and girls adopt those of their mother.
• Internalisation

  • Children take on board the gender identity of the same-sex parent.
  • This is how a child acquires their gender identity.
• Identification


  A desire to be associated with a particular person or group often because they possess desirable characteristics.
• Internalisation

  An individuals adopts the attitudes and/or behaviour of another.
• Little hans

  • 5 year old boy
  • fear of being bitten by a horse
  • His fear appeared to have stemmed from an incident where he had seen a horse collapse and die in the street.
  • Freud said that Hans fear of horses, represented his fear of castration by his father due to his love for his mother.
  • Freud said that Hans had transferred his fear of his father onto horses via the unconscious defence mechanism of displacement.
• Research support for the Oedipus complex

  • Based on Freud’s explanation of gender development, for boys ‘normal development’ depends on being raised by at least one male parent.
  • Rekers and Morey, rated the gender identity of 49 boys aged 3-11 based on interviews with their families and the children themselves.
  • Results found of those judged to be ‘gender disturbed’, 75% had neither their biological father nor substitute father living with them.
  • This suggests that being raised with no father may have a negative impact upon gender identity.
• Counterargument to research support for Oedipus complex

  • The relationship between absent fathers and problems of gender identity are not supported.
  • Bos and Sandfort, compared data from 63 children where both parents were lesbians and 68 children from traditional families.
  • Results found children raised by lesbian parents felt less pressure to conform to gender stereotypes and were less likely to assume their gender was superior.
• Lack of female development in the explanation

  • Freud wrote extensively about the Oedipus complex, much of the concept of the Electra complex was conducted by Carl Jung.
  • The notion of penis envy was criticised as reflecting the Victorian era where men held so much power.
  • Horney a female psychoanalyst, argued penis envy was a result of culture rather than biological factors.
  • This challenges the idea that women’s gender development is founded on a desire to want to be like a man (androcentric bias)
• How is the explanation Pseudoscientific?

  • Lacks scientific credibility
  • Freud has been criticised for the lack of rigour in his methods e.g using subjective case studies. Many of his concepts like penis envy are untestable.
  • This contrasts sharply with other explanations of gender that are based on objective, verifiable evidence derived from controlled lab studies.
  • Popper argued this makes Freud’s theory pseudoscientific as his ideas cannot be falsified.
  • This decreases the validity of Freud’ theory as it is not based on scientific evidence.
• Contrasting explanations

  • Freud’s theory and Kohlberg’s explanation has disagreement.
  • Freud argued that children do not begin to show gender-appropriate behaviour until after the age of 6, when Oedipus and Electra complex is resolved. To some extent this agrees with Kohlberg’s theory which suggests that children only begin to act in a gender-appropriate way after they have achieved gender constancy.
  • However, Kohlberg suggests that the child’s concept of gender develops gradually, a sequence of stages as a child’s cognitive capacity increases. Freud sees no gradual build up.