Psychodynamic explanation: Gender Developement

• pre-phallic children


  Freud argues that gender development occurs in the phallic stage

  • before the phallic stage, children have no concept of gender identity
  • describes pre-phallic children as bisexual (neither masc of fem)
  • the stage where children experience the Oedipus complex or the electra complex
• How does the Oedipus complex influence gender?

  to resolve the conflict between loving your mother and fearing your father, the boy must relinquish his love for his mother and begin and begin to identify with his father.
• how does the Electra complex influence gender?

  girls come to accept that they will never have a penis and substitute penis envy for the desire to have children, identifying with their mother as a result.
• identification 


  both sexes identify with the same-sex parent as a means of resolving their respective complexes.
• internalisation 


  children taking on board the gender identity of the same-sex parent.
• what evidence did Freud have for the Oedipus complex?

  Little Hans
• Little Hans

  • was scared of being bitten by a horse after seeing one collapse
  • Freud said this fear represented his fear of castration
  • Hans had transferred this fear of his father onto the horse via the unconscious defence mechanism of displacement
• How does it have an inadequate account for female development?

  Freud admitted that women were a mystery to him and his notion of penis envy has been criticised as reflecting the patriarchal Victorian era within which he lived and worked.

  • feminist psychologists have argued that a more powerful emotion than penis envy is womb envy ( also argued both are a cultural concept rather than innate )

  therefore making this an androcentric assumption
• How does Freud's explanation ignore non-nuclear families?

  Relies on the child having two parents of different genders so they can manage both complexes effectively.

  • hence we can assume that being raised in a non-nuclear family would harm a child's gender development
  • psychologists have shown that single-parent families went on to develop normal gender identities
• lacks scientific rigour

  Freud often gets criticised for lacking scientific rigour in his methods.

  • because of their unconscious nature, his theories are untestable
  • contrasting with other explanations that provide variable evidence
  • making his theory pseudoscientific (fake science)
  • his key ideas can not be falsified