A2 GENDER - PSYCHGODYNAMIC EXPLANATION OF GENDER

Question 1

Describe the 5 psychosexual stages of development

Answer 1

0-1 yrs: Oral stage; pleasure gained from sucking/biting, focus of pleasure is the mouth; fixation can lead to smoking, nail biting, and sarcasm as a personality trait.
1-3 yrs: Anal stage; pleasure gained from withholding and expelling faeces, focus of pleasure is anus. Anally retentive (under indulged) leads to perfectionism and over-neatness, anally expulsive leads to messiness and disorganisation
3-6 yrs: Phallic stage; pleasure focused on genitals , fixation can lead to “phallic personality” (narcissism), gender identity disorder and homosexuality
6yrs-puberty: Latent stage; all previous desires are repressed down into unconscious mind (no fixation here)
Puberty +: Genital stage; focus of pleasure back on genitals (sexual orientation fully conscious now). Can’t really get fixated here but earlier fixations can become more apparent

Question 2

What are pre-phallic stage children, according to Freud?

Answer 2

• No concept of gender identity; Freud described them as “bisexual” in terms of their gender; they’re neither masculine nor feminine at this point.
• This is because gender development doesn’t start until the phallic stage (3-6 yrs)

Question 3

Identify the steps of the Oedipus complex

Answer 3

1) In phallic stage, boys dev incestuous feelings towards their mother
2) Dev a jealous and murderous hatred for father for standing between them and their mother
3) Boy recognises that father is more powerful than he is and so dev.s castration anxiety
4) Boy gives up feelings for mum and identifies w/ father to resolve conflict; identification w/ the aggressor.

Question 4

Identify the steps of the Electra complex

Answer 4

1) Girls dev feelings for mother but then realise that she doesn’t have a penis in phallic stage
2) Girls experience penis envy and develop a double hatred for their mum; partly because they believe she castrated them both at the girl’s birth, and partly because she is a love rival standing bet the girl and her father
3) Girl realises she will never have a penis
4) Penis envy swapped for desire for childbirth

Question 5

Identify the 2 key processes for the resolution of Oedipus/ Electra complexes

Answer 5

Identification: child identifies with the same sex parent and has a desire to be like them

Internalisation: child adopts parent’s attitudes, beliefs and values as their own

Question 6

Evaluate the psychodynamic explanation of gender

Answer 6

(-) Unfalsifiable; no scientific credibility and reduces the scientific status of psychology as a whole
(-) Only evidence is from Little Hans, which is extremely weak and subjective (and also a case study so extremely low generalisability)
(-) Suggests anyone not raised in a nuclear family won’t develop gender identity; not only socially sensitive, but also there’s counter evidence from Green (1978); studied 37 kids raised by gay or transgender parents and found only 1 of them had non-typical gender identity
(-) Blakemore and Hill (2008) found that kids raised by more liberal parents had stronger gender identity than those raised by stricter ones, whereas Freud’s theory says that the greater the castration anxiety caused, the better the identification and internalisation i.e. better gender identity