Psychodynamic explanation for Gender Flashcards
When does Gender identity occur in the psychodynamic explanation?
-occurs in the phallic stage (3-6)
what is the oedipus complex?
-a boy has incestuous feelings for his mother and a have a jealous hatred for their father who is a love rival
-However, the child fears his father and has castration anxiety because he knows the father is more powerful
-To resolve the conflict, the child surrenders his love for his mother and identifies with his father.
What is the Electra Complex ?
-girls experience penis envy and see their mother as a love rival for her father
-Girls develop double resentment towards mother:
1)mother is love rival
2) girl blames her mother for having no penis
-girls then substitute their penis envy for wanting children of their own and end up identifying with their mothers
What is identification?
-Children identify with same-sex parent as a means or resolving the conflict and as a result boys adopt attitudes and values of their father and daughters with their mothers
What is internalisation?
-Children taking the gender-identity of the same-sex parent
-Therefore both boys and girls receive second-hand gender identity from their parents in the phallic stage
Strengths of the Psychodynamic explanation for gender?
-Support for Oedipus complex: Freud’s explanation emphasises that for “Normal” development boys must be raised by at least one male parent. George Rekers and Shasta Morey (1990) rated gender identity of 49 boys between 3-11 based on interviews with families and the child. Of those considered to be “ gender disturbed”, 75% had neither a biological dad or step-dad. This suggests that there is support for freud’s theory.
-However, Henry Bos & Theo Sandfort ( 2010) compared data from 63 children with lesbian parents and 68 from “traditional families” and found no differences in gender identity and instead felt less pressure to conform to gender stereotypes and assume their own gender is superior.
Limitations of the psychodynamic approach for gender
-Karen Horney (1942) argues that a more powerful emotion than penis envy is men’s “womb envy”, a reaction to how women can nurture and sustain life. Horney argued that womb envy and penis envy were based on cultural factors, not biological. This challenges the idea that women’s development is based on the desire to be like a man -androcentric bias.
-Pseudoscientfic: lacks scientific credibility. Alot of freud’s concepts are untestable because they are largely unconscious. Karl Popper (1959) states that Freud’s theories are pseudoscience as they cannot be falsified. Questions the validity of freud’s theory was they are not scientific.
