PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT AND SEXUALITY: THEORIES OF BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES
The processes of identification during childhood have become the most important element in the formation of personality. Because the central issue in the struggle for identification is sexuality and the loss of the love object, the psychoanalytic theory of personality formation is tied closely to psychosexual development.
Bronfenbrenner’s of the concept of identification showed that identification is a condensation of at least three components. First is behavior, especially observable behavior, as a means by which the child can relate to the person with whom he or she identifies by emulating that person’s behavior. Second is motivation, Freud considered the motive for identification to be defensive, an attempt by the child to deal with the loss of the love object, through incorporation, introjection, and identification. In other words, he or she comes to possess the love object internally. Kohlberg’s and Kagan’s views stress even more the child’s wish to be similar or to possess the person to whom he or she feels deeply attached. Recent developments in psychoanalytic ego-psychology also emphasize the conflict-free aspects of identification, especially the role of object relationships in this respect. The third component of identification is the process involved. As we have mentioned, the process is a shift of cathexis by which the child gives up his or her tie with an infantile love object, either early in life through anaclitic (primary) identification, or later during the Oedipal struggle in response to castration anxiety and guilt for hostile fantasies about the ambivalently regarded parent.
Another major theory of behavioral differences among sexes is the social learning theory, which relies not upon identification but upon the imitation concept. Using imitation as a prototype of social learning, this theory does not single out sex-type behavior and sexuality as central. To social learning theorists, the same principle governs all social learning, regardless of sex. In fact, childhood sexuality is not considered at all, and sex-typed behavior is not examined as related to sexuality but more as a prototype of certain social conduct. In the works of social learning theorists, there are very few references to such behavior among children as masturbation, inquiries about sexual functions or portrayals of various erotic relations between parents (Issacs, Malinowski).
Despite the major controversies among investigators over identification versus imitation, there seem to be many similarities between the two concepts. Often, the opponents seem merely to be describing the same concept in different terms (Bandura and Walters), referring to the child’s development of attitude, behavior, and emotional patterns as similar to those of significant people in his or her life.
Most social learning investigators today emphasize the importance of observation and information processes to social learning based on imitation, as compared with an earlier emphasis on reward and punishment. According to the former view, the child becomes aware of sex differences in personality around four to five years of age and begins to emulate one parent in particular because of the power attributed to that parent (Kohlberg). Recently, however, many social theorists have been able to bridge the gap between the psychoanalytic concept of identification and the social learning concept of imitation as based on the model’s power and status. Whiting, in anthropological studies of six cultures, explained sexual identification not solely as an outcome of the Oedipal struggle but also as a part of the cultural context, in which the child envies the status of the more influential and powerful parent and thus is apt to identify with that parent. For example, in cultures in which the father is frequently absent and the mother sleeps with the child, the predominant identification in boys is feminine, because of the mother’s presence and the control she exercises over him.
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