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I am pleased to have the opportunity to read and discuss Dr. Chodorow's work. From the dual perspectives of sociology and psychoanalysis, she discusses the issues connected with influences on men and women pertaining to their gender identity, sexuality, and normative development. Although the paper is an overview of her own, Lacanian, and some recent psychoanalytic challenges to Freud's ideas on these matters, I will confine my remarks to Dr. Chodorow's (1978) theoretical ideas, viewed from a clinical perspective.
Freud's (1931) views concerning women stressed three points. First, he asserted that sexual difference did not matter until the phallic phase. Second, he assumed a preoedipal phallic monism in children of both sexes until they became aware of gender differences through the perception of the girl's penisless state. Third, femininity was understood as a secondary development following the girl's renunciation of phallic negative oedipal aims toward her mother. As a result of this renunciaition, the girl turned to heterosexual interests that Freud termed the positive oedipal configuration. Within this configuration she began a lifelong search for substitute gratifications for her missing penis in the form of babies and marriage. Absence of a penis defined a woman's sexual orientation, participation in the sexual act, desire for parenting, and character, including gender roles.
Like Freud (1931), Dr. Chodorow focuses on the preoedipal relationship with the mother as crucial to gender development in both sexes. She differs from Freud insofar as she does not understand perception of genital differences to be causal and central to the formation of gender identity and personality. Rather, she focuses on the experience of self in relationship with mother, on how the self becomes organized, and on social norms regarding women's gender roles which are perpetuated through identificatory processes.
Although I am in agreement with her view that gender d