Psychology of Women: Late Adolescence and Early Adulthood

Dr. Calvin F. Settlage, Chairman, introduced this third in a series of four panels devoted to the Psychology of Women by noting that the presentations would be focused on late adolescence and early adulthood, a period of life when cultural issues are often confronted and when there is also a recapitulation and reworking of prior conflicts and resolutions, as well as conflicts unique to adolescence. Factors of cultural change and new data and theoretical formulations from the earliest years of life would therefore be particularly relevant for this panel to consider.

Settlage noted that Freud's views of female psychology were in accordance with the cultural atmosphere of his time, bound up with ideas of the woman's reproductive and childbearing functions. Changes in the cultural value of these functions, along with new knowledge concerning preoedipal development and early sex-related differences derived from direct observational research, require a redefinition of both the position of women in our society and of their psychology.

An attempt to correlate two theoretical frameworks — the psychosexual and separation-individuation theories — was then presented by Settlage as the basis for his special concept of recapitulation, a concept that is applicable to both sexes. He chose two particular developmental issues for illustration: the first was the disruption of emotional equilibrium that characterizes both Mahler's rapprochement phase and early adolescence, periods when there is a need for parental emotional support as well as a need for independence, combined with a heightened struggle for drive control and modulation resulting normally in the establishment of the age-appropriate