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This concise, clearly written book represents the distillate of the research findings from systematic analytically informed, cross-sectional and longitudinal observations of the sexual and gender development of the infant and young child. From these, the authors develop integrated hypotheses, some of which have been published elsewhere as individual papers, regarding early gender development.
Starting with Freud's acknowledgment of the incompleteness in our information about the prefigurements of genital sexuality, Roiphe and Galenson have since 1966 methodically gathered evidence enriching our understanding particularly of the second half of the second year of life and its relation to the development of sexual concepts, sexual activity, and sense of gender as part of the development of the sense of self.
They take that human dialectic which when studied as physical predominances we call male and female, when studied as behavioral proclivities we call masculine and feminine, but which from early on is subjectively experienced as an absoluteness of he-ness or she-ness and tease out its relation to the basic patterning in separation of self from object.
Using Margaret Mahler's extensions of Freud's basic phase-specific sequential developmental model, Roiphe and Galenson's laboratory, like Mahler's, is the natural nursery, their subjects infants and young children and their caretakers, and their instrument analytic eyes and interviewing with analytic knowledge. In this setting, Roiphe and Galenson made definitive observations which lead them to hypothesize that much earlier than even the boldest of Freud's assertions about the sexual nature of childhood, there is intense, specific, and gender-bimodally differentiated behavior which is an important achievement of the separation-individuation progression.
They assert that this behavior, which they label the early genital phase, arises with increasing specificity in body awareness and concomitant