A Note on the Relation Between Physical and Psychical Differences in Boys and Girls

I propose first to investigate some of the ground preceding the awareness of physical differences, the time at which such awareness sets in, and the possible variety of reactions now included under the name of penis-envy. In the second place I wish to consider the question of psychical versus physical differences, from the point of view of children's difficulties in developing abstract thought, and thirdly to take up some specific interactions of physical and psychical differences.

There are a few familiar functional differences between boy and girl babies—such as that girls begin to walk and talk earlier than boys, are less difficult to rear, and so on, but I do not know how these are related to the differences in their sexual organs. Neither do I know that there is any general agreement about the age at which sex differences in this sense first arouse the child's interest—that is, I do not know of any evidence which would with any exactitude relate the baby's distinction between the father and the mother, leading on to the distinction between men and women, and between boys and girls, to the distinction between their sexual organs.1 The baby's relation to the mother's feeding breast cannot lead quite directly to classification of men and women as those who have no breasts and