You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud's early observations of his own children at play have been succeeded by increasingly systematic observations of children in naturalistic settings by psychoanalysts. Herman Roiphe & Eleanor Galenson are well-established as pioneers in carrying out such observations; their observational studies and resulting theoretical innovations have received wide psychoanalytic publication and acclaim for some years. The current work, 'Infantile Origins of Sexual Identity', constitutes a compendium of their earlier published studies, edited and admirably integrated into a single volume.
Roiphe & Galenson describe the subject of their work as follows: 'It is the interrelationship existing between instinctual-phase development, self-object differentiation, and other aspects of ego development that has been of particular interest to us … As our research proceeded, we became increasingly convinced that we had been engaged in tracing the development of the sense of sexual identity from its vague beginnings during the earliest weeks and months to a definite conscious awareness of specific gender and genital erotic feelings and fantasies by the end of the second year. This definitive awareness has turned out to be a critical factor in ongoing psychological development and has therefore been designated as the beginning of a new psychosexual phase' (Preface; pp. ix–x). With detailed case histories, Roiphe & Galenson substantiate their claims for the existence of an early genital phase, in which genital schematization is the outcome of a normal and regularly occurring increase in spontaneous, endogenous genital sensation and arousal, typically commencing between 15 and 19 months of age.
They begin the book with two chapters based on Roiphe's previously published papers (1968 and 1973) in which he set forth his conceptualization of an early genital phase and his related ideas concerning pre-oedipal castration reactions. In these chapters, as in most of the succeeding ones, theoret