The Psychobiology of Late Childhood: Significance for Psychoanalytic Developmental Theory and Clinical Practice

Many psychoanalysts, even today, view biological influences on human experience and activity in terms of Freud's instinct theory. Freud characterized instincts as forces representing somatic demands on mental life and creating tensions that are experienced as needs of the id (Freud, 1940).

During the latter half of the twentieth century, however, psychoanalytic sophistication about many areas of psychobiology—including the psychobiology of attachment, nonverbal representation, affect regulation, cerebral lateralization, memory, evolutionary psychology and genetics—has increased (Kandel, 1999). It has become apparent that Freud's instinct theory cannot provide an adequate theoretical framework to integrate the psychobiological observations that occurred after his death.

In this article we call attention to an aspect of psychobiology under-emphasized by psychoanalytic theory to date—the development and significance of gender differentiated childhood play. Research findings on this dimension of human development are important for psychoanalytic theory. Consideration of the significance of childhood play, both necessitates a more complex model of psychological functioning than that posed by instinct theory and complements that of other areas mentioned above (attachment, memory, etc.) and of psychoanalytic developmental theory as traditionally conceptualized.

Childhood play marks the beginning of developmental lines that differ between the sexes. The two pathways are dramatically evident in late