Chapter 12 Identification and Dis-Identification in the Development of Sexual Identity

The development of sexual identity and gender identity is a prolonged and complex process which is at the heart of psychoanalysis. It was sexuality which precipitated Freud into his investigation of the human mind and it is sexuality which is the foundation stone of psychoanalysis. From his Studies in Hysteria (1895), through Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), then A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Man (1910), The Ego and the Id (1923) and then, shortly before his death in London on 23 September 1939, to An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938), Freud emphasised the primacy of sexuality as a wide concept that was present in childhood and was to be distinguished sharply from genitality. This wider concept of sexuality is driven by the instinctual energy which represented the body's somatic demands upon the mind; an energy he called libido. The mind has to deal with the conflictual demands upon it, which are both conscious and unconscious, by mental activity which allows satisfactions whilst at the same time having defences against anxiety which may be overwhelming (A.Freud 1936). The central element of the conflicts to be dealt with is a man's love for his mother together with his jealousy of his father, which stand in opposition to his affection for that very same father. This central element he delineated as the Oedipus complex, realising that the Greek legend of King Oedipus represented that universal struggle that every man feels within himself and has to resolve in his own particular and unique way.

During the course of growing-up, in order to resolve this nuclear complex, the boy has to make an identification with his father. Freud described identification as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. Hence the little boy exhibits an especial interest in his father and takes him as his ideal; he would like to grow like him and be like him. Th