Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Eleanor Galenson pointed out the three themes emphasized in Dr. McDevitt's case material. (1) The sense of gender identity begins to emerge only very gradually at the end of the second year of life and becomes more complex in the next several years even before the oedipal period. (2) This gradual development of gender identity is shaped in large part by the mother's unconscious fantasies that are activated by the child's drive-directed sexual and aggressive behavior, which normally begins to emerge at the end of the second year. (3) The child feels anxiety over possible maternal loss, which motivates him to maintain attachment to his mother, even at the cost of compromised drive and ego development. Dr. McDevitt utilized the analytic material from his treatment of a young boy to illustrate these three themes in an unusually clear manner. He offered convincing evidence that gender identity is established to a marked degree during the preoedipal period and that the mother's unconscious fantasies do indeed influence the direction as well as the form of the child's sense of gender identity.

Dr. Ernest Kafka noted that the child's mother had early suppressed his assertive behavior. The boy began to behave in a feminine way, evidently to comply with his mother's wishes and to maintain a playful relationship with her. He feared and mother's abandoning him (as she had done during his toddler period). His fear and anxiety were followed by anger, which was expressed in feminine identification with mother via castrating fantasies and games in which the child played his mother's part. This was an identification with the aggressor that converted passivity into a form of activity; it also expressed the child's wish to appropriate his mother's power and to rival her. Study of adult patients shows that as development proceeds, femininity can be used in numerous other ways—for instance, to assuage guilt when femininity is employed as masochistic provocation