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Dr. Stoller's very condensed paper is a most timely and valuable challenge to us to reflect on the area of gender identity. He draws conclusions as to the importance of “healthy parental influences on the earliest development of masculinity in baby boys,” basing those conclusions mainly on extreme deviations of gender identity among boys resulting from severely distorting interactions with the parents.
Since his article is meant to initiate thinking about this question among others and to encourage discussion of his germinal propositions, I should like to begin by making a comparison with a few impressions that have been conveyed to us through our research of ten years' duration on the separation-individuation process as we have seen it in normal or average mother-infant pairs and their interaction from the baby's fifth to 36th month.
On the basis of our experience, we are inclined to say that the important contribution that the parents (especially the mother) make during the preverbal period, in terms of coenesthetic empathy, to the general question of the identity formation of their sons (and also of their daughters) may help us to understand the minor deviations—or rather, uncertainties—of the toddler's gender identity at the age level at which he develops what I have termed the second level of intergration of the sense of identity, namely, sexual; or in Dr. Stoller's term, gender identity.
We found that, as far as the children themselves (boys and girls alike) were concerned, their awareness of the anatomical sex difference begins much earlier than was hitherto believed. The inborn and early environmental variables that lead, as early perhaps as at the end of the second and the beginning of the third year, to the second level of identity formation—namely, gender identity—are, however, quite numerous; they are also much more complex than one can deduce from what
appear to be Dr. Stoller's deliberately oversimplified statements.
In our experience, the mother's unco