Discussion of Robert J. Stoller's Article, Healthy Parental Influences on the Earliest Development of Masculinity in Baby Boys

Stoller's paper, which highlights the main findings of his research, presented more completely in his book Sex and Gender (1968), is one of a growing number of current works which are extending the boundaries of psychoanalytic thinking by stressing the multiplicity of factors involved in individual development. Of particular interest in this connection is Stoller's emphasis on the importance of parental influence during the pre-oedipal period, when objects are experienced more frequently as part of a two-way linear relationship rather

than in the more familiar triangular oedipal structure which forms the core of our psychoanalytic theory.

In discussing this paper I intend just to mention some of the thoughts which it stimulated. The first is an elaboration of item one of the concluding statements concerning healthy parental factors which contribute to the development of masculinity in male children. As part of his statement that it is essential for the parents to have an unequivocal conviction that the infant is a biologically normal male, Stoller adds that this conviction is then confirmed by the infant's experience of his own body through sight, touch, and inner sensations. Such confirmation does not automatically progress favorably, however. The extent to which the child is permitted to have the necessary experiences depends on the parent's attitudes toward the child's body. This in turn involves the parents' unconscious and conscious feelings about their own bodies. It is axiomatic to say that parents need to be secure about their own gender identity and relatively satisfied with it if they are to help the child to establish his. When this is not the case a mother, for example, may prevent her child from developing a clear and accurate body image by setting up prohibitions against the processes by which he comes to know his body, i.e., through seeing and touching his genitals and experiencing and recognizing the sensations thus provoked. She may also interfere