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Perhaps the most profound insights afforded by psychoanalysis have been those concerning the influences of the past upon the present and future development of the individual. The fundamental import of early childhood on adult personality formation is a basic and consistent finding of the clinical practitioner.
However, much questioning of the genetic aspects of psychoanalytic theory has been voiced. There seem to be at least two general groups from whom such dissension has been most avid.
The first group is made up of numerous academic, researchoriented scholars, who have attempted many studies which purport to cast serious doubt upon the basic tenets of the influence of childhood experience, as defined within Freud's system. In the views of a number of these workers, the objection is not to the relative import of childhood; rather, it is directed towards those dimensions of childhood which Freud chose to regard as basic. This is especially true for researchers who brandish the spears of anti-instinctualism, cultural relativism, drive relativism, etc. Thus, studies such as Sewell's 5 attempt to correlate specific infant-rearing practices with specific later personality characteristics; the results show that such correlations do not hold, and the theorist is thereby led to believe that he has refuted Freud's claims. 4
We suggest, however, that the basis for this “negative evidence” is a misunderstanding of the Freudian system. A one-to-one correspondence between X infant-rearing-practice and Y adult-characteristic was never part of the psychoanalytic concept. Indeed, the notion of “psychosexual stages” is a built-in safeguard against such naive