Turning Women Things into Men: Masculinization in Papua New Guinea*

Psychoanalysis, in considering the period of childhood termed the “oedipal transition,” has focused primarily on the rivalry between father and son for the mother. Until recently, little attention has been given to problems in masculine development created by the boy's initial identification with his mother (Greenson, 1966; Lidz & Lidz, 1977, 1984; Stoller, 1966, 1968, 1974). Psychoanalysis has, in accord with the culture in which it developed, generally assumed that the possession of a penis sufficed to assure a boy's masculine development, and that girls and women would suffer from penis envy and often have difficulty in accepting a feminine identity. Freud thought that the girl's development was more complicated than the boy's because she had to shift her initial investment of a love object from a woman to a man—from her mother to her father—whereas the boy could retain his attachment to a female object. The study of male transsexuals, with their core identity virtually irrevocably established as a female, drew attention to the potential importance of the boy's identification with a mother who could not separate herself from her son physically and used him as a phallic extension of herself (Stoller, 1966, 1974).

We have discussed in previous papers (Lidz & Lidz, 1977, 1984) how in Papua New Guinea a boy's development unfolds differently than in Western cultures and drew attention to aspects of male development that psychoanalytic theory has tended to neglect. Although the boy's repression or suppression of the erotic aspects of his