Gender Identity and the Self: I. Gender Formation in General and in Masculinity

The question of the origins and vicissitudes of gender identity has been actively debated in the wake of the demise of the classical freudian formulations on sexual differentiation.1 Subsequently, the issues related to the development and expression of gender identity have been much discussed, with the result that our thinking about such matters has undergone significant change and we can at least persuade ourselves that we may be drawing closer to a more comprehensive and meaningful understanding of what is involved in such questions for both sexes.2

My purpose in this article is to try to bring some greater degree of organization and synthesis to our understanding of sexual aspects of personality functioning and to integrate this with a psychoanalytically meaningful concept of the self. In this first article I discuss some general issues pertaining to gender formation and then review developmental findings and differences related to the formation and characteristics of masculine gender identity. In the following article in this journal issue (Meissner, S.J., 2005) I review similar findings with respect to feminine and homosexual gender identity, and then attempt to integrate these understandings of gender identity with a more encompassing view of the self as synonymous with the human person, that is, of the self as an embodied and heterogeneously structured unity. My objective is to propose a more comprehensive theory of the self that makes sense in terms of psychoanalytic understanding and contributes to closing the gap between the analytic view of sexuality and the structure and functioning of the self.