Now we finally get to Gilligan.

As a student of Kohlberg's, Gilligan was taken by the stage theory approach to understanding moral reasoning. But she disagreed with her mentor's assessment of the content of the moral system within which people developed. If you look at the table of Kohlberg's stages, you can see the question being answered in the third column is one of justice - the fourth stage gives this away with talk about duty and guilt. "What are the rules of the game?" seems to be the issue at hand. From her careful interviews with women making momentous decisions in their lives, Gilligan concluded that these women were thinking more about the caring thing to do rather than the thing the rules allowed. So she thought Kohlberg was all wet, at least with regard to women's development in moral thinking. What set her off in thinking this was the fact that in some of Kohlberg's investigations, women turned out to score lower - less developed - than did men. Were women really moral midgets? Gilligan did not think so. In taking this stand, she was going against the current of a great deal of psychological opinion. Our friend Freud thought women's moral sense was stunted because they stayed attached to their mothers. Another great developmental theorist, Erik Erickson, thought the tasks of development were separation from mother and the family. If women did not succeed in this scale, then they were obviously deficient. Gilligan's reply was to assert that women were not inferior in their personal or moral development, but that they were different. They developed in a way that focused on connections among people (rather than separation) and with an ethic of care for those people (rather than an ethic of justice). Gilligan lays out in this groundbreaking book this alternative theory.
Gilligan's Stages of the Ethic of Care Approximate Age Range not listed not listed maybe never Stage Preconventional Conventional Goal Goal is individual survival Self sacrifice is goodness

Transition is from selfishness -- to -- responsibility to others Transition is from goodness -- to -- truth that she is a person too Postconventional Principle of nonviolence: do not hurt others or self

Thus Gilligan produces her own stage theory of moral development for women. Like Kohlberg's, it has three major divisions: preconventional, conventional, and post conventional. But for Gilligan, the transitions between the stages are fueled by changes in the sense of self rather than in changes in cognitive capability. Remember that Kohlberg's approach is based on Piaget's cognitive developmental model. Gilligan's is based instead on a modified version of Freud's approach to ego

development. Thus Gilligan is combining Freud (or at least a Freudian theme) with Kohlberg & Piaget. In reading Gilligan and understanding her place in psychology, you may yourself come face to face with an intellectual difficulty. The momentous life decision that Gilligan looks at in her central study was that of whether or not to get an abortion. It seems clear from Gilligan's comments in her text that she is a supporter of a women's right to choose. Those of you who agree with her will have less trouble seeing the logic of her system. Those of you who disagree will have to get past the disagreement on this important ethical issue to see if there is anything interesting psychologically in what Gilligan has to say. Here is my pitch for the psychologically interesting. Gilligan has shown that Kohlberg's (and Freud's, and Erickson's) systems are based on a male-centered view. Kohlberg built his theory based on interviews with males only. She has certainly shown us the inadequacy of that. In addition, she has broken the idea that there is only one dimension of moral reasoning. If there can be two, why not three? Why not several? Finally, she has connected moral decision making back into concerns about both the self and the social environment in which the self lives. One more item before we get to the book itself. Most psychologists now disagree with the empirical claim that men and women differ in their moral reasoning in the way Gilligan outlines. Several studies have now found both men and women using both justice and care dimensions in their moral reasoning. There have also been criticisms of the rigor of her interview method of research. More careful researchers are now cleaning up behind the trail she blazed.
Gilligan's argument in the text

The first chapter is the most dense and will require the closest attention. But you will find choice tidbits here about her opinion of Freud and Erickson. And you will find what she uses of Freud's approach and what she discards. Her basic claim is that women have no place in these earlier theories and that this is why women's development has been considered an aberration from the normal. Make sure you follow the logic of her critique of the "fear of success" issue. This is a classic critique of psychological theory: women are different, but they are not thereby inferior. Toward the end of the chapter she introduces us to a favorite form of argument: extensive quotes from interviews with interspersed comment. As you read these quotes try to decide if you see the same thing in them that Gilligan sees. Images of relationship introduces us to a central claim that Gilligan wants to make: men and women view relationship differently. Current research agrees with Gilligan

that there is a difference, but the difference is more complex than Gilligan suggests (or can suggest) in this chapter. The TAT study is a classical social science style experiment. Different conditions produce a difference in the measured variable. However take a close look at the percentage differences she reports. How large are they? In concepts of self and morality Gilligan introduces the abortion study and lays out the sequence of development you saw in the table above. You have two basic issues to grapple with here. First, make sure you understand how Gilligan's system is both similar to and different from Kohlberg's. How does the meaning of conventional change from one system to the other? Second, make sure you understand how the woman's self concept is involved in each of the stages and in the transition from each stage to the next.

Freud's Psychosexual Stage Theory

Explanations > Learning Theory > Freud's Psychosexual Stage Theory The stages | Fixation | So what

Sigmund Freud developed a theory of how our sexuality starts from a very young ages and develops through various fixations. If these stages are not psychologically completed and released, we can be trapped by them and they may lead to various defense mechanisms to avoid the anxiety produced from the conflict in and leaving of the stage.

The stages

Age

Name

Pleasure source Mouth: sucking, biting, swallowing Anus: defecating or retaining faeces

Conflict Weaning away from mother's breast

0-2

Oral

2-4

Anal

Toilet training

4-5

Phallic

Genitals

Oedipus (boys), Electra (girls)

6Latency puberty

Sexual urges sublimated into sports and hobbies. Same-sex friends also help avoid sexual feelings. Physical sexual changes reawaken repressed needs. Social rules

puberty Genital onward

Direct sexual feelings towards others lead to sexual gratification.

Fixation
Strong conflict can fixate people at early stages.
Oral fixation

Oral fixation has two possible outcomes.

The Oral receptive personality is preoccupied with eating/drinking and reduces tension through oral activity such as eating, drinking, smoking, biting nails. They are generally passive, needy and sensitive to rejection. They will easily 'swallow' other people's ideas. The Oral aggressive personality is hostile and verbally abusive to others, using mouth-based aggression.

Anal fixation

Anal fixation, which may be caused by too much punishment during toilet training, has two possible outcomes.

The Anal retentive personality is stingy, with a compulsive seeking of order and tidiness. The person is generally stubborn and perfectionist. The Anal expulsive personality is an opposite of the Anal retentive personality, and has a lack of self control, being generally messy and careless.

Phallic fixation

At the age of 5 or 6, near the end of the phallic stage, boys experience the Oedipus Complex whilst girls experience the Electra conflict, which is a process through which they learn to identify with the same gender parent by acting as much like that parent as possible.

Boys suffer a castration anxiety, where the son believes his father knows about his desire for his mother and hence fears his father will castrate him. He thus represses his desire and defensively identifies with his father. Girls suffer a penis envy, where the daughter is initially attached to her mother, but then a shift of attachment occurs when she realizes she lacks a penis. She desires her father whom she sees as a means to obtain a penis substitute (a child). She then represses her desire for her father and incorporates the values of her mother and accepts her inherent 'inferiority' in society. This is Freud, remember. He later also recanted, noting that perhaps he had placed too much emphasis on sexual connotations.

So what?
Freud's theories are largely criticized now as lacking in substantial corroborative data. He was, however, using a model to describe observed behavior. His ideas may thus still be used as metaphors for actual developmental issues. The concept of psychosexual development, as envisioned by Sigmund Freud[1] at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, is a central element in his sexual drive theory, which posits that, from birth, humans have instinctual sexual appetites (libido), which unfold in a series of stages. Each stage is characterized by the erogenous zone that is the source of the libidinal drive during that stage. These stages are, in order: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Freud believed that if, during any stage, the child experienced anxiety in relation to that drive, that themes related to this stage would persist into adulthood as neurosis.[1]

Contents
[hide]

1 Background 2 Freud's model of psychosexual development o 2.1 Oral phase o 2.2 Anal phase o 2.3 Phallic phase o 2.4 Latency phase o 2.5 Genital phases 3 Criticism of Freud's theory of psychosexual development o 3.1 Scientific critique o 3.2 Feminist critique 4 See also 5 References

[edit] Background
Freud observed that, at somewhat predictable points during early development, children's behavior often orients around certain body parts (the mouth during breast-feeding, the anus during Toilet-training, and later the genitals). Believing, due to his previous work with hysterical patients, that adult neurosis often has root in childhood sexuality, Freud proposed that these behaviors were childhood expressions of sexual fantasy and desire. He suggested that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that infants can derive sexual pleasure from any part of the body,[2] and that it is only through socialization that libidinal drives are focused into adult heterosexuality. Due to the fairly predictable time-line that the childhood behaviors in question follow, Freud developed a model for what he considered to be the normal sexual development of the child, which he called "libido development". According to this theory, each child passes through five psychosexual stages. During each stage, the libido has a different erogenous zone as the source of its drives. The libido refers to various kinds of sensual pleasures and gratifications. However, in the pursuit of satisfying these sexual urges, the child may experience failure or reprimands from its parents or society and may thus come to associate anxiety with this erogenous zone. To avoid this anxiety, the child becomes preoccupied with themes related to this zone, a phenomenon Freud termed fixation. Freud believed the fixation persists into adulthood and underlies the personality structure and psychopathology, including neurosis, hysteria and personality disorders. Freud called this psychosexual infantilism.

[edit] Freud's model of psychosexual development

Stage Age Range Erogenous zone(s) Consequences of Fixation

Oral

Birth-1 year Mouth

Orally aggressive: Signs include chewing gum or ends of pens. Orally Passive: Signs include smoking/eating/kissing/fellatio/cunnilingus[3] Fixation at this stage may result in passivity, gullibility, immaturity and manipulative personality Anal retentive: Obsession with organization or excessive neatness Anal expulsive: Reckless, careless, defiant, disorganized, Coprophiliac Oedipus complex (in boys only according to Freud)

Anal

13 years

Bowel and bladder elimination

Phallic 36 years

Genitals

Electra complex (in girls only, later developed by Carl Jung)

Latency 6-puberty years Pubertyend of life Dormant sexual feelings Sexual interests mature (People do not tend to fixate at this stage, but if they do, they tend to be extremely sexually unfulfilled.) Frigidity, impotence, unsatisfactory relationships

Genital

[edit] Oral phase

The first stage of psychosexual development is the oral stage, which lasts from the beginning of ones life up to 2 years. During this stage, the focus of gratification is on the mouth and pleasure is the result of nursing, but also of exploration of the surroundings (as infants tend to put new objects in their mouths). In this stage the Id is dominant since neither the ego nor the super ego is yet fully formed. Thus the baby does not have a sense of self and all actions are based on the pleasure principle. The ego, however, is under formation during this first stage. There are two factors that contribute to the formation of the ego. Firstly, body image is developed, which implies that the infant recognizes that the body is distinct from the outer world. For instance, one starts understanding that one feels pain only when force is applied on ones own body. By the identification of the body boundaries, one starts developing the sense of ego. Ego formation is attributed to a second factor: experiences that involve delay of gratification and that lead to the understanding that specific behaviors can satisfy some needs. The infant gradually realises that gratification is not immediate, and that he or she must produce certain behaviors to initiate actions that lead to gratification. An example of such behavior is crying, which seems to be purposeless during the first 2 months of the babys life, but later seems to be used productively and is connected to certain needs.[4] The key experience in this stage is weaning, during which the child loses much of the intimate contact with the mother and leads to the first feeling of loss ever experienced by the baby.

Weaning also adds to the babys awareness of self, since he or she learns that not everything is under his or her control, but also that gratification is not always immediate. In this stage, the gratification of needs lead to the formation of independence (since the baby forms a clear idea about the limits of the self and has formed his or her ego), and trust (since the baby learned that specific behaviors lead to gratification). On the other hand, a fixation can lead to passivity, gullibility, immaturity and unrealistic optimism, and also to the formation of a generally manipulative personality due to improper formation of the ego. This can be the result of either too much or too little gratification. In the case of too much gratification, the child does not learn that not everything is under his or her control and that gratification is not always immediate (which are the results of weaning), forming an immature personality. On the other hand, the childs needs may be insufficiently met, and thus the child becomes passive since he or she has learned that whether producing behavior or not, no gratification comes. In some societies it is common for a child to be nursed by his or her mother for several years, whereas in others the stage is much shorter. Sucking and eating, however, compose the earliest memories for infants in every society. This stage holds special importance because some tribal societies commonly found in the Southwest Pacific and Africa, consider the stomach to be the seat of emotions.
[edit] Anal phase

In the anal stage of the psychosexual development the focus of drive energy (erogenous zone) moves from the upper digestive tract to the lower end and the anus. This stage lasts from about the 15th month to the third year of age. In this stage, the formation of ego continues. According to the theory, the major experience during this stage is toilet training. This occurs around the age of two (there may be fluctuations among different societies as to the age in which toilet training occurs), and results to conflict between the id, which asks for immediate gratification of its drives that involves elimination and activities related to it (such as handling feces) and the demands of their parents. The resolution of this conflict can be gradual and nontraumatic, or intense and stormy, depending on how the parents handle the situation. The ideal resolution comes if the child tries to adjust and the parents are moderate, so that the child learns the importance of cleanliness and order gradually, which leads to a self-controlled adult. If the parents put too much emphasis on toilet training while the child decides to accommodate, this may lead to the development of compulsive personality, extensively concerned about order and neatness. On the other hand, if the child decides to heed the demands of the id and the parents give in, the child may develop a messy and self-indulgent personality. If the parents react, the child must comply, but it develops a weakened sense of self, since the parents were the ones who controlled the situation, not the ego.
[edit] Phallic phase

The phallic stage extends from about three to five years of age, and the erogenous zone associated with it as the area of the genitals. Even though the gratification is focused on the genitals, this is not in the form of adult sexuality, since the children are physically immature. However, stimulation of genitals is welcomed as pleasurable and boys, like adult males, may have erections during their sleep. Children become increasingly aware of their body and are

curious about the bodies of other children, but also their parents. Freud observed that children of this age can very often be observed taking off their clothes and playing doctor with each other, or asking their mothers whether she has a penis. These observations persuaded Freud that the gratification is focused on and around the genitals during this period. The major conflict of this stage is called Oedipal conflict, the name deriving from Oedipus, who killed his father and unintentionally slept with his mother. Freud used the term Oedipal for both sexes, but other analysts proposed the female variant to be referred to as "Electra complex". In the beginning, for both sexes the primary care giver (at least in most societies) and main source of gratification is the mother. As the child develops, however, it starts forming a sexual identity and the dynamics for boys and girls alter. For both sexes, the parents become the focus of drive energy. For the boy, the mother becomes more desired, while the father is the focus of jealousy and rivalry, since he is the one who sleeps with the mother, but still he is one of the main caregivers. The id wants to unite with the mother and kill the father (like Oedipus did), but the ego, based on the reality principle, knows that the father is stronger. The child also feels affectionate towards the father, one of the caregivers, and his feelings are ambivalent. The fear that the father will object to the boys feelings is expressed by the id as fear that the father will castrate him. The castration fear is not rational, and occurs in a subconscious irrational level. Freud argued that young girls followed more or less the same psychosexual development as boys. Whereas the boy would develop a castration anxiety, the girl would go on to develop penis envy, envy felt by females toward the males because the males possess a penis. The envy is rooted in the fact that without a penis, the female cannot sexually possess the mother as driven to by the Id. As a result of this realization, she is driven to desire sexual union with the father. After this stage, the woman has an extra stage in her development when the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity and its importance to the vagina. The young girl must also at some point give up her first object-choice, the mother, in order to take the father as her new proper object-choice. Her eventual move into heterosexual femininity, which culminates in giving birth, grows out of her earlier infantile desires, with her own child taking place of the penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence. Generally, Freud considered the Oedipal conflict experienced by girls more intense than that experienced by boys, potentially resulting in a more submissive and less confident personality. In both cases the conflict between the id drives and the ego is resolved through two basic defence mechanisms of the ego. One of them is repression, which involves the blocking of memories, impulses and ideas from the conscious mind, but does not lead to resolution of the conflict. The second is identification, which involves incorporation of characteristics of the same-sex parent into the childs own ego. The boy by adopting this mechanism seeks for the reduction of castration fears, since his similarity with the father is thought to protect the boy from him. The identification of girls with the mother is easier, since the girl realizes that neither she, nor her mother have a penis. Freud's theory regarding the psychosexual dynamic present in female children in this point of their psychosexual development is termed, though not by Freud himself, the Electra complex. Freud's theory of feminine sexuality, particularly penis envy, has been sharply criticized in both gender theory and feminist theory.

If the conflict is not resolved, a fixation in this stage may lead to adult women striving for superiority over men, if she had overwhelming feelings of devastation due to lack of penis, being seductive and flirtatious, or very submissive and with low self-esteem. On the other hand, men can exhibit excessive ambition and vanity. Overall, the Oedipal conflict is very important for the super-ego development, since by identifying with one of the parents, morality becomes internalized, and compliance with rules is not any more the result of punishment fear. A poor identification with the same sex parent may lead to recklessness or even immorality.
[edit] Latency phase

The latency stage is typified by a solidifying of the habits that the child developed in the earlier stages. Whether the Oedipal conflict is successfully resolved or not, the drives of the Id are not accessible to the Ego during this stage of development, since they have been repressed during the phallic stage. Hence the drives are seen as dormant and hidden (latent), and the gratification the child receives is not as immediate as it was during the three previous stages. Now pleasure is mostly related to secondary process thinking. Drive energy is redirected to new activities, mainly related to schooling, hobbies and friends. Problems however might occur during this stage, and this is attributed to inadequate repression of the Oedipal conflict, or to the inability of the Ego to redirect the drive energy to activities accepted by the social environment.
[edit] Genital phases

The fifth and last stage of psycho-sexual development, the genital stage, lasts from puberty onward (i.e. starting at 12 years of age). It is said to continue until development stops,[citation needed] which is supposedly at 18 years of age[citation needed] when adulthood starts. This stage represents a major portion of life and the basic task for the individual is detachment from parents. It is also the time when the individual tries to come to terms with unresolved residues of early childhood. In this stage, the focus is again on the genitals, like in the phallic stage, but this time the energy is expressed in terms of adult sexuality. Another crucial difference between these two stages is that, while phallic gratification is linked with satisfaction of primary drives, the ego in the genital stage is well-developed. It uses secondary, process thinking, which allows for symbolic gratification. This symbolic gratification may include the formation of love relationships, development of families, or acceptance of responsibilities associated with adulthood.

[edit] Criticism of Freud's theory of psychosexual development

Wikinews has related news: Dr. Joseph Merlino on sexuality, insanity, Freud, fetishes and apathy [edit] Scientific critique This article contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed.

A common scientific criticism regarding Freudian theory of human psychosexual development is that Freud was personally overly fixated on human sexuality himself, which may have served to subjectively bias his work in favor of defining human development solely upon normative human sexual development. It is possible that said fixation regarding human sexuality could have negatively influenced Freud in manners that may have led to him ignoring other significant variables that contribute to human's psychosexual development, such as hormonal and pheromonal activity. The stage that has caused the most controversy is the phallic stage. Freud supported his assertions on the Oedipal complex with a series of clinical observations. In 1909, he published a case study of a boy called "little Hans," who had a phobia of horses. Freud connected Hans fear for horses to his fear for his father. Hans' fear and anxiety were thought to be the result of various factors, including the birth of his sister, the desire of his id to replace his father as his mother's companion and conflicts over masturbation. Hans admitted his want to have children with his mother, which was considered an adequate proof for patients sexual attraction for the opposite-sex parent. Little Hans, however, was unable to connect the fear for the horses with his father, and, as Freud admitted, "Hans had to be told many things that he could not say himself" and that "he had to be presented with thoughts which he had so far shown no signs of possessing," so that one may suggest that Freud manipulated the patient's mind. Scientifically minded researchers have criticized Freud's statement, in his 1914 paper, "On Narcissism," that "It is impossible to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego can exist in the individual from the very start". Ample evidence documents a functioning ego in infants, even in neonates, contrary to Freud's speculation. The neonate shows surprising ability to track moving targets, to differentiate a familiar from an unfamiliar stimulus, and to react meaningfully with the care giver. Further, children show signs of superego behavior earlier than Freud's suggestion that it does not arise until after the Oedipal complex has been resolved. Cultural considerations have largely influenced the assumptions within the psychodynamic perspective. Freud stated that the Oedipal Complex is universal and essential for development. Bronisaw Malinowski, an anthropologist who studied the behavior of villagers in the Trobriand Islands, challenged common western views such as Freud's Oedipus complex and their claim to universality. In the Trobriand society the boys are disciplined by their mothers' brothers instead of their biological fathers (avuncular society). As he recounts in his work, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), Malinowski found that boys had dreams in which the target of fears was not their father, but their uncle. Based on this observation, Malinowski argued that power, not sexual jealousy, is the base for the oedipal tension. As a result, Segall et al. hypothesized that Freud's theory was based on a misinterpretation of a confounding variable[5]. A survey of scientific research showed that while personality traits corresponding to Freud's oral, anal, phallic, and genital phases can be observed, they cannot be observed as stages in the development of children, nor can it be confirmed that such traits in adults result from childhood experiences[6].
[edit] Feminist critique

Despite their popularity among psychoanalytical psychologists, Freud's psychosexual theories are commonly criticized as being sexist. Freud's theories were often informed by his own

introspection and self-analysis, and thus were infused with an inherently male perspective, resulting in a great deal of criticism from feminists as well as from gender theory practitioners. He had difficulty incorporating female desire into his theories and attempted to provide a theoretical explanation for feminine psychosexual development only rather late in his career.[7] Freud personally confessed a lack of understanding of female sexuality and did not hold out hope that psychology would ever explain the phenomenon.[7] For example, Freud stated that young females develop "penis envy" toward the males during their psychosexual development. In response, Karen Horney, a German Freudian psychoanalyst, argued that young females develop "power envy" instead of "penis envy" toward the male. She also suggested the concept of "womb envy" in males, which is defined as jealousy of ability to bear children. However, more modern formulations consider this as an envy of the perceived right of women to be nurturing.[7]