ABSTRACT
The early psychoanalytic literature stressed the special problems the little girl has to overcome in order to achieve a satisfactory sex life and the capacity to love. The female child must work through two important conflictual areas from which the male is spared. She must shift her major erogenous zone from the clitoris to the vagina and must renounce the mother as her primary love object and turn to the father and men (Freud 1925, 1931, 1933, 1940). The purpose of this presentation is to focus attention on a special vicissitude in the normal psychological development of the boy which occurs in the pre-Oedipal years. I am referring to the fact that the male child, in order to attain a healthy sense of maleness, must replace the primary object of his identification, the mother, and must identify instead with the father. I believe it is the difficulties inherent in this additional step of development, from which girls are exempt, which are responsible for certain special problems in the man’s gender identity, his sense of belonging to the male sex.
