ABSTRACT
In a setting, Roiphe and Galenson made definitive observations that lead them to hypothesise that much earlier than even the boldest of Sigmund Freud’s assertions about the sexual nature of childhood, there is intense, specific, and genderbimodally differentiated behaviour that is an important achievement of the separation–individuation progression. They assert that this behaviour, which they label the early genital phase, arises with increasing specificity in body awareness and concomitant increasing self-definition and is not specifically linked to oedipal ideation. They hypothesise that severe early disturbances in body image formation such as resulting from illness and injury and/or early disturbances in object relatedness, particularly loss, will cause intense and observable gender-differentiated disturbances with important and lasting consequences. Their observations indeed provide us with a rich store of surprisingly highly differentiated sexual and gender-related responses of boys and girls during the crucial second half of the second year of life.
