Nancy Chodorow

Family Structure and Feminine Personality and Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots

These two pieces both focus on the differential psychological development of males and females and their social and psychological consequences. Insofar as it appears that Chodorow seems to ascribe these differential psychological developments to the causes of social organizational structure (especially in the first article this viewpoint is quite explicit), then these two articles have some interesting sociological ramifications. The key starting point for the differential development of male and female psychological traits is the fact that child rearing is universally carried out mainly by women, and so that both female and male children develop initial emotional attachment to the mother, rather than the father. These two articles, in turn, perform as complementary pieces to each other as they look at two different sides of the same coin - with the first perceiving the male identity as rather more precarious and complex, while the latter focuses on the aspects of female psychological development that are more complex in nature.

But what are some of the significant consequences of the fact that both sons and daughters are reared mainly by the mother? The initial and crucial difference existing between son's and daugher's upbringing is the difference in the way they are separated from the mother and "individuated" with distinctive identity separate from that of mother's, Chodorow states. For boys, this process of separation and individuation involves the process of forcible detachment from and the rejection of his attachment with the mother - leading to his sense of the need for differentiation from the others, and the strong call for independence. Insofar as this tends to be done by the process of developing a sense of identity with his father, who because he does not take much role in child raising and is removed in the world of "formal" economies, the issue of masculinity remains somewhat elusive and precarious for a boy. Further, because this process is about the rejection, rather than the acceptance and positive identification, of his mother, this involves the devaluation of anything associated with feminity and feminine world - and so the rejection of feminity comes to be perceived as being necessary in order to attain the sense of masculinity. The tacit assertion of the possible negative implication of this fact on our social organization that devalues feminity is obvious here. Further, identification with the father does not occur in the context of affective relationship, and so the apprehension of his father's personality and values as a total person is difficult. Instead, boy's identification with the father tends to be the process of apprehending the generalized and abstract social roles a father has.

For girls, the process of psychological development is quite different. Here, the process is more continuous, for there is no need of forcible separation from the mother in order to achieve the feminine identity. The relationship with the mother tends to be characterized by more of affective and personal identification. Her development of feminine identity is based on the gradual learning through the everyday experience, not external or fantasied influences that characterize a boy's relationship to his father.

Briefly, this is the basic line of analysis provided by Chodorow - and psychoanalytic analysis of this nature does not seem to be at all uncommon nowadays. Similar sort of arguments that focus on the more precarious and detached nature of boy's psychological development - and the subsequent notion that masculinity must be achieved while feminity is simply given - has been propounded by number of theorists later on.

On the other hand, in many respects the development of feminine personality is more difficult and complex. For one thing, a mother tends to express a greater sense of emotional attachment to her daughter than to her son, and does not encourage the daughter to differentiate and develop the sense of individuality. A daughter raised in this fashion then grows up without developing the firm "ego boundary", and when she becomes a mother she perpepetuates this cycle of inadequate ego development. This then may lead to rather negative social consequence of mothers coming to be over-involved with their children, as their identities as a person cannot be defined in any other way as their own sense of ego identify is rather precarious - which is a situation that may be broadly applicable to many of the Western nations, as women (though this situation has changed greatly in the late 20th century) lost independent economic functions and became "housewives".

So, while the article is about the development of gender identity from the psychological perspective, we also get a sense that these psychological factors are also interrelated with social structure - as women's psychological identities may be rendered even more precarious by social organization of modern industrial societies. In fact, depending on the type of social structure, women may have a strong sense of ego boundary and matured sense of identity in spite of the otherwise patriarchial arrangement of the society. This condition seems to be fostered when women consistently have meaningful social relations with other women (empirically, with particular emphasis on kin relations), have firmly grounded role expectations, have meaningful role in economic activities, however segregated women and men's economic activities may be otherwise. To put forth this idea in a more theoretical sophisticated fashion, Chodorow makes a distinction between the concepts of mature and immature dependency. Mature dependency, which needs to be firmly differentiated from the idea of forced independence men face in developing their gendered self, is characterized by clear separation of ego boundaries from the others while recognizing the need to develop affective, give and receive relationships with the others. Chodorow notes of several traditional societies where these conditions are reality, and laments of the situation of current middle class Western women who lack these conditions. Current Western middle class women, in contrast, are trapped in the social situation identified as the "immature" dependency - with its lack of clear ego separation for women's gendered personality, and the consequent overinvolvement by mothers in the lives and upbringing of their children.

In "Family Structure and..." we saw that male identity may be more precarious and complex, in "Oedipal Asymmetries..." we look at the aspects of womens' psychological development process that is more complex than that of men's - especially regarding the difficulty in the development of women's sexual identity. Here, the difference between sexes is framed in terms of the "asymmetrical" relational needs and wants they eventually come to have. Here, again, the starting point is the fact that both boys and girls are mainly reared by women and then they both have to detach from mothers to certain extent in order to achieve individuality. As both sexes are reared by women, it is then reasoned that they are both looking for, in an unconscious fashion, a return to this emotional and physical union which has characterized their initial experience of life (Ideas like this are heavily psychological, and it is indeed somewhat frustrating that they are by their very nature cannot be tested as empirical sociological facts). For men, the situation is quite simple. They simply need to achieve this directly by heterosexual attachment to his lover, who replicates his initial emotional attachment with his mother. However, they also had to reject mothers in order to attain the sense of masculinity. This initial rejection, then, takes shape in their future heterosexual relationship as their inability to form a close and affective relationships and their tendency to think of the relationships in abstract and categorical terms. For women, the situation is more complex as they never had to reject their mothers. Instead, the relationship with mothers have always been more important or at least equally importrant as their relation to their fathers. So the picture is that of the complex "triangle" involving a woman herself and a mother and a father in which a woman finds a need for a consistent primary attachment to mothers. In short, women never become so one-sidedly heterosexual in their emotional needs and wants than men in their psychological development. Sexual and erotic attachment women develop toward their fathers during the oedipal phase is counterbalanced by their strong affective attachment they always retain toward their mothers. In other words, the difficulty with the development of women's sexual identity is the exact replica of men's difficulty in developing affective ties with their fathers. That is, while women develop their sexual/erotic identity by transferring her initial sexual identification with the mother to her father, the process is complicated by the fact that the father, due to his economic function, tends to be absent and distant - making it more difficult for women to identify sexually with him concretely. Nevertheless, in an emotional sense women have more emotional resources to fall back on for the sense of belonging than men. They never need men to the same extent as to men need women. At the same time, however, the development of women's psychological gender identity in this "triangular" affective relational ties with the father and mother leads to the complex situation in which women, relative to men, have greater relational needs to create affective ties with both men and women while their sexual identity is never as simple as that of men's - who simply need to reject their mothers and then look for lovers to build heterosexual identity.

Finally, Chodorow sees a particularly enervating factor to the institution of family in this asymmetrical psychological development of men and women - for one thing, given men's incapacity for the truly affective and personal relationship, women's relational needs are not likely to be satisfied by their relationship to men fully. This factor is exacerbated by the modern social organization, in which families lost functions as economic unit and now perform only the emotional functions.