ONTOGENESIS OF SEXUAL BEHAVIOR 



1415 



induced signs of puberty may, on the one 

 hand, open the doors to adolescent social 

 encounters before a child is psychologically 

 ready and able to cope with such learning 

 experiences (see Hampson, 1955; Money, 

 1955). On the other hand pubertal delay 

 permits a lag in social and psychologic de- 

 velopment by making the child so out of 

 step with his contemporaries that the job 

 of catching up may be slow or even impos- 

 sible. Without belaboring the point, body 

 appearance does have an important, indi- 

 rect bearing on the development of psycho- 

 logic functioning, including that which we 

 term gender role or psychosexual orienta- 

 tion. 



There is yet another link between hor- 

 monal functioning and gender role which is 

 specifically relevant to the genital erotic 

 component of psychologic sex. To be brief, 

 for this topic is taken up more fully in 

 jMoney's chapter on sex hormones and eroti- 

 cism, both androgens and estrogens can act 

 on external genital structures so as to in- 

 tensify genital erotic sensation. In the ab- 

 sence of one or the other sex hormone geni- 

 tal erotic sensation is relatively weak. We 

 would stress that genital eroticism, however 

 important, is but one facet of the constella- 

 tion of elements comprising psychosexual 

 functioning. One may, therefore, expect to 

 find individual differences, both pathologic 

 and nonpathologic, in this component alone, 

 or in combination with the other compo- 

 nents of gender role behavior. 



C. SOCIAL LEARNING AND GENDER ROLE 



It is not a new idea that humans learn a 

 great deal during their earliest years. From 

 the beginning of psychodynamic research, 

 much information has been collected about 

 the importance of learning experiences in 

 man and the influence of such experience 

 in shaping those psychologic modalities 

 broadly spoken of as personality.*^ 



Freud (1910) was among the first to pre- 



" It is beyond the scope of this chapter to dis- 

 cuss the many theories of personality extant in 

 psychology and psychiatry. The interested reader 

 will find an excellent review of the more important 

 of these theories in Theories of Personality by 

 Hall and Lindsey (1957). Murphy (1947), with 

 considerable ai>propriateness, defined personality 

 as "the integration of all the roles that a particular 

 person has to enact." 



sent a comprehensive theory of psychosex- 

 uality. Freud apparently based his views on 

 a postulate von Krafft-Ebing had also em- 

 braced some years before, namely, that 

 every person is inherently bisexual, or, in 

 another sense, homosexual as well as hetero- 

 sexual tendencies are originally present in 

 everyone. The Freudian theory of psycho- 

 sexual development embodied a succession 

 of oral, anal, and genital phases and held 

 that the psychologic differences between the 

 sexes emerged during the first 5 years of 

 life.'-' Freud saw the third to the fifth year 



"Freud (1949) attached great importance to a 

 biologic hypothesis that "man is descended from a 

 mammal which reached maturity at the age of 

 five, but that some great external influence was 

 brought to bear upon the species and interrupted 

 the straight line of de^'elopment of sexuality. This 

 may also have been related to some other trans- 

 formations in the sexual life of man as compared 

 with that of animals, such as the suppression of the 

 periodicity of the libido and the exploitation of 

 the part played by menstruation in the relation 

 between the sexes." Freud (1927) gave the fol- 

 lowing account of the maturation and development 

 of infantile sexuality : "The sexual function ... is 

 in existence from the very beginning of the in- 

 dividual's life, though at first it is assimilated to the 

 other vital functions and does not become inde- 

 pendent of them until later ; it has to pass through 

 a long and complicated process of development 

 before it becomes what we are familiar with as the 

 normal sexual life of the adult. It begins by mani- 

 festing itself in the activity of a whole number of 

 component instincts. These are dependent upon 

 erotogenic zones in the body; some of them make 

 their appearance in pairs of opposite impulses 

 (such as sadism and masochism or the impulse 

 to look and to be looked at) they operate inde- 

 pendently of one another in their search for pleas- 

 ure, and they find their object for the most part in 

 the subject's own body. Thus to begin with they 

 are noncentralized and predominantly auto-erotic. 

 Later they begin to be co-ordinated ; a first step of 

 organization is reached under the dominance of 

 the oral components, an anal-sadistic stage follows 

 and it is only after the third stage has at last been 

 reached that the primacy of the genitals is estab- 

 lished and that the sexual function begins to serve 

 the ends of reproduction." 



In Freud's view it was the phallus which dic- 

 tated the organization of infantile sexuality: "The 

 difference between the two — the infantile genital 

 organization and the final genital organization of 

 the adult — constitutes at the same time the main 

 characteristic of the infantile form, namely that for 

 both sexes in childhood only one kind of genital 

 organ comes into account, the male. The primacy 

 reached is, therefore, not a primacy of genital but 

 of the phallus" (Freud, 1924). Freud considered 

 there was no distinction between maleness and 

 femaleness in the anal-sadistic stage; in the in- 



