The Impact of Opposite-Sex Younger Siblings: A Hypothesis Concerning Gender Differences

Abstract

The first year of two psychoanalyses (a prelatency boy and a prelatency girl, both with opposite-sex younger siblings) is examined and compared using an approach to the psychoanalytic data similar to grounded theory. For the girl, her envy of her brother's penis seemed to be a response to her sense of abandonment by the mother. For the boy, the birth of his sister seemed to have triggered concern about the integrity of his body, although separation concerns were also present. The findings in these two cases are consistent with Phyllis Tyson's (1989, 1994) conjecture about the difference between boys and girls. Because of boys' body difference from mother, the threat to their body integrity (expressed as castration anxiety) is more common than in girls and begins with separation–individuation. In contrast, girls do not usually experience such concerns with their body integrity because their bodies are like mother. Intense penis envy that may be observed in girls is more reflective of the loss of the mother than an issue of concern about their body integrity. The implications of the contrast between the two cases are discussed.

Notes

¹See, for example, Kris and Ritvo (1983).

²Compare Ernest Jones's (1933) idea that the phallic phase is a compromise formation to deal with conflicts of earlier traumas (Hoffman, 1999).

³Joint bathing of children (regardless of sex) close in age is a very common occurrence. Its impact on the development of children's sense of body integrity certainly needs to be studied.