Sigmund Freud thought that gender differences developed from the way in which individuals learned to give meaning to their anatomy and to
‘repress’ drives, especially the sex drive, in order to allow ‘civilized’ society to function. He was an Austrian who began developing what became known as psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Freud argued that the incest taboo (social rules against sex with relatives) started the process by which boys learned how to be masculine and girls learned to be feminine. The desire that infants have for physical pleasure must be shaped into socially acceptable, heterosexual forms of sexual expression as they mature. He claimed that the incest taboo, present in all societies, was the key mechanism through which the sexual drive was directed into ‘normal’ femininity and masculinity. There is no neutral selfhood for Freud; to develop an identity is to become gendered. He thought that we become ‘women’ and ‘men’ by gradually separating ourselves from our mother. For boys he called this the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1910).The argument was that all children desire pleasure, which involves gratification of their physical needs. The first source of pleasure for a baby is its mother, who satisfies its needs. This desire for the satisfaction of needs slowly develops into more specifically sexual desires focused on the genitals. But young boys learn that it is not acceptable for them to sexually desire their mothers because to do so would mean competing with their much more powerful fathers. Boys notice that they have a penis, like their father, and fear that if they continue to attach themselves to their mother they might end up lacking a penis like her. This fear of castration encourages boys to turn away from identifying with their mother and to align themselves with their fathers, who symbolically represent separate selfhood. As a result they try to be like their father and therefore learn to be masculine.
Freud’s (1932) theory on how girls learn to be feminine is generally thought less satisfactory than his ideas about masculinity. The story goes like this. Girls realize that they lack a penis and are supposedly envious of that male organ. The incest taboo prohibits them from fulfilling their desire to ‘have’ their father’s penis. They know that their mother cannot provide them with a penis, but perhaps if they become like their mother, and behave in a feminine way, they will be able to attract men and get what is supposedly a penis substitute — a baby. Now, this story can be read as not really being about women wanting to have an actual penis, but about girls recognizing that fathers are symbolic of men (those with penises) and that men represent a distinct selfhood, separate from mother (Beasley, 2005: 53). Such selfhood clearly carries status within the social world, but is not (easily) accessible to women.