The Stages of the Self

By William Horowitz, M.D., on September 3rd, 2011

Margaret Thatcher, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and many ordinary grandmothers are emblematic of this new self-confidence; we regard an older woman who is excessively vain or petulant as having missed this full maturity.

The little girl, lacking the visible appurtenances of both her parents and older siblings, feels lacking and unlovable but responds enthusiastically to mother's fussing with her hair, which is interpreted as her having value. The little boy, a miniature of the man, rejects his mother's fussing over him, which is experienced as babying and thus diminishing him. These reactions are telling markers of the state of the self in the early child.

The older girl, catching the eye of a new friend, is delighted at his interest in her, and will willingly cultivate those features which enhance the experience, for they convincingly prove her worth. Her response, in turn, enhances his growing feeling of strength, and pleasing to both, is a powerful inducement to eventual coupling. When he later asks for her hand, the apogee of self-confidence is reached for both.

With the advent of the baby, she is endlessly gratified with constant love from the child and admiration from the family for what she has accomplished. He is reinforced in his grown maleness and hands out symbols of that in pride. They have arrived!

With the rigors of child-rearing and making a living behind them, both sexes arrive again, this time fatigued and wiser at "middle-age". For the man, from this apogee may be experienced a gradual and progressive decline in strength. For the woman, after her "change" is successfully negotiated, has the opportunity to resume her individual self-development which had been foregone with her mothering. Now she catches up to her male companion, who is passing her in the other direction.

Margaret Thatcher, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and many ordinary grandmothers are emblematic of this new self-confidence; we regard an older woman who is excessively vain or petulant as having missed this full maturity. The man, who from the beginning was dependent on the woman and continued so throughout life, may become even moreso in his infirmity. There can be an actual reversal of roles to each other for them, a possible source of conflict, yes, but equally a possible source of fulfillment.

These two varieties of human being are different , there is no doubt; some say even separate species. Girls seem to know this, deeply. Boys may puzzle at girls' ways, but may be quite oblivious to her difference and may deal with her as he would himself. But continual exposure to each other over a life-time engenders cross-identifications which may ameliorate the gap.

A student of ethology could be haunted by the thought that this characteristic difficulty in discriminating the differences (operating as though all the kids are the same and democratically equal) may be a simple accidental resultant of early learning experiences...in kindergarten? (And famously difficult to unlearn.) Konrad Lorenz first identified that newly-hatched goslings will follow for life the first creature they see on hatching from the shell; he called it imprinting. School is the human's emergence from his cocoon.

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2011/09/03/the-stages-of-the-self