Post 15

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is true, the one shown below is worth a billion or more in terms of the message it conveys. It is comprised of a beautiful family, the members of which I do not know. They are engaged joyfully, and their happy togetherness shows so perfectly what must transpire socially and psychologically in a young male child’s life for him to mature orderly and be heterosexually oriented  at psychosexual maturity.  In this scene, the young child is leaving his mother’s arms happily anticipating being received into the arms and gentle, loving care of his father.

Through the loving father/son bond, male identification is internalized.  

For normal development, male children must move from what had been their symbiotic and originally exclusive bond with their mothers to a greater oneness with their fathers. It is through affectionate rapport with their fathers that little boys recognize and value that they are more like their fathers than their mothers. Their confidence and appreciation of being male grows through the loving connection the father and son share over the developmental years of childhood. As he grows into the male role, for a time females and things pertinent to the female role  become more firmly avoided.

 Humans are created to grow, not in isolation, but primarily in interpersonal relationships. Newborn infants possess, if you will, “packages of potential.” From their first oral connection with their mothers, they draw upon personal resources as they interact with their environment. From infancy onward, there are developmental tasks and milestones that are expected to be accomplished or met. From rolling over, they learn to stand and run or from babbling to voicing complex sentences.

There is a natural order for growth, and if  supportive conditions have not been encountered, another different outcome uniformly evolves . It is “natural for that circumstance. This happens throughout nature.  For example, with the dry winds from African deserts blowing almost constantly over the Canary Islands, it is natural or the norm that corn stalks in fields there  grow less than half as tall as they do in America.

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 Experiences during particular periods of physical development are backdrops in the building blocks of personality.  If male children fail to experience needed forms of nurturance, they uniformly mature differently than the norm. Their hoped for and expected potential is not fully attained.

 It appears that given a particular set of antecedent events, some measure of psychosexual inversion is the “natural” outcome. Male homosexuals possess a uniformity that is unique so far as their early childhood experiences and in the manner in which they respond to them. Children’s first five years are profoundly important. As William Wordsworth wrote: “the child is father of the man.”