Interactionism.

 
Boys and girls are biologically different. It would be surprising if it were not so. Equally, it would be hard to argue that we do not treat them differently, and have different expectations of their behaviour. What might not be appreciated is the subtleties of such expectations.

Until recently, both psychology and psychoanalysis has viewed the person as a victim. A major revolution in psychoanalysis occurred in the 1960's with the publication of Rogers' On Becoming a Person⁽¹⁾ which led to beginnings of counselling - a therapy which is still largely misunderstood even by those who claim to be practitioners.

In psychology, it led to the constructivist approach - individuals not merely surviving in their environment, but active agents in their lives. Each of us has, since birth, set out to construct our own representation of the world. In that sense, my view of the world is qualitatively different from yours, and both from any other human being.

Psychology often seems to portray the individual as being the passive recipient of learning imposed by the social environment, or passively following a predetermined cognitive development path. But humans (and, for that matter, all organisms) actively pursue their own paths within the environment. The urge to interact could be said to be the most central feature in humans, from the moment of birth. Even the first moment of suckling is a two way communication. The baby makes it plain if it is not comfortable. The mother adjusts position accordingly. A young baby grimaces in what might be the result of a wind pain. Someone says "Look he (she's) smiling!" Baby enjoys the attention and learns that enjoyable communication can result from smiling. Meanwhile, adults like to see baby smiling, so there is reinforcement of both infant and parental behaviour.

While every mother interacts with her baby in the knowledge of its sex, the baby in general is happiest in interacting according to its emotional nature. But, at this age, the baby is above all, a baby, and she interacts with it as an individual. Both relate to each other in ways that result in the most comfort and, in the end, the closest bonds with each other.

Watch a mother playing with a baby. She coos to it. The baby responds, then waits expectantly to be cooed to again. Linguists often portray this as a child's first conversation, learning turn-taking. But all child psychologists insist that the child affects the family as much as the family affects it, and this is probably important in the child's finding a secure sense of itself as an individual - before it goes to school and has to interact with its peers.⁽²⁾

This diversity of biology, of mental structure and, especially, of the immense variety of environments that children encounter, leads to a wide variation in individuals that psychology, perhaps, does not sufficiently account for. It measures average behaviours over large groups. Individual differences tend to be lost as experimental error. Behaviours is a key word. Psychology is very good at describing the psychology of language, because precisely designed studies can measure precisely designed behaviours.

For many other psychological studies, the measuring tools are necessarily crude. It can say little about the central processes of the mind that, after all, occupy most of mental life and, in particular, it does not say what it means to be a man or a woman.

Bibliography and good reading.

1. Rogers,C., (1967) On Becoming a Person, London:Constable (1974 edition). (bookshelf)
2. Harris, J.R., (1999)The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out They Way They Do,New York: Touchstone (Simon and Schuster) (bookshelf) and (review)