Psychoanalytic Theories of Homosexual Development

It is self-evident, I suppose, that I am conspicuously taking exception to the all-tao-prevalent idea that things are pretty well fixed in the Jesuitical first seven years. This idea has constituted one of the greatest problems for some anthropologists who have tried to translate psychiatric thought into anthropologically useful ideas. The anthropologists have noised at them from all sides the enormous importance of infantile experience-meaning experience certainly under the age of eight. Yet one of the most conspicuous observa­ tions of an anthropologist working anywhere is that children of the privileged, who are raised by servants, do not grow up to be like the servants. That is a little bit difficult for an anthropologist to reconcile with the tremendous emphasis on very early experience.