In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

Erik Erikson was a German American psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist. He was particularly interested in the role of the ego and the development of the self throughout life, known as ego psychology. His theory of psychological development revolves around psychosocial crises. Erikson theorized development through these crises and generally did not refer to developmental stages by age.

Erikson was also interested in the psychology of religion and received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his psychobiography Gandhi’s Truth, which considered Gandhi through his theory of development.

Gilligan worked with Erikson while teaching at Harvard. Though she is critical of some of his staging of developmental psychology, she also acknowledges how much she has learned from him, citing his insistence on paying attention to the specificities of individual lives and always considering context. She also references his insights in Gandhi’s Truth, specifically Erikson’s argument that Gandhi politically adhered to nonviolent principles while not caring for his family.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychoanalyst. Freud was interested in psychosexual development, and he proposed that each individual goes through specific stages from infancy to adulthood. Freud’s work assumes a male human as the standard for human development, most famously in his theory of the castration complex. While male development includes the Oedipus complex, female development hinges on a recognition of the female genitalia as lacking a penis. This is not only a lack, but a “wound,” Freud theorizes. Thus, the difference that female genitalia mark to Freud is one of insufficiency.

Erikson, like Freud, concurred that separation from the mother was necessary for development, but women did not separate as fully as men from their mothers.

Freud’s theories of human development begin with the relation of the child to the mother and the intimacy that is inherent in the infant’s relation to their caretaker. Development occurs not in the relation of dependence for Freud, but in the separation of child from parent that ensues. Women, however, remain more attached to their mothers than men and are thus stunted.

Gilligan does not disagree that this separation is part of human development, but she is critical of the overt privileging of separation over intimacy that marks Freud’s theory of human development. In the same way that male anatomy is seen as standard and female anatomy as lacking, Freud’s theory of human development assumes separation and striving toward independence and autonomy as the driving force in human development, which Gilligan sees as much more prevalent among men than women. For women, relations of intimacy and interdependence are privileged over those of independence and autonomy.

Freud’s assumption of male anatomy and development as the standard in human development in turn influences social developmental psychologists like Kohlberg, whose theory of human development is countered by Gilligan’s research.

Lawrence Kohlberg was an American psychologist most known for his theory of moral development, which built on the work of Piaget’s theories of child development. He is credited with developing the field of moral development within psychology, where he focused on the impact of the individual’s reasoning over the prevailing emphasis on the impact of parental rules and cultural norms.

His theory of moral reasoning is now known as “Kohlberg’s stages of moral development,” which includes six stages of moral development. Each stage becomes increasingly inclusive, expanding outward from the most intimate relations of childhood. The six stages are broken into three groupings: preconventional (stages 1-2), conventional (stages 3-4), and postconventional (stages 5-6).

Kohlberg borrows from Piaget’s epistemological model in his creation of a moral developmental model of stages. Moral development moves from the egocentric/concrete (avoidance of punishment) to the conventional in which decentering occurs (taking on the morals of parents and other important members of the community) to the postconventional (applying standards that are considered to be universal to decision-making). Kohlberg’s work depended on extensive research in which he presented moral dilemmas to children and adults.

Gilligan worked with Kohlberg on his moral development theory. In a Different Voice is grounded in a critique of this theory, which Gilligan claims privileges abstract principles over lived relations. Men tend to think in terms of abstract principles and through a lens of justice, whereas women, Gilligan argues, tend to think in terms of relationships. Gilligan argues that women, as judged by Kohlberg’s moral developmental theory, are assessed at a lower level than men. In making this argument, Gilligan founds the theory and broader movement of feminist care-based ethics. Kohlberg himself agreed with Gilligan that justice-based and care-based moral judgments are different, but he did not agree that a care-based ethic leads to a lower score in his moral developmental framework.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and genetic epistemologist interested in children’s intellectual development and the broader question of how knowledge develops. Piaget theorized that one form of knowledge will supersede a previous form of knowledge until adulthood; therefore, children’s ways of knowing the world are entirely different than adults’ ways of knowing. Piaget’s interest in the ways that children make sense of the world differently than adults helped to create the field of child development and genetic epistemology.

Piaget is credited with the development of the stage approach to human development. Many developmental psychologists reject a stage approach, instead focusing on the development of specific skills (e.g., making excuses, lying, self-sacrificing, etc.) and how these skills affect development. Piaget’s theory was a cognitive (not behaviorist) one, and he is often referred to as an epistemologist. He theorized that infants begin as egocentric and concrete thinkers. They have to learn that the world exists beyond them and that, for example, just because they do not apprehend an object with their senses, that object may still exist—they have to learn that the world persists beyond their individual recognition of it.