Socialization: Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Gilligan,

Socialization: Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Gilligan, Mead and Erikson

While most of the major sociological theorists of the 20th century conceived of human beings as socially-driven animals, all of these major writers placed different emphases on different aspects of the socialization process. For example, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud placed greater stress on the importance of the 'family romance' in his theory of socialization, the Oedipus Complex. Freud believed that all human beings began life polymorphously perverse, or capable of sexually attaching onto anything. The mother is the first object of affection of the child, and the boy child comes to wish to sexually possess his mother and kill his father. However, through the influence of societal codes, this initial impulse and other asocial desires are repressed and then sublimated. The human consciousness is structured into the id (desire), the ego (the ability to fulfill desires) and the superego (conscience or societal morality that constrains the ego in fulfilling the id's desires).

Erik Erikson agreed with Freud that human beings proceed through a series of developmental conflicts, but placed greater emphasis on non-sexual desires in the individual's journey to fulfillment. Erikson placed a greater emphasis on influences outside the family in determining a child's developmental progression. If various stage-related conflicts, such as the need for a stable identity for adolescents, were not resolved, the individual would be arrested at that particular stage. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, in contrast to both Freud and Erikson, believed that adolescence was not necessarily a conflict-ridden social stage and that psychological conflict was not endemic to the human condition. Repression was not universal and necessary. Based upon her observations of Samoan culture and its acceptance of sexuality, she believed that the sexual and identity crises of adolescence and even adults were particular to Western culture.

Jean Piaget was one of the first theorists of socialization to place a strong emphasis on the cognitive and neurological development of the brain. He believed that it was impossible for individuals to process certain concepts until cognitively prepared to do so. For example, an infant in the sensory motor stage experiences the world through grasping and sucking; children in the preoperational phase are able to obey moral rules but cannot generalize the principles in terms of moral behavior; children in the concrete operational phase can understand literal moral concepts, but it is not until the child reaches the formal operations phase that he or she can comprehend moral abstractions (Stages of intellectual development, 2004, Child Development Institute).

Piaget stated that he believed some 'primitive' peoples never achieve the final stage of formal operations, reflecting his Eurocentric bias -- and his bias in prioritizing abstraction over concrete reasoning as a theorist. Lawrence Kohlberg has been accused of a similar bias in his conceptualization of moral development. According to Kohlberg, children proceed through a series of six stages in which they first obey out of a fear of punishment, then out of devotion to 'rules,' and only later do they formulate higher ethical principles. In Kohlberg's analysis, at the highest moral level of development, "laws are evaluated in terms of their coherence with basic principles of fairness rather than upheld simply on the basis of their place within an existing social order. Thus, there is an understanding that elements of morality such as regard for life and human welfare transcend particular cultures and societies and are to be upheld irrespective of other conventions or normative obligations" (Nucci 2008).