What are the most interesting facts about human behavior?

Generally there is a diffused common sensical social current that men find it difficult to express their emotion as compare to the women. So to understand this human behavior sociologist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow made use of Freud’s approach in studying gender development and further explained it with analysis and experiments on the primitive socialization of child in her thesis(1978,88) on “attachment and separation.”

According to her:

• Sense of male or female for a child derives from the his/her attachmentto his/her parents from an early age.
• Children tend to become emotionally involved with the mother, since she is easily the most dominant influence in their early lives.
• This attachment has at some point to be broken in order for the child to achieve a separate sense of self – the child is required to become less closely dependent.
• This breaking process occurs in a different way for boys and girls. Girls remain closer to the mother—for example, to go on hugging and kissing her and imitating what she does. Because there is no sharp break from the mother. The girl, and later the adult woman, develops a sense of self that is more continuous with other people due to continuation of bond with mother.
• Her identity is more likely to be merged with another’s: first with her mother, then with a man and finally with her child. In Chodorow’s view, this tends to produce characteristics of sensitivity and emotional compassion in women.
• On the contrary Boys gain a sense of self via a more radical rejection of their original closeness to the mother, making their understanding of masculinity from what is not feminine. They learn not to be ‘sissies’ or ‘mummy’s boys’. As a result, boys are relatively unskilled in relating closely to others: they develop more analytical ways of looking at the world.
• They have repressed their ability to understand their own feelings and those of others due to the forfeiting of continued close attachment to the mother.
• Male identity is formed through separation: thus, men later in life unconsciously feel that their identity is endangered if they become involved in close emotional relationships with others.
• Female identity is formed through Attachment, so women, on the other hand, feel that the absence of a close relation to another person threatens their self esteem.
• These patterns are passed on from generation to generation, because of the primary role women play in the early socialization of children. Women express and define themselves mainly in terms of relationships. Men have repressed these needs and adopt a more manipulative stance towards the world.

so ‘male inexpressiveness’ – the difficulty men have in revealing their feelings to others is emerged during his childhood. This is not universal in nature but true up to some extent.

Credit: Yogendra Sharma