Cross-Gender-Identified Children

Abstract

It may come as a surprise to some that this well-known retrospective researcher was sensitive to the method’s limitations. Despite their shortcomings, retrospective methods have made important contributions to the domains of developmental psychology and psychopathology. Their widespread use may be largely attributable to the acceptance by most students of development of the view that early experiences affect later behavior. Retrospective methods, for better or for worse, have played a major role in appraising the idea of continuity in development.

So long as we trace… development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start from the premises… and try to follow these up to the final result, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have been otherwise determined. We notice at once that there might have been another result, and that we might have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter. The synthesis is thus not so satisfactory… in other words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the result.

Freud (1920/1955)