Gilligan is interested in psychological development in the human life cycle. Psychological developmental theorists have assumed “male life as the norm” (6), however, and have tried “to fashion women out of male cloth” (6). This assumption of a male subject in human development is grounded in Freud’s theory of psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex—the theory that, at a subconscious level, very young male children desire to have their mothers all to themselves and regard their father as a rival. In this framework, conscience is tied to castration anxiety, the fear that the father (or father figure) can castrate or disempower the younger male.

Freud theorized that “for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men” (7) and that women are “more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility” (7). This was theorized not just as difference but as inferiority, and Gilligan argues that this “problem in theory became cast as a problem in women’s development, and the problem in women’s development was located in their experience of relationships” (8).

Nancy Chodorow, a feminist sociologist, disagrees with Freud, theorizing that because women are generally the main caregivers of children, female and male children develop differently.