Darwinian Jekyll, Freudian Hyde.
The Psychology of Gender

Darwinian Jekyll, Freudian Hyde is a revolutionary book that rewrites early childhood and mainstream psychology by showing that our gender-defined breeding roles, the worker/soldier male and nurturing mother female, are not instinctive. They are socially modelled aspects of our behaviour that we acquire between the ages of two and five via fairy tales, dolls, and mimicry of the same-gender people around us (our family/society/tribe/culture). That means we have two natures, not one, as Psychology insists.
     We have a pre-five modelled gender-defined nature that is physical and a post-five academic thinking nature that is conscious, and because those two personas are starkly different in origin, they never work together. We switch between them depending on the challenge we are facing at the time, breeding or thinking. Far more importantly, from this book’s perspective, our pre-five modelled breeding nature is Darwinian/physical, while our post-five academic thinking nature is Freudian/conscious – and when you stand back from this somewhat odd arrangement, those disparate natures are the reason we can fly to the moon but can’t stop fighting for dominance even if we want to.
     So, the pink and blue boxes people talk about are real things, but because they are poured into our brain’s foundations as toddlers, they feel as if they're unconscious aspects of the teenagers and adults we become. They may feel unconscious, but in fact, they are highly potent definers of our everyday lives, especially when we are young, and when you look at human behaviour in this Darwinian breeder, Freudian thinker way, it falls into place as never before.
     Darwinian Jekyll Freudian Hyde is a remarkable book on the psychology of gender and the part our gender-based breeding roles play in life, and those four words define what this book brings to the table. The missing Darwinian piece of the nature/nurture puzzle.