Transvestitism represents a compromise formation of interwoven roles and impulses and identities. All are contradictory but simultaneously complementary to each other. The perversion is an ultimate condensation of the self and object; the suckling infant and the active feeding mother; the foetus and the pregnant mother; a blending of homosexual and heterosexual tendencies; and the active and the passive participants; the seducer and the seduced; the sadist and the masochist; the little girl, father and mother; and the male and female. Donning female clothes, in terms of a splitting of the ego, permits the subject to recreate a primitive symbiotic state and to enter into the realm of contradictions, and thereby preserve an otherwise precarious equilibrium. Should the perversion be suppressed or fail, then the alternatives are sexual impulsivity, suicide, paranoid psychoses or schizophrenic disintegration.