A Transvestite Boy and a Hypothesis1

Lance lived in a family constellation which can be condensed to the following: His mother loved him possessively and was in overly close contact with him in a tactile sense, visually and emotionally. She hated and disrespected her husband and men in general. Lance's father was unloved and despised by his wife; he was afraid of her, was a failure in his work which he disliked, and was absent from home a great deal. Lance's sister was no serious rival for his mother and was more attached to the father.

This situation led to problems in Lance's development which can best be understood by following some of the ideas of Jacobson (1964), Greenacre (1958), Mahler (1958), and Winnicott (1951). Lance developed difficulty in certain aspects of the process of individuating himself from his mother. Although he could develop a self-representation as distinct from object representations, this broke down in his attempt to establish a realistic gender identity. For Lance, loving was equated with becoming, with some primitive form of identification and imitation. Some of his activities had the quality of 'as if' activities, magical fantasies based on the idea that if I imitate mother I will become her (Jacobson, 1964, p. 43). The over-gratification by the mother kept Lance fixated to oral pleasures derived from eating, tactile, temperature, muscle, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic stimuli. The relative absence of frustration and rivalry helped keep obscure the boundaries between himself and his mother. The lack of a loving and loved father interfered with his opportunity for identification and identity formation. The tactile and visual over-exposure to his mother's body helped confuse his gender identity (Greenacre, p. 617). It seems to me that just as the girl has a special problem in establishing object relations by having to change the gender of her love object, so the boy has a special problem in building a gender identity by having to change the original object of his identification.