You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Chair opened the session with a few words in memoriam of Agnès Oppenheimer (Paris), who died suddenly on 5 January 1997. A dedicated psychoanalyst, she was to have chaired this session. She was the author of a book on Stoller's works, entitled Le choix du sexe: à propos des théries de Stoller (Paris: Presses Univ. France, 1980), as well as many papers on transsexualism. Her most recent work was a book on Kohut, Kohut et la psychologie du self (Paris: Presses Univ. France, 1996).
Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber said that all three panellists would address themselves to transvestism, not to transsexualism. Therefore she opened with the following few words on transsexualism as Robert Stoller had understood it, asking the reporter to complete the description after the presentations.
Stoller described true male transsexualism as a clear-cut entity with a rather precise clinical picture, both in its dynamics and in its aetiology. Such a boy is raised in a blissful symbiosis by a mother, who herself has a problem of gender identity; wanting to be a boy, she decides at puberty to live as a woman, but make her boy her feminised phallus. The boy has a primary feminine identity and cannot later disidentify from the mother.
After sex reassignment, transsexuals are often reported as functioning better, and that raises an important issue for psychoanalysts. But the data are not all in agreement as showed by Pfäfflin (1993).
The first panellist, Mervin Glasser, presented the analysis (five times a week) of a transvestite, Mr W. The analysis took place some years ago and was discussed in a previous paper (1979). He began with a few remarks on the core complex that influences the total structure; in transvestism, as in all perversions, there is a libidinisation of the intense aggression of the core complex, the object relations are always fundamentally sado-masochistic, at the cost of precluding true intimacy.
The patient dressed up as a woman, paying attention to the minutest de