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The Chairman defined his role as someone who should direct and not comment. After presenting the panellists he asked Reimut Reiche to begin with his paper ‘Sexuality and gender identity’, which criticised first Stoller's concept of core gender identity (CGI) (1968, Sex and Gender. New York: Science House); and then Reiche defined the concept of gender: ‘[This] emphasizes psychic or social connotations of sex or of sexual concepts’, and then the term ‘gender identity’, neither of which is genuinely psychoanalytic. He also warned about the incorrect use of ‘CGI’ (Wallerstein's and Sandler's would be my understanding) to refer to an empirical or clinical fact when it actually indicates a scientific or metapsychological concept.
Person & Ovesey's (1983, ‘Psychoanalytic theories of gender identity. J. Amer. Acad. Psychoanal., 11: 203-226) study of a primary CGI free of conflict from which gender and sexual roles are developed was discussed by Reiche. For Reiche, CGI develops in parallel with a ‘core object choice’, ‘core’ referring to the sexual proto-object-choice, which gives origin to a sexual proto-identity, and this, in turn, permits an explication of the ideas of constitutional bisexuality developed by Freud (1937, Analysis Terminable and Interminable. S.E. 23.).
Later, Reiche emphasised that in ‘the primal-object messages (the parental messages that deal with sex assignment) leading to the formation of CGI, plus the traces of elements that generally cannot be assimilated by the child’, these traces organise in the unconscious identity as well as object choice. The case was presented of a woman who developed a manifest transvestite perversion in her adolescence. Periodically, in hardly bearable sexually tense states, she would ‘dress up like a man who dresses up like a woman’. This phenomenon was given the name ‘inner transvestite’. The patient had had a father who was hoping for a male child at the birth of each of his daughters. The patient presented, in