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Lawrence Kubie (1896-1973) was a renowned psychoanalyst, the editor of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, and a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University, and later at the University of Maryland and Baltimore. Analysed in London by Edward-Glover, he was at the same time working in neurology at the National Hospital, Queen's Square. He was an independent thinker, with wide interests, and made a synthesis of analytical, biological and neurophysiological models, maintained the need for psychoanalysis to become a more exact science, and pressed for more research.
This book contains a collection of his papers. It is clear, after reading these, that there were two main preoccupations in his thinking—the symbolical processes and their distortion, and bisexual conflicts, and, what he described as the drive to become both sexes.
The first paper that he read to the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1932, was an account of a fifteen-year-old girl who was transvestite by day, wearing only riding-breeches, and at night was a woman in long ball gowns. He suggested that these impulses might be ‘more or less universal’, and continued to gather what he felt were clinical examples of this thesis. He came to believe that a drive to become both sexes, or neither, often appeared to be ‘a central axis in the development of an individual and cultural psychopathology, around which other conflicts over castration, Oedipal needs etc. all cluster’ (p. 249), and, further, that ‘conflicting gender identities, misidentifications, false identifications and irreconcilable identifications, give way to unattainable and irreconcilable drives and wishes, which, in turn, become fresh sources of neurotic conflict that, on occasion, may lead to psychotic disorganisation’ (p. 247).
He found it puzzling that, over the ages, gender differences had not become accepted, and still gave rise to such envy and anxiety in development. These problems seemed unresolved by genet