Comment on ‘A Mythic Search for Identity in a Female to Male Transsexual’

I am grateful for the opportunity to write a short comment on this article which, as the authors affirm, has been greatly influenced by the attitudes and work of John Weir Perry.

It may be unwise and harmful to label the personal myth of our patient psychotic, but we have sometimes to decide how much we are going to go along with it. For example, are we going to perform a sex-change operation on this patient, castrate that one, or kneel down and worship a third? In practice, very few or none of our psychotic patients really expect this of us, nor, I would submit, really want us to. To do so would be grossly disrespectful to them as well as to oneself. The patient, like the rest of us, is perfectly capable of living in two or three or more separate and incompatible myths. Living in any one myth, living out any one archetypal motif fully, never could happen, and to the limited extent that it does happen it is not simply an expression of this part of the self, it is also to some extent a denial or distortion of the rest of the self. There is a large amount of ‘as-if’ in our behaviour, however ‘mad’ we are, and however strongly we are identified with any particular archetypal theme.

The ‘as-if element is vitally important, as is the whole matter of the relationship between the ego and the myth, personal or otherwise. The same personal myth can give rise to creation and enhancement of the personality, or to destruction and degradation, depending on the relationship between ego and myth, the symbolic attitude. The interaction between the patient and his environment is also vital, the more so the more of a ‘patient’ he is as opposed to a robust person. Perry and his co-workers are, of course, doing a valuable service here and they are no doubt right to emphasise the validity of the personal myth at this time.

Thus the ‘personal myth’ is one thing, and it is, of course, interesting even in itself, if only as an example of the kinds of personal myths modern persons have. But th