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A twenty-seven-year-old transvestite came into treatment because of a marital problem. Associated with his sexual difficulties and occasional paranoid tendencies was a remarkable all-pervasive experience of, and preoccupation with, space and direction. Although he was intellectually aware of directions according to the points of the compass, his orientation and movement in the world were according to his subjective experience of space, a private system which he referred to as his 'rectilineal strait jacket'. His mode of dealing with objective space and direction was apparent in practically all perception and learning. As the patient put it, 'Anything in sequence or in series has a spatial aspect'. This aspect was more fixed the more culturally standardized it was; otherwise, much variability existed in the spatial systems. Examples are given of these spatial systems as they pertained to hours of the day, months of the year, numbers, geological periods, musical scales, and masculinity and femininity. He did not regard his preoccupation with spatial orientation as having anything to do with his relationship to people.
An attempt was made to understand the patient's spatial mode of experience through a consideration of his relations with his family, his group, and the world. Schilder and Bender observed that the capacity to perceive rectangular configurations matures at about the age of three and that the function for directional orientation gradually develops after that age. This makes it likely that a fixation of these functions occurred in the patient's ego at the age of three or four in connection with the stresses he was exposed to at that time. Primitive perceptual experience is an experience of multiple curved configurations in motion. It seems likely that the patient used his newly developed perceptual function in an attempt to control the intense ambivalence and fears of retaliation associated with his earlier perceptual experiences of curved configu