Robert, in mid-life, came back to analysis complaining of long-standing depression. He previously had a ten-year Kleinian analysis, which he felt saved his life, for he’d become suicidal about cross-dressing, a comforting behaviour since early boyhood. He was born just under a year after the sudden death of his older sister, Roberta, aged four. He was supposed to be her, a ‘replacement child’, at which he failed. Robert (also known as Rachel) was short, stocky, strongly built, dark haired. He often wore black. When he wore shorts and a T-shirt I noticed he shaved his arms and legs. In his mid-forties, he was a successful lawyer. An ebullient, mercurial extrovert with a strong sensation function, he loved music, art, cooking, carpentry and dressing up as a woman. He hated having impulsive rages, the habit of animosity. He often raged at himself. Desperate after another pointless conflict, he wanted to see his first analyst, but she had retired. He was furious about ‘mummy not being there for me, again!’; understandably puzzled I did not know everything she knew, without being told.
There were sulphurous stormings out, mercurial stormings back, salty tears of rage and remorse. The transference, he interpreted, was simple: I was ‘bad mummy’ because I was ‘daddy’. In his first analysis he discovered he’d always believed his mother hoped for a girl to replace Roberta. He felt met by his first analyst, a ‘good enough’ mother, ‘but boys need fathers too’. As I’d just been wrong for being a father, I was puzzled. Whatever gender I was, it would be wrong.
His own father was over 50 when Robert was born: a loving, generous, old- fashioned man who married late. As a teenager, he’d served at the end of the First World War. He was not able to rough and tumble like Robert’s friends’ younger fathers. Robert enjoyed verbal fights with me. When we began, mother was denigrated, father idealised (the clothed King and Queen). Yet, if ‘father and son’ dynamics emerged, he’d rage. We could not stay as ‘King and Queen’ without it becoming unbearably painful. My ease with being either had to be enviously attacked, for he was easy with neither. He’d find opposites to rage at, assuming from my accent I must be ‘a country-bred Tory toff’, whilst he was a lower- middle-class London boy, and a good socialist. ‘It must have been easy for you’, he grumbled. I was tempted to tell him my parents were in the Party, but didn’t.
In his inner world, Robert insisted men be men and women be women, as if his Edwardian, Tory-voting father spoke. Robert brought the image of ‘angels in marble’ – a quote from the Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, referring to the aspiring working class whom he saw as natural conservative voters. Robert found parallels between his family’s social position and transvestism: they were neither workers nor ‘toffs’; they aspired to something they could never attain. I thought of his dead sister, and imagined a real marble angel on her shrine.
As a boy, Robert was active, sporty, mischievous; a keen scout, an enthusiastic jazz musician. Early memories include finding his sister’s name on all his coat hangers, in his Beatrix Potter books and seeing her picture enshrined on the mantelpiece. He remembers being held between his mother’s knees to get his hair combed, ‘like a girl’ (he always messed it up on the way to school). He didn’t pass his eleven plus: mother was a school teacher, another disappointment. ‘She did all the practical things a mother had to do’, he said, ‘but there was no joy in her’. He began trying on her silk underwear aged about seven. In his last year at primary school, he and friends enjoyed pre-adolescent sex play, shared their first orgasms and perhaps a stolen cigarette afterwards. He’d dress up, put on makeup and play the girl. During adolescence, he had happy sexual relationships with girls; later, at Oxbridge, he had a ‘steady’.
He found a Chambers to practise law (barristers and judges get to dress up). Robert found a motherly prostitute who’d employ him as a ‘French Maid’ – to tidy up, make cups of tea and be rewarded with sex at the end of a busy day. He attended S and M parties in this role: though neither a ‘top’ nor a ‘bottom’, the scene, with its clubby friendliness, rules and codes, was seductively like the boy scouts: dressing up, ropes and knots. He knew where he was. Despair at his con- tinuing compulsion to cross-dress brought him to his first analysis, as he wanted to be committed to a girl. Inability to maintain a sense of gender – or sexuality – brought him to his second.
I often wondered about his inner world. What did it feel like to be touched like a girl by your mother, when you are a boy? What did it feel like to have a father too old to play football? To always feel, no matter how hard you tried, that you never get anything right for anyone, ever? Despair and rage will be ordinary. Envy of those with ‘good enough’ parents led to envious attacks and Robert often had fights as a boy. Good things were easily spoilt, whether possessions or relation- ships; but once he had a good thing it was impossible to let go. It took many years for him to give his late father’s carpentry tools to a charity. Perhaps he enshrined his fathers ‘tools’ (penises) as father symbolically failed to transmit his potency? Robert easily got lost in details. Choosing a new dishwasher took six months, there were so many choices. This became our first symbol. We coined ‘to dish- washer’ as a new verb to describe circular, concrete, obsessional thinking: a defence against ‘getting it wrong again’, and against shame. Washing up is a stereotypic couple activity, ‘you wash, I’ll dry’ is a non-gendered, open nego- tiation. ‘Dishwashering’, like dressing up, defends against symbol formation, and is an envious attack on the Self – a refusal to enter its open system. An obsessive
bachelor lawyer buys a dishwasher he doesn’t actually need because he lives alone. The dishwasher washes and dries behind its closed door, just as his sexual activity is ‘behind closed doors’. As he said, ‘being a trannie is a wonderful way of finding disapproval, because nobody wants to “do it” with you’. And, though cheerfully celebrated by practitioners on websites such as ‘tvChix’, transvestism nearly always draws shaming and stigmatising reactions. A transvestite looks both male and female, yet may feel neither male nor female. No one, straight or gay, is attracted. I wondered if that was Robert’s purpose, enacting an unspoken parental wish. I’d not wish to generalise this idea and make it a ‘law’.
The law, Robert felt, is creative – it brings order to chaos by making up particu- lar sorts of believable stories – at which he excelled. He has an Irish gift for story, and before his first analysis he had great difficulty separating fact from fantasy, particularly sexual fantasy. You could drown in the mercurial fountain of his stories. They were sad rather than titillating, with images of people, including himself, going to great lengths to avoid intimacy whilst achieving orgasm. He’d learnt the term ‘part object’ relating from his previous analyst, intellectually understood this was what he did, but the insight brought little change.
To help him symbolise part-object relating, I told the story of Trickster, the hero of the Winnebago Native American myth cycle. Though called ‘Elder Brother’, he is both male and female, and neither male nor female. He can make himself a vulva out of a deer’s liver, and carries his penis on his back in a box. Trickster sees the chief’s beautiful daughters bathing on the far bank of a river. He sends his hard penis across for coniunctio, but the girls see it coming and flee. He tries again, weighting his penis with a stone. Alas, it sinks. The third time he gets it just right. His penis enters the prettiest girl. Unfortunately, it gets stuck. The wise woman has to be called to pull it out (Radin, 1972, p. 57). The penis is both a part object and a bridge (Gordon, 1993, pp. 69–84). Robert laughed at the story, and identified with Trickster. Like Trickster, he could penetrate, but only while remaining on the far bank.
He would stay far away from me by repeating trivial domestic details for weeks – ‘dish washering’. It felt like playing ‘mummies and daddies’. To avoid getting washed away myself in a deluge of feelings (for I’d begun to wonder if I was a girl, a boy or any kind of object), I began to look at the Rosarium pictures, badly in need of a map. Was I to be King or Queen, or both? If Robert feels both male and female, is this an androgynous experience or a hermaphroditic one? I became as confused in my theorising as I did in my clinical experience: so, at the same time as studying alchemy, I looked at psychoanalytic theorising around cross-dressing.
Transvestism
If parents and culture cannot provide settings where archetypes of gender and sexuality, Animus and Anima, install adequately then a complex forms – a repeti- tious compulsion, a habit of concretisation. Normally, in the transference and counter transference, feelings and thoughts flow in a third area, a ‘between’, held by clear boundaries. The analytic frame is ‘an alchemical vessel’, which, if strong
enough and the emotional temperature is right, lets gold form: the gold of the Self. For children, the vessel is the family, society and culture. Children need affir- mation of their gender and sexuality to form reality-testing functions (an ego), personae (faces to show the world) and a mature, fluid adult identity (individuate). Depth psychologists all agree problems in early life impact on adult relating. Psychoanalysts and learning theorists suggest transvestism develops if gender identity is poorly established. Transvestites may or may not believe they are the wrong gender, but rarely wish for gender change. They are not transsexuals (like Bree, played by Felicity Huffman in Donald Tuckers Academy Award nominated film, Transamerica, 2005).
The German physician and pioneer gay rights campaigner, Magnus Hirschfeld, coined the word ‘transvestite’ in 1910, from the Latin ‘trans’ (across) and ‘vestitus’ (dress). He found transvestites could be male or female, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or asexual (Hirschfeld, 1910/1991, pp. 147–148). He noted the transvestite coniunctio involves a prelude, cross-dressing; then, often, arousal and orgasm – ‘monosexuality’ (ibid., pp. 155–157). He suggested cross-dressing might be a way to escape from rigid gender roles usually assigned in Western capitalist society. It is a political as well as a sexual gesture. This was true for Robert, as it counterbalanced being a powerful lawyer, as well as being his dead sister. Now he’d not be ‘a disappointment’ to mother. It could also be an envious attack on them both, through caricature.
Freud examined sexuality in terms of object choice and activity. An unres- ponsive mother is substituted with a transitional object which, if sexualised, becomes a fetish – a coniunctio with an artistically created thing. This is concrete/ operational thinking. Clothing stands for a whole object, a mother. It may be a conditioned response: if your first orgasm comes when wearing your mum’s bra, this is a strongly reinforcing experience. But why is a boy wearing his mum’s bra in the first place? Is he playing at being her, or is he being her?
In ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’, object relations theorist Donald Winnicott says ‘the fetish can be described in terms of a persistence of a specific object or type of object dating from infantile experience in the transitional field, linked with the delusion of a maternal phallus’ (1953). Like Trickster, here is a mother whose penis is detachable. In transference, this feels like ‘not knowing where to put it’. There is a penis loose in the room, but whose? Kleinian analysts might symbolise this part object as ‘the breast/penis’ (an androgynic concept): both can be taken in, sucked and give out. Both can be signifiers of power, particularly the power to say ‘no’. It is like reaching the Rosarium picture, ‘the naked truth’ but never getting into the bath or having intercourse. Whilst valuing psychoanalytic theory, which Robert probably understood better than I, I felt I needed a more symbolic way to theorise his dilemma. I looked first to Jung, then to mythology.
It is rather the incapacity to live which robs mankind of his possibilities. This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct
his libido toward objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we gift to them. That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing inside of ourselves.
(Jung, 1919, p. 107) In The psychology of the unconscious Jung described the ritual creation of fire. The fire stick penetrates the wooden fire block. Cross-dressing involves grasping the fire stick (ibid., p. 103). He goes on to talk about masturbation as theft, stealing possibilities of intimacy. Theft is part of the Oedipus story, as the lamed shepherd boy stole the kingdom of Thebes, which was rightfully his. In having sex mostly with himself, under his frock, Robert hid an undifferentiated and lonely child, lost in fantasy. In re-reading the Oedipus myth, I discovered a wise transvestite.
Tiresias was a prophet from Thebes, a clairvoyant blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets. On Mount Cyllene he met a pair of mating snakes, sacred to Hera, and killed them. Hera was furious and punished Tiresias by turning him into a woman. Tiresias interfered with a sacred marriage, and the mother-goddess took his gender – castrated him. After seven years, he again found mating snakes. He made sure to leave them alone, and was allowed to become a man again. In Sophocles’ play, Oedipus asks Tiresias to find the killer of Laius, his predecessor. At first, Tiresias refuses, but eventually he reveals Oedipus himself (unwittingly) committed the crime, killing his father and marrying his mother. Outraged, Oedipus threw Tiresias out. Later, realising the truth, he blinded himself and went into exile.
This myth links two ways of theorising transvestism. Psychoanalysts look to an Oedipal model: mother (Hera, the mother goddess) is unobtainable, so she is enacted. The fetishistic object is a ‘penis’ analogue, mother’s breast/penis which can be kept safe against castration, and banish castration anxiety. For analytical psychologists, a fetish object has a magical meaning; it is symbolic rather than signifying. Tiresias came back to himself when he could bear to watch a coniunctio (witness a primal scene). Freud and Jung agreed that in para-sexual behaviour there is sexualisation of anger and rage at a denying object – a withholding and/or abusive parent. For Robert, intimacy with mother was castrating. ‘Being a girl’ is an identification with the persecutor.
Robert Stoller, a Californian psychoanalyst, suggests three elements are involved in gender identity: hormonal influences, sex assigned at birth and psy- chological imprinting. He described ‘perversion’ (a term he was unhappy with) as an erotic form of hatred. He found threats to gender identity disrupted a child’s sense of self, creating unconscious aggression and wishes for revenge (1966). Attachment is followed by undoing; frustration can’t be tolerated, as transitional objects, the first symbols, cannot form. Before a child can form transitional objects, Stoller assumes, like Winnicott, they believe their own wishes magically create the desired object – a loving mother. Transitional objects symbolise good
qualities, persist when the real mother is not there, ‘are’ her. Transvestites seem to act as if they themselves are the desired object: ‘playing at being mummy’ becomes being mummy.
Normally, as children, we eventually gain from the experience of frustration, developing a capacity to be with ‘not knowing’, to be, for a little while, out of control, not caring what is ‘right’, or ‘what mummy wants’, simply playing. Mother is a secure internal object. This is not possible if mother is absent, hostile, over-anxious or dead (Green, 1983, p. 142). Robert’s concretisation of his need for a mother (and the feminine) could not resolve until he could bear the experi- ence of lack – of loss, of frustration. Until then, his actions tended to ‘eat themselves’, that which was created was simultaneously destroyed.