SURVEY OF VARIOUS ASPECTS OF TRANSVESTISM IN THE LIGHT OF OUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE N. LUKIANOWICZ, M.D.

(Continued)

The Psychoanalytical Theory:

All psychoanalytically-minded writers base their interpretations of transvestism on the teaching of Freud. Their point of view may be summarized thus: Transvestism is an attempt to overcome the fear of castration by creating an imaginary phallic woman, and subsequently identification with her. Fenichl, for example, gives this symbolic formula of transvest- ism: "Phallic women exist; I myself am one" (32) In another paper he elaborates this idea further: "The fantasy of a phallic girl is a substitute for a phalli exhibition which is inhibited by castration anxiety, and is composed of the two kinds of 'castration denial! I keep my penis by acting as though I were in fact a girl." "Girls are really no different from myself." All this is condensed into the symbolic equation: "I my whole body a girl the little one = the penis" Sadger (89) reconstructs the train of thought of a male transvestite thus: "When I put on my mother's dress I feel as if I were she herself, and so could arouse sex- ual feelings in my father and possibly supplant her with him." Bohm (18) uses almost an identical picture: "In the clothes they put an, they represent the mother with the penis". (((Ed Note: It seems as though there is nothing else in life for analysts to think about than sex. It is a matter of amazement to me that the animal world has been able to exist for so many eons, to use sex instinctively for reproduction and to go about the rest of their lives without the assistance (?) of psychoanalysts to explain it all.)))

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The inability of a transvestite to renounce the idea of a phallic woman was clearly demonstrated by a

49.