50.

classically "transvestic" dream of the 21 year old patient of Peabody (82), "in which he looked under a girl's skirt and saw male genitalia". The Fame man for a long time "had no clear idea of the difference between male and fe- male anatomy and frequently fantasied going into a ladies' room dressed as a woman in order to see the difference." According to Peabody, "The late date at which he discovered the difference between the sexes, suggest the extreme diff- iculty he had in consciously accepting the lack of a penis in the female."

This fear of castration and its denial through crea- tion of a phallic woman is often precipitated by an exhib- itionistic behavior of the important female figure in the transvestite's early childhood, representing most often his mother or his sister. In the patient of Peabody: "Early memories revealed a mixed feeling of revulsion at the accidental (?) sight of his mother's genitalia when he was four or five," Bak (5) also emphasizes the disturb- ance of the mother-child relationship, resulting in an al- ternating identification with the phallic and penisless mother, with the corresponding split in the ego. Greenacre too stresses the splitting of the ego: "It is an extra- ordinarily strong castration problem of the phallic-oedipal period which...causes regression and splitting of the ego." ((( d Note: All those understanding all this stuff get a small gold-plated penis as a reward and as a reminder of their castration anxiety!!!)

Gillespie (4) assumes "a specific modification of cas- tration anxiety, determined in its form by earlier pregen- ital, and especially oral developments." He accepts the splitting of the ego, on lines defined by M. Klein (63) and adds, "What characterizes. perversion and makes it diff- erent from neurosis or psychosis--is a special technique of exploiting the mechanism of splitting of the ego, by which the pervert avoids psychosis, since a part of his ego continues to accept reality and behave fairly normally in the non-sexual sphere".