has imprinted on his mind from earliest infancy his own gender image which stays with him the rest of his life. If identification with the femi- nine has been strong enough to supercede the obvious fact of maleness, somewhere along the line the boy becomes conscious of "a girl within," and this is when he becomes a TV. If the urge has been strong enough to cause the boy to experiment with dressing, then his identification becomes crystallized, and for all practical purposes he just can't quit. Efforts made by TVs to quit lead to serious emotional problems with which I am sure you are familiar. Consequently, I urge TVs to try to find a way of living with their problem which will give them a reason- able release for their TV urge and will at the same time remove as much strain as possible from their wives and others for whom their TV activi- ties are a serious trial. It is for this reason that I urge people like your- self to get into an FPE group, if at all possible.

My advice to wives is that they get to know other TVs and their wives, so I urge them to get acquainted, at least, with the people in the FPE group to which their husband belongs, even if they can't bring them- selves to join in. One of the most effective means of counteracting the impression of TV wives that their husbands and those like him are de- generates is to have them meet other TVs. When they see a group of intelligent, well-adjusted, decent men, who are all TVs, they can't very well continue to look upon the TV activities of their husbands as some sort of immorality. I don't expect wives to like TV, but I would hope that most of them are willing to look at it as it really is.

I hope you may have success in persuading your wife to make an effort to understand your problem. This is a very difficult thing for TVs to accomplish. In the first place, the reaction of the wife to TV is perfectly natural. We have to understand this and accept it before there can be any progress toward her acceptance and understanding of TV. Once having understood that the wife's reaction is normal and reason- able, we can ask her to make the effort to understand the TV syndrome for what it really is, not what she thinks it is. Wives seem to think that TV represents moral degeneracy, which it does not, and they seem to be convinced that all their husbands have to do is want to quit, and they will be able to do it, which is due to a failure to appreciate the fact that TV is not an acquired habit (like smoking) but a personality defect imprinted on the brain from earliest infancy. It's almost like being left- handed.

Wives are also much concerned about what is going to happen if people find out, and this again is perfectly normal and understandable.

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