With the onset of the physical changes of adolescence, the girl—unlike female transsexuals, whom she had resembled to this point—gave up all hopes that she would ever become a male. Instead, she put on a feminine facade and in time married. The man she married —the transsexual’s father—is a passive, distant, though usually not effeminate man, who is not to be a forceful or significant figure in the marriage. He is expected to support his family and then simply offer himself up to his wife as an object for derision.
Into this miserable marriage, the transsexual-to-be is bom. Yet, although the dynamics of the family are as sketched above, transsexualism does not occur in any of the children unless a male is born who is perceived by his mother as beautiful and graceful. This infant is the best thing that has ever happened to his mother. Finally, after years of quiet hopelessness, without a sense of worth about her sex or gender identity, filled with hatred and envy for males, who have what she wanted and was forced to give up hope for, she has created a piece of herself, from out of her own body and as if parthenogeti-cally without the need of a husband, the best of herself, her own ideal—the perfect phallus. This boy will not have the envied and hated rub of masculinity; that, she feels, is guaranteed from birth on by his physical beauty, augmented by a lush nursing experience in which he is a fine feeder who enjoys his mother’s body. The blissful
symbiosis is established from birth, and it is maintained fiercely by this mother, for she has enfolded within her now the cure for her lifelong hopeless sadness. Joy is the energy that permits her—forces her—to maintain excessively close body and psychic contact with this infant for too many hours a day and for years. By creating this symbiosis, she binds—incorporates—her son into herself as much as one physically can. By identifying with him, she tries to undo her own traumatic infancy, to replace her evil mother; the present mother and infant are to be all good. The bliss created in the symbiosis thus becomes the aura of a new, idealized, perfect mother for her.
When these families are first seen, with the boys four or older, mother and son are still too intimate, touch each other too much, and enjoy each other’s company too much, understand each other without talking. (This has no erotic quality for either mother or son [60, 61]). It is not as absolute as in infancy, for, while these mothers wish to be too close to their child, they do allow other ego functions to develop, such as mobility, talking, reading, and the like. The closeness seems to be maintained in a precise sector, that concerned with the passage of femininity.* We also note the power of the symbiosis when we try to treat mother and son, with treatment’s implication that the symbiosis should end and masculinity supervene. Both resist fiercely (112, 148). Father, as one would anticipate, does not take part but remains dimly in the background.
*In other words, a focal symbiosis. "By focal symbiosis I mean a condition in which a symbiotic relationship exists in respect to the functioning of a special organ or body area. [To this I would add: or psychic function or identity theme.] Usually the individuals participating in this symbiotic relationship are of uneven development: parent and child, older and younger siblings, or even stronger and weaker twins. The focal symbiosis represents the special site of emotional disturbance in both members of the symbiotic pair. But it is ordinarily manifest in the weaker or smaller partner, who remains functionally dependent in this specific area on the active response of the other partner, far beyond the maturational period at wnich the special function would ordinarily become autonomous” (56).
What is father’s role as merging of mother and son persists and as the feminine behavior surfaces? He is to be absent and therefore to be scorned. He is scarcely seen—literally—by his son during the first few years of life. Father leaves home for work before the boy awakes and returns after his son is in bed. On the weekends, he is not with the family because, encouraged by his wife, he is allowed to spend the weekend solitarily, at hobbies or watching television.
The oedipal situation that develops further confirms the oddity of this symbiosis. Its outstanding feature is lack of conflict. The boy never develops a heterosexual relationship with his mother (without treatment) and as a result never develops an oedipal conflict. The two of them are so much one, are so free upon each other’s bodies, that no sexual tension develops. The boy does not desire his mother as a separate, opposite-sex object, and she has no sexual desire for him. (Her lack of interest in his becoming masculine exemplifies this.) Only with treatment and the beginning of masculinity does one see oedipal conflict and the neurotic symptomatology of childhood with which we are familiar when we think of oedipal conflict (60, 61, 112).
The Pathogenecity of “Latent Homosexuality”
This review of the transsexual situation serves to demonstrate forces that produce femininity in a male. It is, I believe, correct (though one must be cautious, for not enough families have been studied to test it) that when all these factors are present and strong, the femininity will be greatest. As one reduces the intensity of the factors or as factors drop out, the femininity is less pure. I therefore extrapolate to a belief that at least a minimum tendency toward transsexualism occurs in the usual masculine state. And that brings us home to principles enunciated by Freud as early as 1905, never repudiated in his theory or in his clinical observations, that bisexuality (homosexuality, masculine protest, fear of females) is part of the make-up of men. The only difference is that what we call at present "transsexual” he labeled “homosexual.” (By no means is this the only meaning he gave to “homosexual.”) Let us carry these ideas further.
In his last statement regarding the sexuality of men and women, Freud said he could never resolve in either sex their “masculine protest,” that is, men’s need to insist on their masculinity and to fear attack upon it and women’s need to react with penis envy and its permutations to the effects of imagined castration (34). These ideas he attributed to “latent homosexuality,” another manifestation of which was the forbidden—unconscious or conscious—wish for sexual pleasure with a person of the same sex. He found dread of homosexuality to be pathogenic in many major diagnostic conditions, and his closest followers extended the list until that factor was raised to being a cause in all psychic disorder. In time, it was carefully scrutinized, clinicians and theoreticians finding it too grand an explanation. Some suggested homosexuality was in itself a defense rather than an underlying cause (82, 123); others emphasized that male homosexuality, which seemed to Freud to spring primarily from a son’s disturbed relationship with his father, could be traced back to preoedipal disturbances in mother-son relationships (153, 3, 130).
In perhaps his greatest exposition of the role of latent homosexuality in causing illness, the Schreber case, Freud felt he demonstrated the etiology of paranoid states, including psychosis, to be dread of homosexuality; he saw homosexuality in males especially as a pathology of the resolution of a boy’s oedipal conflict with his father (27). This idea has subsequently been well criticized by those emphasizing the role of frustration, trauma, and conflict in the earliest stages of life. With these later workers the mother-infant relationship moves to the fore of the explanation. Some (125, 153) suggest that within the violent, hostile potentials of the oral stage there is also embedded in Schreber and by extension in other psychotics, as well as in those overtly homosexual, a desire to merge again with mother. For our present purpose, we can note, as did MacAlpine and Hunter years ago (88), that what Freud called Schreber’s homosexuality is in fact a surge of transsexual impulses: Schreber’s body is changing to female. And that impulse is one of the sources of the dread of homosexuality, which might better be called "dread of transsexualism."