These latter modifications, with which I agree, push the pathogenic conflicts back toward earliest infancy. They all emphasize that bad mothering, innate defects in the infant, or both traumatically disrupt what should be a happy symbiosis. Still, it is well to recall also that, for many infants, there are nonconflictual, nondefensive aspects of this merging: for some, the experience was often simply marvelous. Not all infants have the same symbiotic experience with their mothers. For some it is bitter —and they are thus in danger. But for some it is joyous. Yet to the extent it is the latter, even these fortunate infants may be at risk, for a dangerous remnant is left behind as the boy works his way out of the symbiosis toward masculinity. In other words, for males, not only is a deprived symbiosis a threat to development but so, in a different way, is good-enough mothering, and more so, too-gratifying mothering. By pointing up this nonconflictual aspect, perhaps I can draw the concept of merging from the special case of psychopathology to the general one of normative psychology. The transsexual is our bridge.
We have seen how a disturbed, unhappy mother, with a need to preserve the one experience of goodness she has ever had, will make superhuman efforts to prevent pain, frustration, trauma, and conflict from developing in her infant. She surrounds him with the pleasures of her all-giving body, never letting go of him because of the good feelings his presence produces in her and her wish to protect him from experiencing the bad infancy and childhood to which she was exposed. We have followed the argument that normal mothering in the best circumstances follows a similar pattern, though of less intensity and duration (cf. 155). We know that in good-enough mothering, episodes of blissful merging occur. Therefore, it may be that imbedded in every male there remains, even as the years pass, at least a trace of that earliest merging, a “primary identification” with his female mother and therefore with her femaleness and femininity. (The quotes indicate my belief that there is more to this process, especially in its earliest stages, than what is usually called identification; see below: the “biopsychic.” “The infant’s dependence on the mother . . . does not involve identification; identification being a complex state of affairs inapplicable to the early stages of infancy” [155, p. 301].) The same tendency for merging in a female need not be a threat to gender identity; it only augments or at least helps sustain femininity in her.
Gender Symbiosis
Gender symbiosis is the aspect of the symbiosis that transmits to and from infant and mother attitudes and information about both partners’ masculinity and femininity. Unfortunately, the mechanisms that keep an infant thus attached are not yet understood. Psychoanalytic theories need, I think, some of the findings and concepts of learning theorists; these, although as yet rudimentary in research on humans, can at least help us speculate—as follows.
These mechanisms, in the first months of life, are “biopsychic,” by which I mean that stimuli from the environment (and probably less sharply sensed stimuli from the inner environment, such as pain or proprioception) set up changes in the nervous system that function (more or less) permanently as neurophysiological sources of motivation, the change now serving as a nonmental “memory.” (The quotation marks indicate that this is psychologically a different experience from what is commonly called memory; how it might be related physiologically to psychic memory has not yet been worked out.) Examples are imprinting, classical conditioning, visceral conditioning, and perhaps certain forms of operant conditioning.
By nonmental I mean that the stimuli and the changes they bring have no psychic representation and never did. These new foci for behavior therefore are not remembered, in the ordinary sense of the word, nor are they felt by any of the senses. They cannot be recalled, for they never existed as part of mental life. They are more silent than what is commonly meant by “unconscious” and are a different category to be added to what Freud referred to as the sources of “drives” (“instincts”) (29). They are as silent, as, say, the effects of hormones.* (See the discussion in chapter 6 on free will and determinism.)
If these notions apply to research on infantile development, then personality development cannot be fully understood by means of the technique used in a psychoanalysis. As Racker says (119, p. 79), “The study of transference has been one of the most important sources of knowledge regarding the child’s psychological processes.” Exactly: processes, but not actual experiences. Freud hints of this in his warning that often egosyntonic character structure is beyond modification by psychoanalysis (34). We need minute, systematized observation
•I am in no way suggesting that these nonmental forces, the province especially of learning theorists, are all there is to early psychic development. As lime passes and object representations, under the influence of drives, gather into memories and fantasies, mother's influence helps cause her infant's learning to become enriched, cognitive, mental.
of infantile behavior in its natural state, which especially includes mother, the ambiance she creates, and those of her attitudes and behavior that touch her infant, to provide us with more information about personality development.
With this detour, I am suggesting a flimsy but perhaps someday usable framework on which to hang experimental data, observations, and theory about earliest stages of psychic development. At present, the framework serves me as a rationalization, a comfort in this period of little data, to “explain,” in the transsexual, the transmission of mother’s femininity into her infant son so that by around a year (more or less) he openly behaves in a feminine manner. In fact, of course, the only data we have now are that a mother with a particular form of bisexuality and a father with an intense passivity and inability to be close to his son have a beautiful and graceful infant who stimulates this mother to set up an excessively close and blissful symbiosis from which the rest of the world is excluded for too long. Then, at the time when first gender behavior can be measured, it is feminine. There are no other data yet. What happens inside that symbiosis has not yet been seen grossly or microscopically, and so I have shoved into that vacuum this theoretical framework.
But this theory is not crucial for our main argument regarding the role of symbiosis anxiety in creating masculinity. For that, it is sufficient to say that the urge to return to a state of oneness with mother, long known to analysts, remains as a permanent fundament of character structure and, depending on one’s life experience after infancy, may serve as a stronger or weaker locus of fixation for regression. (It is probably latent in every “act” of regression.) I am only emphasizing now—again, what is well known from Freud’s early works on—that such regression is often accompanied by what he called “homosexuality” and what I think of as “a transsexual tendency.” We recall the finding that fear of changing sex is ubiquitous (some say universal) in male psychotics but infrequent in females (whose delusional-hallucinatory systems, when sexual, are most often heterosexual [62, 79, 81, 107]). We also observe that in the general population—in most cultures and most eras about which we have information—men seem more concerned to preserve their masculinity against real or imagined insult than women their femininity.