In transvestism, we also saw masculinity. The usual adult transvestite is a man who, however flawed his gender identity, lives comfortably enough as a masculine person most of the time. He is, however, intermittently propelled into his masquerade of cross-dressing. He does this precisely on behalf of his penis: when excited and in order to have a gratifying penile experience. It is when he disguises his masculinity that he attains the height of maleness, that is, with a potent erection.
The hostility of perversion (and its milder version in the “normal”) is a reaction to trauma, a turning outward to find a victim to suit one’s revenge. But if one has not felt victimized, then one will not be so motivated. Some confirmation for the thesis comes from those whom I call transsexual. There is in them an odd absence of hostility, a blandness in our relationship, described in more detail elsewhere (147), that persists for years, without end as yet, and unlike what I have ever sensed in any other patients. They treat me as their mothers treated them: as things, as appendages, rather than as separate people. I never have felt in danger from a transsexual, but a painfully large number of my other patients with gender identity disorders have escaped being murderers (of others or of me) only by hard and frightening therapeutic work. One is reported on at book length elsewhere (146).
Discussion
As described here, masculinity in males starts as a movement away from the blissful and dangerous, forever remembered and forever yearned for, mother-infant symbiosis. The male infant who is to become masculine must be blessed with a mother who encourages him to separate from her and to individuate appropriately. If she cannot allow him this, she will prolong and thereby augment his primary state of femininity; and if, on the other hand, she beats at him too harshly to forgo all she considers feminine, she may produce the frozen, brutal, phallic character that results when the possibilities of even momentary return to her are foreclosed (120, 136).
We are certainly familiar with the traumatic effects of anxiety and how it becomes a central factor in motivation. In the case of symbiosis anxiety we have a problem: we must account for an almost universal desire on the part of infants to separate themselves from a state of bliss and so to risk anxiety. We can measure the strength of that desire not only by the fact that almost all males develop some degree of masculinity despite the early symbiosis; also, it is known (137) what a monumental effort is required on the part of the transsexual boy’s mother to maintain the symbiosis she finds so precious. In accounting for the need to break from mother, some have observed how a mother respectful of maleness and masculinity will reward behavior she considers masculine, discourage that which she does not, time her ministrations to fit the child’s mood, capacity, and stage of development, and draw on her husband for necessary reservoirs of masculinity for her son. In addition, perhaps, hatred of mother’s badness assists the boy to separate. If, still further, we postulate innate mechanisms pushing the infant toward separation and favoring behavior that can be shaped into what mother feels is masculine, we may have a good enough explanation for the pleasure—the sense of mastery—that will motivate him to remove himself from her.
Once the boy has been acknowledged as a male and has begun to fix that sense of maleness and pride in masculinity into character structure, it becomes crucial that he raise a barrier—symbiosis anxiety—against his tendency to regress into his mother’s embrace. Herein, symbiosis anxiety serves an essential normalizing function, permitting the process of disidentifying and then individuation to proceed. Without this barrier, femininity will persist, the oedipal situation will not be perceived as a conflict, the knowledge of mother’s body as a separate and desired object (a root of later heterosexuality) will not develop, and masculinity will not be the happy end result.
Perhaps some of the uneasiness men feel about women—the mystery over which poets (male) sentimentalize—reflects the need to raise this barrier against the desire to merge with mother. This, then, could be one more contribution to the multiple causes of homosexuality; lying next to, or ev£n worse, penetrating a woman’s body would be too risky. The boy fears losing his masculinity and sense of maleness, not only by losing his precious, fragile penis but also because he may be overwhelmed by the desire to become one with the dark infinity of inner femaleness once again.* This could partly account for the many men who cannot live lovingly with a woman except for short periods and for those who, after intercourse, must get up and away quickly.
Much of this is not new. For instance, in a letter to Freud dated November 6, 1927, Lou Andreas-Saloml writes:
For women have never experienced the great shock of discovering the absence of their own penis in their mother. In the male it is this discovery which gives rise in the first place to the incest-situation, which confirms him as a male in relation to the female parent. Thus even before the incest-situation has arisen, he has been confronted with an overwhelming experience, which is totally suppressed and to which he never returns again in later life. Whereas the girl is concerned with real things and sensual experience, the man is haunted in the farthest recesses of his mind by a hidden and peculiar romanticism, an exciting piece of unreality, which inevitably continues to exercise a secret influence upon his love-life. Whereas, with the help of his castration fears, he works through the incest-situation in himself, diverts his secret desire from his mother and seeks to degrade her, along with her whole sex, more or less to the status of a whore, there nevertheless remains in him a primordial relationship to the “mother figure with a penis,” who was his sexual equal and yet much superior to himself, both protecting and surpassing him. He must find some solution to this situation; does he not do so perhaps in that love of the “masculine anaclitic type" which you have described for us (in The Ego and the Id)? This is in itself understandable—as a result of the battle against the incest, and of the exaggerated reverential tenderness which takes its place. If the process is successful, this is
•“The general failure of recognition of absolute dependence at the start contributes to the fear of WOMAN that is the lot of both men and women" (155, p. 304).
in part the result of the primordial experience, which seems in this way to re-establish a place for itself in the real world.
Perhaps the fetishist is precisely a person with whom this process has not succeeded, but who then condenses it into an absurd fragment of reality, a boot, a lock of hair or something else, which he then invests with a fantastic splendour. But it is just this absurdity which explains the full significance of the successful libidinal development of the normal person. It has always seemed to me that the male, despite his more conscious and firmer adjustment to reality, nevertheless possessed a spark of a more romantic or “idealistic” or deeply imaginative—or call it what you will—capacity than the female, for which reason he is the more creative. He has resigned more deeply in face of that primordial disappointment and has kept his most imaginative faculties intact untarnished by reality, whence they erupt into creative activity—while the female, despite all sentimental tendencies on her part, never entirely relinquished reality, and so can adopt a sober and harmonious relationship to it. (116, pp. 168-»6g)