G. No. No, no, no.
S. It’s different from the whole penis thing. It’s got nothing to do with anatomy or with the clothes you were wearing.
G. Right. What else would I wear if I was a man? The clothes are immaterial. . . After we talked yesterday . . . yesterday I didn’t feel like a man [any longer]. I didn’t feel like anything. I felt good, you know; I didn’t think about am I a man or a woman or what have I got on or ... I wonder how that happened? That's the strange thing.
S. Has it happened before?
G. No.
S. The first time in your life?
G. Yes.
S. And all because I gave you money and told you to buy something good. What was it like, yesterday?
G. Yesterday it was ishooohhhhh, wow! “Wow, I can go out; I know who I am and I’m walking with my sister and my sister knows who am I"; and the man in the store that sold me the duck said, “Thank you, ma’am” . . . You knew who I was and you gave me . . . you gave me the money to spend because you know who I am. And when I came here with my sister
[later in the day, for a social visit] with the duck, I wanted to put my arms around you and hug you and say, “Oh, thank you.” And I did say, “Thank you.” S. Now how much beyond what you get when you steal is that feeling?
G. There’s no comparison. When I get that thing in my hand, you know, I still ... I have to think about the whole thing. I know what I am when I’m going into the house—it’s obvious, you know—I’m just a man getting in. But there’s something about being a man that I know is wrong, you know—I haven’t got the words to tell you, I can’t ... I just want to be warm and ... I want somebody to know who I am ... What do I want to be? I don’t think I want to be a man. You looked at me yesterday, and you knew who I was. I can be out there on the street and look at myself and not know who I am . . . How do I know who I am— nobody else knows? Nobody ever told me who I was. I need to be somebody definite .. . you know. Yesterday I was real to you. When I’ve broken in and I have the thing in hand, I feel good about myself, but there’s something bad ... it’s like, I don’t have a right to be what I am at that time; I have to be punished for what I am at that particular time. But I can never really be “me” until I can have it without stealing. But yesterday, you said, “I’m going to give it to you. I’m giving to you—it’s not a loan or anything . . .”
She has given us some idea of why she steals. As an infant, she craved closeness to her frozen mother, from whom she could extract almost no milk or warmth; and she yearned to be part of an intact, loving family. In parts of the ritual we can see her working out her scenario, built, on an oral level, out of risk, mystery, and reversal of victim into victor quite as the erotic story is for excitement on a genital level.
In keeping with the proposition that all the elements in such story lines could be accounted for if we knew enough, let us turn next to the hour following the one above. The subject is her maleness, a quality invented to assuage her devastating vulnerability. Unwanted by her mother when bom, as she grew she saw how her brother —a few years older—was admired; she decided it was maleness that made her mother desire her brother and freeze her out. So from age four on she had a penis; it signified maleness: strength and power to prevent her from feeling cold, starved, abandoned, and humiliated. (See [146] for more about her penis.) But delusion was not enough, nor even the use of women’s bodies, especially breasts, to quiet hunger. She also needed a piece of reality she could literally hold in her hand and rub on or put in her mouth. Stealing the gratifying objects provided the comfort for a moment, and in stealing them she revenged herself in fantasy on her ungiving mother.
But this bad act demanded punishment (or rather, as in all masochistic acts, only that punishment one chooses for oneself; no matter how painful in reality, it is at bottom a controlled, partial, gratifying, libidinized—fake— punishment). To satisfy her immense guilt for stealing what her mother (by now the world) would not give her freely, she briefly renounced her penis: in undefended femaleness, she arranged with equanimity her “rape”— penis, and invulnerability, returning only when that was completed.
We can see the form her maleness takes in the ritual of breaking in. It needs little imagination to know she senses herself as a penis thrusting into a woman’s body —her mother—a return to primordial bliss. This symbolism approximates that of perverse acts, yet the purpose —and result—is not erotic pleasure; and to call it a perversion blurs the meaning of that word.
S. At what point do you first sense that you're a man? G. In walking up to the house, I guess. I have to be
walking. I don’t feel like a man when I’m in a car. Why wouldn’t I feel like that in my car? I guess it’s because it’s my car.
S. You mean: when you get out of the car, you have disconnected from yourself as a female—physically disconnected. But you dressed in advance appropriately for what’s going to happen. You’ve got on a man’s shirt, a man’s pants, tennis shoes [for silence and safe footing]—clothes which used to be exclusively men’s clothes when you were a kid. What kind of underwear do you have on? [Patient looks stunned.] You forgot about that.
G. Yeah. I don’t even know if I wear underwear. I must wear underwear. I guess I just wear my regular underwear, my bra and my pants . . . That “man” has a bra and pants on!
S. O.K. You’re out of the car and you’re a man and you’re looking over the neighborhood for the right house. How do you choose?
G. It’s got to be a home. It’s got a mother and a father and children. You can tell because maybe they have a bicycle in the yard . . .
S. The person then who climbs through the window is the man?
G. Uh-huh ... No; I’m not sure. I can think about going up to the house and I can think about having it in my hand ... it must be ... it has to be ... It has to be a man that goes through the window. Who else would go into that kind of an opening? It’s just that kind of opening for a man, you know.
S. How do you go through it? Show me your body going through.
G. No. It’s too embarrassing ... I go in head first. Just pull my body in. I do the same thing each time. I go in head first. I pull myself in with my arms, with my hands. I don’t know how. Don’t ask me. I could just as well go in feet first; it would be more easy sometimes. But it’s always head first. You can’t go in too fast; you might make some noise ... I don’t want to talk to you any more.
S. When you go in the window, are you fat or thin? [In reality she was fat.]
G. I’m my real self. Thin . . . When I go through the window, I’m on my stomach. My legs are hanging straightly. I guess like this. [Her feet, ankles, and legs are touching; the arms are stiffly, fully extended on a straight line with her rigid body and head.] Like a polliwog. One piece. It wouldn’t be curves or it wouldn’t be sharp angles. If I was a thing, I would say: I would go in as straight as an arrow. I’m warm and I'm real and I’m that thing that is real . . . you know. I’m a man that’s real. Yet you’d be confused. There would be something wrong. See, it’s dark and there I am with short hair and pants on, but I have that thing in my hand. So how are you going to know if I’m a boy or a girl? You have to know. How am I going to know if you don’t know?
S. Is that missing every time you're in the house, that somebody hasn’t told you?
G. What do you think I have to get fucked for? [Her overriding hope in treatment was that she might someday fully restore her sense of femaleness and accept herself wholly as a woman. “Getting fucked” served to force her to full awareness that her body was female.]