ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the psychodynamic and biographical roots of a transvestite development based on clinical findings of five-year high-frequency psychoanalysis and follow-up 24 years after termination of treatment. It describes the Research Subcommittee for Conceptual Research: that the three branches of clinical, conceptual, and empirical research in psychoanalysis can supplement each other in a productive way. Extra-clinical empirical research is indispensable for the development of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline and for the dialogue with the non-psychoanalytic scientific world. Transvestism, the unconscious fantasy to be an omnipotent man-woman, constitutes a narcissistic defence against the unbearable feeling of dependency on the primary object. In the 1980s psychoanalytic theorists contended that unsolved conflicts during the individuation-separation phase presented an additional biographical and psychodynamic background for a transvestite symptom formation. The transvestite patient described, and most of the cases reported in the clinical psychoanalytical literature so far—castration anxieties and unsolved oedipal conflicts have been one unconscious source for a perverse development.
