The transvestite and his wife

This study reports the analysis of a transvestite man through focusing on his marital interaction and his wife's complementary behavior to his perversion. In his marriage, this patient dramatically recapitulated many of his infantile core conflicts, fixations, and traumas associated with his cross-dressing. These were: (1) the marital crisis which brought him into analysis and its associations with his split gender identifications; (2) his wife's ability to force him into cross-dressing on cue; (3) the extent to which his cross-dressing was dependent on the degree of psychic separateness he felt from his wife; and (4) his and his wife's complementary transvestite fantasies. Both this man and his wife's attempted to use their marriage as a cure for resolving their complementary transvestite problem. The extent to which they were able to accomplish this before the husband's "breakdown" (brought about by the wife's affair) was examined. The nature of his transvestite transference--what was termed his "John Wayne transference"--provided him with the ideal vehicle for the transferential working-through of the many aspects of his transvestite pathology. The continuance of a strong positive and unanalyzed transference after the formal end of the analysis was commented upon.