- Joined
- Jun 13, 2020
Read this slightly older article today and thought of this thread: Link / Archive Link
When we investigate the childhood of the man who believes he is a woman, we often see what attachment theorists call an “intense but insecure maternal attachment.” Mothers of gender-disturbed children usually report high levels of stress during the child's earliest years. When the mother is alternately deeply involved in the boy's life, and then unexpectedly disengaged, her erratic and unpredictable emotional engagement leaves the child feeling profoundly insecure.
The term that psychoanalysts use to describe this profound insecurity is “abandonment—annhilation trauma.” In early infancy, the child's sense of self is very fragile. Because the boy’s very existence is dependent upon this emotional connection, if the mother abandons him (emotionally or physically), he feels like he is going to die— “be annihilated.” We know this fear is rooted in all mammals as a basic survival instinct.
The infant’s solution to this unbearable anxiety is to resort to the fantasy that “I am Mommy”: “When Mommy is gone, I ‘become' her and will be safe.” That infantile defense is is not a normal, mature identification process, but is an emergency safety maneuver that generates an “as-if” personality.
The infantile dynamic of "imitative attachment" is such that "keeping Mommy inside" becomes truly a life-or-death issue - "Either I become Mommy, or I cease to exist." This explains why gender-disturbed boys are willing to tolerate social rejection for their opposite-sex role-playing--it feels like death to abandon this perception of themselves as a female.
The phenomenon of "imitative attachment" explains why gender-disturbed boys do not display femininity in a natural, biologically based way, as do girls; but rather, demonstrate a one-dimensional caricature of femininity--exaggerated interest in girls' clothes, makeup, purse-collecting, etc. and a mimicry of a feminine manner of speaking.