Transvestism

Transvestism, as elaborated across two moments in Lacan's Seminars 4 and 5, names a structural position in the field of perversion that is distinct from—yet continuous with—fetishism. In Seminar 4 (jacques-lacan-seminar-4, p.157), Lacan articulates the difference between the fetish-veil (an object that screens the subject from the absent maternal phallus, holding the lack in suspense) and the enveloping fetish that functions as an aegis: not a screen between the subject and the absence, but a protective mantle in which the subject identifies with the female personage (the mother). Transvestism is thus the point at which the fetishistic logic of the veil gives way to identificatory logic—the subject does not merely prop a substitute object against the maternal lack but wraps himself in that lack's very source. This is an imaginary identification with the mother as phallic, pre-castrated figure, not a symbolic inscription of difference.

In Seminar 5 (jacques-lacan-seminar-5, p.275), Lacan repositions transvestism within the triangle of mother–child–phallus. Where the ordinary resolution of the Oedipal impasse requires the child to renounce being the exclusive object of the mother's desire—accepting that the phallus is a third term held by the Other—transvestism marks the failure or refusal of this renunciation. The subject cannot sustain the separation between the phallus and the mother; instead, it must intimate within itself their conjunction. This internal fusion bypasses the Name-of-the-Father's symbolic work of separating jouissance from the object of desire, leaving the subject fixated on the imaginary phallic completeness of the mother rather than entering the circuit of alienated, signified desire.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-4, transvestism occupies the threshold between fetishism and a deeper perverse identification. The canonical concept of the Fetish shows that the fetish operates as a veil over lack, simultaneously acknowledging and disavowing castration. Transvestism extends this logic by shifting from the veiling function to the enveloping/aegis function: where the fetishist maintains a veil object between himself and the absent phallus, the transvestite takes on the imaginary body of the mother herself, collapsing the distance that the fetish-veil preserved. This aligns with the Identification canonical's distinction between imaginary identification (with the Ideal Ego, a specular image) and symbolic identification: transvestism is an imaginary identification with the mother's pre-castrated phallic wholeness, not an inscription within symbolic difference.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-5, transvestism is positioned as one outcome of the child's failure to accept the Phallus as an irreducibly third term—a signifier held by the Other that installs lack and mediates desire. The canonical account of the Phallus as the signifier of desire and castration clarifies why the transvestite's "conjunction of the phallus and the mother" within himself constitutes a short-circuit: it refuses the structural separation that the Name-of-the-Father (another cross-referenced canonical) enforces. As a Perversion, transvestism is thus a specific response to the Real's pressure on the Imaginary plane—confirming the cross-referenced Imaginary's role as the domain of ego-constituting specular identification, rivalrous passion, and phallic illusion—one that refuses the symbolic path of alienated desire in favor of imaginary completeness.

Seminar V · Formations of the UnconsciousJacques Lacan · 1957 (p.275)

If it is necessary that he bring about within himself, intimately, the conjunction of the phallus and the mother without which nothing in him can be satisfied, then we have transvestism.

The phrase "conjunction of the phallus and the mother" is theoretically loaded because it names precisely what the Oedipal, symbolic order is supposed to disjoin: the phallus as third term separating the subject from the mother, and the mother as the site of primordial desire. The adverb "intimately" further specifies that this conjunction is not symbolic or external but imaginary and bodily—enacted within the subject's own flesh—marking transvestism as a perverse solution that re-fuses what the Name-of-the-Father was meant to cleave apart.