Psychological Tests: The Uninvited Guest

The second battery of psychological tests was administered a year after SRS. Initially, Tina kept up her facade, but eventually became quite depressed. She admitted that she had lied to her therapist about how satisfied she was with the phalloplasty because she did not want to "let him down." The battery of psychological tests were re administered (at my request) when Tina (now calling herself Tim) was judged to have successfully overcome both her depression and her regret at the surgery (almost a year later).

On the WAIS, Tina scored a verbal IQ of 119, a performance IQ of 120, and a full scale IQ of 120. These scores were congruent with her previous intellectual testing scores. While there were some elevations of her subscores, the examiner attributed some of this to Tina's familiarity with the tests through personal experience and her having recently taken a college level course on psychological testing. However, she revealed the same basic pattern of inter and intra test scatter, and her thinking was still viewed as inefficient. Her score on the picture completion subtest of the WAIS was significantly elevated from her past score. The nature of the task on this subtest was to identify "missing parts" of pictures. Tina's responses suggested that she was more vigilant about her environment and, now having a penis, might be evidencing less castration anxiety. There was also the suggestion that she was moving from a more fantasy dominated life to one in which action and acting out played a greater role.

Tina's TAT stories suggested that she was now more conscious of the themes suggested by the first Rorschach. She was feeling more estranged and alienated from people and despairing of ever having good interpersonal relations. Tina implied that her decision to have SRS might have been a bad one; post surgery she felt more like a misfit. Her feelings of estrangement from people intensified. She was more aware of how she isolated her affect and employed rationalizations, and was growing increasingly depressed and coming to view her SRS as having failed to provide her with a means of personal salvation. Above all, Tina seemed preoccupied with her relationship with father. She felt that he infantilized her. She was frightened of his strength (that is, her perception of his strength) and power over her (which suggested an unresolved transference relationship to her therapist). Apparently SRS had abrogated her defensive identification with the aggressor. In effect, her real penis was not as powerful as her imaginary one. However, on the surface, Tina stated that she valued her new penis and verbalized satisfaction with the surgery. In spite of her ambivalence her therapist viewed her surgery as a success. (see PROPOSITION 1: THE SO CALLED "STABLE" COURSE OF FEMALE TRANSSEXUALISM PART IX)