Meaning of Life Crisis and Self-Attitude of Fetishistic Transvestites (Internet Research)

Abstract

The determinants of the long-standing and relatively widespread practice of fetishistic transvestites have been so far insufficiently researched by the psychological science. In the present paper on a Russian sample of fetishistic transvestites of mature and young age (N=120) mediated by virtual reality, an Internet study of the severity of their meaning life crisis and the specifics of self-attitude, which have a deep systematic impact on self-management of the life process, was carried out within the norm. It is shown that the overwhelming majority of fetishistic transvestites do not experience a meaning-life crisis, and their self-attitude is divided into dichotomous lines of manifestation – balance in conditions of confidentiality and dissonance in the public environment. It is established that the meaning-of-life crisis provides a favorable corrective effect on self-abasement, blocking the trajectory of minimizing self-abasement to an abnormal state by the method of self-justification of personal experience of fetishistic transvestism. It is revealed that the absence of a meaning-of-life crisis is characterized by the expanded personal plasticity of fetishistic transvestites in transphobic social situations, maintaining their state of self-esteem at an acceptable level, while their autosympathy as a veiled dimension of self-attitude is contrastively encapsulated from the meaning of life crisis.