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At times, the clinician leaves his office and is fortunate enough to wend his way to the theater. One exceptional venture led him to rare enchantment. He came across so riveting a performance that it not only moved him but changed his perspective once he returned to seeing patients in his office. Ideas about gender and adolescence, gender and early infancy, gender and the delights of life were all transformed by the evening at the theater.
Adolescence is a time of glorious but painful agonies when, in the face of great uncertainties about oneself, a gender identity gels. Yet the pressure to settle that sexual identity is not the only force exploding tumultuously within the young person. For while adolescence is subject to the compelling command of both lusty and romantic desires, it is also a time when everything is thrown off balance by a tidal pull toward individuating self-definition, often manifested by a rash readiness to discard established constraints.
As gripping as are the feminine and masculine urges of adolescents and the pressure for independence, behind these remains the desire for fusion, for an oceanic unity of being, for a self fully at one with the whole human fabric and, concomitantly, for a sexuality not differentiated by gender. It is often forgotten that there is a unity that precedes individuation and a sexuality that is non-gendered but comes before both bisexuality and male/female identity. Growth does not dissolve these prior states, which continue to lie behind and alongside the later aspects more familiar to our view.
This early sexuality, one that might be called polymorphously normal (as opposed to polymorphously perverse), can nowadays be seen most easily from a distance. Shakespeare, whose breadth of view is ever astonishing, not only brings us