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Since the inception of psychoanalysis, Freud has been accused of being a “pansexualist.” In fact, the scandal caused by his sexual theories would be better explained by a more proper appellation: Freud was a “pan-bisexualist,” for bisexuality is a foundational psychoanalytic concept. It has far-reaching implications and yet is still felt to be ambiguous, contradictory, and full of impasses.
Considering that he had made great strides in his understanding of the riddle of sexuality, in a letter dated August 7, 1901, Freud announced that he was planning to write a book with the title Human Bisexuality, and asked his close friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess to be his coauthor: “The idea is yours. You remember my telling you years ago, when you were still a nose specialist and surgeon, that the solution lay in sexuality.” Freud added: “Several years ago you corrected me, saying that it lay in bisexuality—and I see you were right” (Masson 1985, p. 448). Indeed, Freud wanted to transform Fliess's ideas of a material, corporeal bisexuality, based on a comparison of nose bleeds and menstruation, into a universal psychoanalytic notion, freed from the constraints of biology.
The joint writing project never took place. Nonetheless, Frank Sulloway (1979) notes that the book on bisexuality that Freud wanted Fliess to join him in writing was actually published: “That seminal work eventually came out—minus Fliess's cooperation—under the better-known title Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (p. 187). There Freud (1905) ascribed to bisexuality a foundational role in his theory of sexuality—it was of equal importance for both genders. It was “a decisive factor” in the “understanding of the sexual manifestations that are