You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Erik Gann opened the panel by repeating the reaction of one of his patients on finding out that Gann was participating in a panel on castration and bisexuality: the patient found the topic ‘one of those bizarre-sounding … esoteric, seemingly nonsensical and yet intimidating psychoanalytic topics’. People doubtless have various reasons for reacting to the psychoanalytic view of castration and bisexuality so strongly. One of the peculiarities of the treatment of the topic in the literature is that psychoanalytic theory harbours three very different notions of bisexuality. There are the two biological or constitutional ways in which everyone is bisexual, namely, having some measure of libidinal interest in objects of both sexes and harbouring a mixture of masculine and feminine features, and there is the clinical or manifest notion in which ‘bisexual’ refers to a specific kind of sexual object choice, namely, the choice of both males and females as sexual objects.
The Chairman centred his remarks on the clinical notion. According to Gann, the traditional psychoanalytic account found in Freud is that sexual interest in general and object choice in particular (male, female or bisexual) is determined by how the Oedipus complex is resolved, where the predominant shaping force is castration anxiety. In line with the anatomical differences between boys and girls, this anxiety takes two distinct forms. In boys, Freud held it to consist in ‘the terrifying fantasy of the threat of castration’, as Gann put it. In girls, Freud held it to take the form of the angry, despairing, envious fantasy of having been castrated. Depending on the vicissitudes of the passage through the oedipal stage, a boy or girl will become predominantly heterosexual, predominantly homosexual, or clinically or manifestly bisexual.
We are over ninety years beyond Freud's first important articulation of these ideas (1905, Three Essays on Sexuality, S.E. 7) and a great deal has happened in the meantime.