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Rosine Perelberg is a Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and author and editor of numerous highly acclaimed books. In her latest book she brings together contemporary British and French Freudian and post-Freudian writers in a rich exploration of psychic bisexuality. It arises out of a collaboration between Perelberg and Monique Cournut-Janin that brought together British and French analysts to discuss the theme of sexuality, in a series of meetings between 1998 and 2012, alternating between London and Paris. This book is a testimony to the stimulating and influential dialogue that emerged from these meetings.
Bisexuality is defined by Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, 52) as:
[A] notion introduced into psycho-analysis by Freud, under the influence of Wilhelm Fliess, according to which every human being is endowed constitutionally with both masculine and feminine sexual dispositions; these can be identified in the conflicts which the subject experiences in assuming his own sex.
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This pithy definition belies the complexity and contentiousness of this concept from its very conception. Juliet Mitchell, in her Foreword, refers to Einstein's claim that any theory must start in the absurd (xvii). In the final chapter, Gregorio Kohon reminds us there is nothing more absurd than the origins of Freud's theory of psychic bisexuality, born out of his idealised “love” relationship with Fliess, a rather crazy charlatan (259). These origins are explored by Cournut-Janin (90). Fliess had in mind a biological basis for his theories of bisexuality and Freud cautioned against tying psychosexuality to anatomy. It was a psychic bisexuality he had in mind, although he remained equivocal on this to the end, always hoping that the concept could be given a biological basis. It has become further complicated by the fact that, in common parlance, bisexuality has come to mean someone of either sex who is consciously attracted to both men and women.
This book places us firmly