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Work of sight is achieved,now for some heart-workon all those images, prisoned within you;for you overcame them, but do not knowthem as yet.Behold, O man within, the maiden withinyou!—creature wrung from a thousandnatures, creature only outwrung, butnever as yet, belov'd. —R. M. RILKE, Turning
There has been little discussion of bisexual love in psychoanalytic literature because it has been confused mostly with latent homosexual love. Freud, in an early paper 'Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality' (1908), did broach this subject. The argument offered here is that for certain persons bisexual love is an authentic and necessary human experience, which can become distorted through repressions and reaction-formations as much as heterosexual love. What characterizes bisexual love is that it is almost exclusively an ego-experience, that is, the ego's way of relating to and cherishing an object of the same gender identity. In such relationships the id-energy is neutralized and turned to use in the ego's passionate interest in the object. The climax of such cathexis of the object is ego-orgasm. The pathological distortions here can lead to ego-perversities in object-relating, just as in the area of id-experience they lead to perversions proper.