Intimacy and the Fantasy of Becoming Both Sexes*

This presentation might be entitled, “Lessons About Love and Reality from Some Familiar Authors and Patients.” It was stimulated in part by the prevalent mechanical approaches of what has come to be called “sex therapy” and a tendency to forget an old truth—the most powerful aphrodisiac is love. Its aim is to contribute something to a way of listening to our patients' accounts of their sexuality. One consequence of such listening is profound skepticism about aspects of human behavior and identity which seem real and immutable. There is no one engaged in the psycho-therapeutic endeavor who has not repeatedly experienced transformations in his or her perception of a solid, consistent public identity into something oscillating, quite different, or even ephemeral, as the private aspects of his patient become apparent. Jose Luis Borges (, p. 117) once described the arrival of such subterranean knowledge: “Strangely enough he never suspected the truth, but all at once it struck him. He realized that he was unable to recall the shapes or sounds or colors of his dreams … and that they were not dreams. They were his reality. …”

I will support the traditional view—in disrepute in many quarters—that the most rewarding and personally fulfilling sexual behavior occurs within the context of a loving and intimate relationship. I will also propose that true intimacy may require the abandonment of some conventional aspects of gender identity. But I recognize at the same time that the search for intimacy may be distorted by a conflictful unconscious wish to possess within one's self the qualities of being simultaneously male and female.

Uncertainty of gender identity, shifts in its expression, and the feelings associated with it—regardless of biological status—were