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THIS PAPER draws together thoughts on observations made when I found that I had had a number of young women patients who had certain problems in common about their own sexual identity. I did not select these women to work with on that account, and nor did they all come to me from the same source of referral. I am presenting four of them, none of whom worked with me in psychotherapy for less than eighteen months. Two of them were with me for three or four years, and one for five. All of them came more than once a week, and some of them three times a week for long periods.
It was in 1970 that a patient in her mid-twenties presented herself for therapeutic help. She had had a long, very important, sexual partnership with a woman friend who lived with her, but also a more recent sexual liaison with a male colleague, who wanted to marry her. She was torn in two by the conflict and was looking for someone to resolve it for her. That was the beginning of our work together, and some time later I remembered that another young woman patient had had similar difficulties, although in quite a different setting. The others followed.
These women have a fear of being thought ‘Lesbian’. The most firmly fixed of them all in homosexual practices firmly stated on arrival that she was bisexual, although up to that time she had had no heterosexual experience; she did, however, have close and affectionate men friends. I was unhappy about any concept or nomenclature that might set any one of them into a determined sexual pattern, and I felt fairly sure that their sexual identity was still quite fluid, although they were all in their mid-twenties. They seemed to be not yet fully formed, and I believed that their recurring passionate relationships with women derived from maternal deprivation, although I could not then link up this probability with the boyish traits these women showed. They called themselves bisexual because they avoided the homosexual label. I hesitated to talk of penis envy,