Chapter 14 The ‘Perpetual Orgy’: Hysterical Phantasies, Bisexuality and the Question of Bad Faith1

The only way of tolerating existence is to lose

oneself in [phantasy] as in a perpetual orgy.

(With apologies to G. Flaubert and M. Vargas Llosa)

I imagine all I say to be true, neither more

nor less, and in my imagination I draw her as

I would have her, both to her beauty and her rank.

The last paragraph in Freud’s (1908 a) extraordinary paper ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’ runs:

In psychoanalytic treatment it is very important to be prepared for a symptom to have a bisexual meaning. We need not then be surprised or disconcerted if a symptom seems to persist undiminished even though one of its sexual meanings has been solved; it may be maintained by a meaning that belongs to the opposite sex and that we may not have suspected. During the treatment of cases like this we can also observe that while one sexual meaning is being analysed, the patient finds it convenient constantly to switch the thoughts that come to him into the field of contrary meaning, as if onto a neighbouring track.

The title of this chapter borrows not only from Freud’s title, but also from this very intriguing idea: the patient ‘finds it convenient constantly to switch the thoughts that come to him into the field of contrary meaning’; the choice of words here, ‘finds it convenient’, inevitably suggesting the possibility of a measure of conscious awareness: the endlessly bewildering question of bad faith.

This is the preceding paragraph:

The bisexual meaning of hysterical symptoms that is, in any event, demonstrable in numerous cases is undoubtedly interesting as evidence for the claim I have advanced, that man’s postulated bisexual disposition can be observed with particular clarity in the psychoanalysis of psychoneurotics. A completely analogous process occurs in the same field when someone masturbating tries in their conscious phantasies to empathise with both the man and the woman in the imagined situation. Further counterparts i