Introduction: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Bisexuality

Although, for psychoanalysis, difference is sexual, the question of bisexuality is related to psychoanalytic theory as a whole.

In a letter to Fliess in 1896, Freud used the word bisexuality for the first time:

In order to account for why the outcome [of premature sexual experience (see above)] is sometimes perversion and sometimes neurosis, I avail myself of the bisexuality of all human beings. In a purely male being there would be a surplus of male release at the two sexual barriers as well – that is, pleasure would be generated and consequently perversion; in purely female beings there would be a surplus of unpleasurable substance at these times. In the first phases the releases would be parallel: that is, they would produce a normal surplus of pleasure.

Freud was to use the term “bisexuality” forty-four times throughout his work. In the initial phase, at the time of his correspondence with Fliess, Freud was still concerned with matching his ideas on bisexuality to the anatomical–biological substratum proposed by Fliess, to whom he attributed the discovery of bisexuality. It is only progressively that

bisexuality acquired a more fundamental psychological meaning in his work. In time Freud was to regard bisexuality as an inherent characteristic of all human beings. Indeed, as I develop below, every single one of his clinical cases may be understood in terms of the interplay between masculine and feminine identifications. In a letter to Fliess on 7 August 1901, he was to write:

And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called “Human Bisexuality”. It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted me to say – the last and the most profound. … So perhaps I must borrow even more from you; perhaps my sense of honesty will force me to ask you to co-author the work with me.

He adds:

thereby the anatomical–biological