Chapter 1 The Beautiful Differences1

The unconscious is said to have no knowledge of time. However, there are many signs that some fairly striking characteristics of our own are the progressive attenuation of conventional manifestations of sexual difference, even a trend towards the complete reversal of masculinity and femininity, hand in hand with a strange bisexual claim. The more of a stake this claims, the more it seems that sexually specific characteristics – which are undoubtedly among these “beautiful differences of nature” that Freud deplored Groddeck for seeking to disparage “in favour of tempting unity” (Letter of 5 June 1917, in E. L. Freud, 1960, p. 324) – tend to diminish, even disappear.

Does the half made-up, grotesque and disturbing countenance of the hero of Stanley Kubrick’s sinister 1971 film A Clockwork Orange bring together in one hard-hitting, symbolic opening shot these recent psychosexual vicissitudes in our society? Does the strange expression that emanates from these ill-matched eyes, one with long mascara-coated lashes and fully adorned with make-up, and the other completely undecorated, contain something more than an ambiguous provocation – namely, the hidden meaning of a defusion of the drives? Does the conjunction of homosexual and heterosexual attitudes and behaviours, readily considered a feat and an achievement by certain naïve witnesses, in fact involve an insidious negation of sexuality, like a challenge to Eros, in the guise of an unleashing of erotism?

On the other hand, leaving the uncanny register of disturbing strangeness for what I would call wonderful strangeness, I will gladly

make an opposite symbol of a countertenor voice heard the other evening. This presented to the listener not only through its unique inflections and timbre, but through all it conveyed of the artist’s inner nature, an indescribable mixture of masculinity and femininity. Now Alfred Deller,2 through his stature, his face and his words, appears an eminently “virile” character, and the qualit