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Bisexuality is a concept that was introduced by Wilhelm Fliess back in 1896 (in Masson, 1985, p. 212). It became a central notion in the work of Freud, who, in 1899, had planned to write an article with the title, “On Human Bisexuality”, but it never saw the light of day. In his book, Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, he states nonetheless “to be born bisexual is as normal as to be born with two eyes; a male or a female without the element of bisexuality would be as inhuman as a cyclops” (Freud & Bullitt, 1967, p. 64). If Freud speaks of being “born bisexual”, he nonetheless rejects the biological basis that Fliess wanted to ascribe to this notion. Fliess sees it as the equivalent of bilaterality in the human being. For Freud, bisexuality is psychic and a corollary of his conception of repression. Its proportion, on the other hand, is constitutional. Thus, in “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928b), he puts forward the idea that “a strong innate bisexual disposition becomes one of the preconditions or reinforcements of the neurosis” (p. 184). That is why we think it is interesting to go back to the bisexual cathexis of the child by the parents and thus to the question of identifications. One of us has been particularly interested in masculine identifications in women (Aisenstein, 2012), while the other has focused more on feminine identifications in men (Harvey Rich).
The first identification prior to object-choice is, for both boys and girls, identification with the father of personal prehistory:
Identification is known as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. This behaviour has nothing to do with a passive attitude towards his father; it is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it hel