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At the exhilarating birth of psychoanalysis, Freud responds to a suggestion from Fliess: “I avail myself of the bisexuality of all human beings” (Freud, 1950 [1892–99], p. 211). In the closing pages of his gloomy, valedictory work of 1937, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, Freud speculates that it is the “repudiation of femininity” in both sexes that causes analysis to stagnate. These two thoughts – bisexuality is a given of human subjectivity, the rejection of femininity is a given of human subjectivity – the alpha and omega of Freud’s thinking about psychic sexuality, still have live currency in our clinical thinking.2 So how are we to make sense of the apparent conflict between these two givens of psychic life?
After I have recounted an early session from Christa’s analysis to some colleagues, they seem uneasy. During the session I have spoken very few words, and those more to reassure myself that I still could than because I felt I had anything inside me that I needed to say. Christa, meanwhile, has been active: she has described, in compelling filmic detail, events from her adolescence. I have been transfixed by the eerily beautiful images Christa evoked in my
mind, as teenagers roamed the night-time countryside, set fire to the grassland surrounding their male teacher’s house, and then rained heavy stones down upon the roof under which he was sleeping. It is only after the session that I can think that someone was asleep and needed to be woken up, through a violent shock. My colleagues’ unease suggests they feel the same about me: I was problematically asleep during the session and needed to wake up. I can hear and acknowledge their concern that I have been submerged in a deep passivity, seduced by the dreamy beauty of the images Christa brings, but I feel as if I am deep underwater, just able to hear words coming to me from the surface.
The impact of this session is not so unusual in this analysis, though th