Foreword

This is a beautifully orchestrated and rich collection of essays without a weak moment. Its appearance is timely – timely both because there is still much to explore and because currently “transgender”, in challenging the binary, is claiming to replace the bisexual subjectivity, whose importance I will be arguing for here. Wandering through my mind, like wine through water, is the example of great artists whose art is in bringing the unconscious to consciousness and for whom, therefore, “bisexuality” is a sine qua non for an art practice. As André Green says here on behalf of psychoanalysis, bisexuality “relates to the theory as a whole”. Of her father, Maya Picasso wrote: “In my opinion my father was, in a sense, ‘bisexual’ from his birth, or rather since his debut as an artist …”1 The sculptor and painter Louise Bourgeois’ many works and sayings about bisexuality can, for our purposes here, be reduced to her knowledge that “we are all male–female”.2

“Bisexuality” is a complicated subject; in an exemplary way, this collection does justice to its importance and its expression as it plays out in clinical encounters and in its historical and theoretical significance, so well described in the comprehensive and excellent Introduction written by Rosine Perelberg.

Bisexuality as a concept makes us ask questions of the theory (or theories) of psycho-analysis. In a recent exchange on the “death drive” between the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons and the sociologist Michael Rustin, Parsons speaks for both when he says that nowadays all of psychoanalysis would disagree with the primary need of “drive satisfaction”. They claim that Freud’s undying

insistence on drive theory has been superseded by the understanding that psychic growth only takes place in a context of relationships to others.3 I believe that repudiating drive theory presents a major problem for the concept of bisexuality. If such a compulsively heterosexual man as Picasso, as an artist, is notably bisexual, we mig