Hermaphroditic Dreams

The theory of bisexuality has had a most important influence in widening our conception of the various types of sexual inversion, particularly since it has been shown that the latter is an acquirec desire associated with a definite sexual object, rather than a congenital disposition of the germ plasm. On this basis of bisexuality can be explained the relationship between cruelty and the sexual impulse, which in its bipolarity originates both sadism and masochism. In homosexuality too, the sexual feeling is only rarely distinct; in other words, cases of complete or pure homosexuality are infinitely rare. In most of these cases we can determine a form of what may be termed psychic hemaphroditism, in either the conscious social reactions of the homosexual or in his unconscious mental life, as shown in the dreams. Our psychoanalytic investigations have demonstrated that the best evidence of bisexuality in human beings is furnished by the dreams of conscious or unconscious homosexuality. Such dreams, which I have termed hermaphroditic dreams, are essentially bisexual in their blurrings or blendings, a sort of a dream condensation, in either a symbolized or literal form.

In his three contributions to the sexual theory, Freud has emphasized the bisexual nature of man, and it appears to us that the best evidence of this bisexual nature can be found in the human unconscious as furnished by the dream. As stated by Edward Carpenter, “In the deeps of human nature the sex-temperament is undif-ferentiated “1 and psychoanalysis has shown also that, up to a certain age, the sexuality of the human child is also undifferentiated, in fact, infantile fantasies are often of the somatic hermaphroditic variety. Because the infantile is the source of the unconscious, the appearance of hermaphroditic dreams may be interpreted as the infantile type of thinking occurring in the adult mind. These types of dreams, therefore, refer to those primitive mental processes