Heterosexuality, Bisexuality, and Lesbianism Rethinking Psychoanalytic Views of Women's Sexual Object Choice

Traditional analytic theory has cast women's sexual development in a pathological light — certainly lesbian or bisexual development, but heterosexual as well. The pathological aspects of heterosexual object choice in classical theory, that is, a girl's negation of her own sexual functioning, suppression of her so-called masculinity, and acceptance of a degree of masochism and misogyny, are considered normative (Freud, 1925, 1931). Feminist thinkers as well as many analytic theorists reject this account but lack an adequate conception of the complexities of women's sexuality. The usual starting point for understanding lesbian development has been to determine how it deviates from this supposedly normal path of female sexual development. These deviations are inevitably treated as pathological, in spite of ample empirical evidence that lesbians have neither more nor less psychological and emotional difficulties than heterosexual women do (Armon, 1960; Weis and Dain, 1979; Gartrell, 1981; Wolfson, 1987). Another problem in traditional theory is the failure to account for the lifelong bisexual orientation that characterizes some women's sexuality.

Analytic theory assumes that sexual orientation arises out of the bond between mother and child, which then may or may not shift to the father. Social learning theorists see social and cultural values and experiences as significantly more influential. Biological approaches also challenge the analytic assumption and search for genetic, structural, or physiological bases for sexual orientation. Some of the first women analysts, such as Horney (1926) and Klein (1928), also believed in a degree of biological determination for sexual