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A Cogent case is often made for the contention that the disagreements amongst psycho-analysts are purely semantic, and that the true approximation of our language to our comprehension would cause this conflict to melt away like the dew beneath the rising sun. A more compelling position would tend to assume that our semantic confusions reflect quite accurately our conceptual ones. Under this thesis, further research in our understanding of mental phenomena would need to precede linguistic investigation.
It is probably the psycho-sexual area of psycho-analysis which best illustrates this dilemma, due to the two-fold origin of our technical vocabulary, half from psychiatry, based on description, half from metapsychology, based on interpretation. Systematic clarification of our language in respect of sexuality is one of the subsidiary aims of this volume, but one which can only be achieved semantically after conceptual clarification. This course has already been followed in several instances of differentiation: polymorphous from perverse; adult from infantile; descriptive “homosexual” from metapsychological “homosexual”; dependence from passivity. A further step must now be taken to distinguish between “bisexual” as a metapsychological and biological concept on the one hand, and “ambisexual” as a descriptive term in psychopathology to which we may hope to give metapsychological precision. In order to do this in depth, both terms must be given substance in relation to clinical phenomenology.
The genealogy of the term “bisexual”, coming as it does from comparative anatomy, embryology and endocrinology, by way of Krafft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis and the “Three Essays on Sexuality”, rather dictates that we must use the term primarily in relation to the constitutional basis of sexual states of mind and consequent behaviour. But this does not preclude the possibility that we may wish to use it also descriptively in regard to sexual activities when we feel convinced that these acts