Psychic Bisexuality

A British-French Dialogue

Rosine Jozef Perelberg, Rosine Jozef Perelberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351262941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Sexualidad humana en psicología

Winner of the American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Edited Book Prize for 2019!

Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue clarifies and develops the Freudian conception according to which sexual identity is not reduced to the anatomical difference between the sexes, but is constructed as a psychic bisexuality that is inherent to all human beings.

The book takes the Freudian project into new grounds of clinical practice and theoretical formulations and contributes to a profound psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality. The object of pychoanalysis is psychosexuality, which is not, in the final analysis, determined by having a male or a female body, but by the unconscious phantasies that are reached après coup through tracing the nuanced interplay of identifications as they are projected, enacted and experienced in the transference and the countertransference in the analytic encounter.

Drawing on British and French Freudian and post-Freudian traditions, the book explores questions of love, transference and countertransference, sexual identity and gender to set out the latest clinical understanding of bisexuality, and includes chapters from influential French analysts available in English for the first time. Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars.

1

THE BEAUTIFUL DIFFERENCES¹

Christian David

The unconscious is said to have no knowledge of time. However, there are many signs that some fairly striking characteristics of our own are the progressive attenuation of conventional manifestations of sexual difference, even a trend towards the complete reversal of masculinity and femininity, hand in hand with a strange bisexual claim. The more of a stake this claims, the more it seems that sexually specific characteristics – which are undoubtedly among these “beautiful differences of nature” that Freud deplored Groddeck for seeking to disparage “in favour of tempting unity” (Letter of 5 June 1917, in E. L. Freud, 1960, p. 324) – tend to diminish, even disappear.

Does the half made-up, grotesque and disturbing countenance of the hero of Stanley Kubrick’s sinister 1971 film A Clockwork Orange bring together in one hard-hitting, symbolic opening shot these recent psychosexual vicissitudes in our society? Does the strange expression that emanates from these ill-matched eyes, one with long mascara-coated lashes and fully adorned with make-up, and the other completely undecorated, contain something more than an ambiguous provocation – namely, the hidden meaning of a defusion of the drives? Does the conjunction of homosexual and heterosexual attitudes and behaviours, readily considered a feat and an achievement by certain naïve witnesses, in fact involve an insidious negation of sexuality, like a challenge to Eros, in the guise of an unleashing of erotism?

On the other hand, leaving the uncanny register of disturbing strangeness for what I would call wonderful strangeness, I will gladly make an opposite symbol of a countertenor voice heard the other evening. This presented to the listener not only through its unique inflections and timbre, but through all it conveyed of the artist’s inner nature, an indescribable mixture of masculinity and femininity. Now Alfred Deller,² through his stature, his face and his words, appears an eminently “virile” character, and the quality of his voice, however close to the castrati of bygone days, is the fruit – if we are to believe some recent impromptu comments by the singer himself on television – of patient and exciting work intended to “bring out” and develop to its point of perfection the “head voice” that every man capable of singing has available potentially but without knowing it, without daring to use it or without thinking of doing so.

These are landmark images, key moments, of the kind also encountered in analysis, in which a world of affects and meanings is obscurely condensed, and I would like to convey its resonance so that at least on a preliminary basis this slightly over-abstract approach to the disturbing problematic presented here does not resemble an impossible detachment.

I

Whether this is a question of sexual difference or bisexuality, an incontestable ambiguity – probably in connection with the constitutive duality of every drive – characterises the elaboration of these facts in Freud’s work. Based on the anatomy and embryology of his day, Freud draws out the “psychological implications” of some elements that are inherently alien to psychology. Thus he regards bisexuality as a biological concept, which he extrapolates into a postulate of psychoanalytic treatment; however, in parallel, albeit from an entirely different perspective, he writes to Fliess – his well-known source of inspiration in this case – that he is getting used to “regarding every sexual act as a process in which four individuals are involved” (Letter of 1 August 1899, in Masson, 1985, p. 364). As for this “bisexual constitution” that everyone is said to possess, how is it manifested psychically? Through the masculinity and femininity of attitudes … Moreover, although sexual difference assumes the status of “destiny”, there is still no strict concordance between sex, psychosexual characteristics and the type of object choice. What is more: “We speak, too, of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ mental attributes and impulses, although, strictly speaking, the differences between the sexes can lay claim to no special psychical characterization” (Freud, 1913j, p. 182). In fact, all that can ultimately be claimed is that activity and passivity are involved; now apart from the fact that these are inadequate connotations, they do not concern the drives themselves but the nature of their goals, and their “regular association … in mental life reflects the bisexuality of individuals” (p. 182).

Has this argument not become somewhat circular? Freud never allowed himself to be impressed by obstacles of that kind: he always treated them with a sovereign disregard and a cool audacity. “But psycho-analysis cannot elucidate the intrinsic nature of what in conventional or in biological phraseology is termed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. If only! … ‘it simply takes over the two concepts and makes them the foundation of its work.’” (1920a, p. 171).

Admittedly, this was an inspired move, but also because these “works” simultaneously found other and better foundations, and above all perhaps because between the foot and the summit a real metamorphosis has occurred, from which it seems that we have only recently departed, having explained the full importance and theoretical implications. I am thinking in particular here of the definition of the drive in relation to instinct, and even more of the determination of the many effects of the extension of the notion of sexuality – this brilliant speculative master-stroke. We cannot in fact address the sexual psychoanalytically in clinical or theoretical terms without having made this extension our own. Certainly we must avoid being dragged here on to the path of a spiritualism that would not dare speak its name, neglecting the somatic basis and “scandalous” aspects of sexuality, but we must also remember that its conceptual extension is – like a difficult realisation fleetingly effected during the treatment – an acquisition that is permanently under threat. This can easily be seen with the creator of psychoanalysis himself, when its temporary overshadowing sometimes gives rise to a certain wavering in thought. Laplanche seeks to explain these eclipses as the inevitable confusion caused by

a scientific revolution which suddenly enlarges the meaning of a concept [and] sweeps away, we might say, its very ground. Such is the case for Freud himself: at which point we see him taking refuge in the hopes for a biological, chemical, or hormonal definition of sexuality … or we see him simply repeating, as though he could progress no further, the reasons which force him to assimilate the domain he discovered to sex in the popular, ‘genital’ sense of the word.

(Laplanche, 1976, p. 28)

We must also be wary of overemphasising this similarity, as well as subjugating ourselves too narrowly to scientific advances, on pain of losing the benefit of an epistemological leap through which the unconscious can be indicated as sexual and sexuality as psychic.

The sexual certainly originates from far beyond the psychic, but analysis proposes to address the way in which it is represented. This is the case with anatomical sexual difference, which, as the object of conscious and unconscious representations, is introduced into analysis as a difference between psychosexualities. Then what about bisexuality? Certainly, we may think that Freud would have hesitated to introduce it into his theory if he had not believed he could give it a biological foundation, based primarily on the embryology of his era. But there again, bisexuality is linked in psychoanalysis not to the vestigial presence in an individual of a particular sex of certain characteristics of the other sex, but to psychic organisations that depend on many other factors. It is even certain that, as something psychic, it has only the most tenuous connection with these vestiges: one proof of this is that the advances made since Freud in the field of embryology (notably, imposing the concept of an embryonic differentiation that occurs not from a bisexual preliminary stage as previously thought but is absolutely phenotypically female) only seem to have to involve ipso facto abandoning the concept of bisexuality in psychoanalysis if the psychoanalytic dimension is seriously underestimated.³ Although it may also be highly instructive as an analyst to study the psychic repercussions of a particular anatomico–physiological bisexual characteristic (true hermaphroditism, pseudo-hermaphroditism, transsexualism and so on), it is nonetheless true that psychic bisexuality is absolutely independent of the existence of such aberrations or other equivalents (endocrine malfunctioning). Bisexuality, as a coexistence of opposite psychosexual dispositions, some conscious and others unconscious, in each of us, proceeds – whatever its biological connections – from psychic processes. How otherwise, moreover, can we explain the universality of its role and how can we recognise that fundamentally “we can only see that both in male and female individuals masculine as well as feminine instinctual impulses are found, and that each can equally well undergo repression and so become unconscious” (1919e, p. 202). Also, when in 1914 Freud reverses the determining priority in relation to repression that he had previously attributed like Fliess to bisexuality, and in respect of which he tried, as early as the Wolf Man case, to demonstrate how it is the ego that instigates the repression to the advantage of one of the sexual orientations, can it be said that he is finally giving bisexuality its specific psychoanalytic status? Is it not, in fact, highly revealing that it should be on this point alone that his position should have changed throughout all his works?

This subordination of sexuality to conflict is decisive, and this is probably what best elucidates the connection between sexual difference and bisexuality. Their relationship emerges as essentially dialectical. This is what I should like to emphasise in the course of the pages that follow.

To be born a girl or born a boy is – even more broadly and more decisively than being summoned to live the castration complex in one way or another – to be promised, as Green (1972) persuasively demonstrates, to a certain sexual destiny, according to an inescapable sexual reality: a man will never give birth and a woman will never impregnate, which are truths that are more comprehensive than the anatomical facts but equally restrictive. However, to be a man with certain female tendencies, or a woman with some male tendencies, is to possess a potential sexual otherness and consequently to bear some indeterminacy. If, therefore, on the one hand anatomy is destiny, then on the other sexual reality, or sexual destiny, we might say, bisexuality is – or may be – anti-destiny. The formula may be less surprising if we recall that the extended concept of bisexuality stems from that of sexuality. As with pregenital sexuality, there are grounds for conceiving of a pregenital bisexuality. The early relations with the mother entail a close relationship between the emergence of desire, the genesis of phantasy and the internal object, and the emergence of a psychosexual bipotentiality (e.g. receiving or giving pleasure in one mode or another), although admittedly this will be specified only later and in stages of bisexuality in the current analytic sense of this term. Furthermore, is it not part of the logic of sexuality, which is difference and division, that it promotes itself from one bipartition to the next, from one opposition to the next? Bisexuality testifies to the internalisation of the active–passive polarity and the progressive introjection of sexual polarity. It is through these internalisations of difference that some play can intervene from the outset in the evolution of sexuality: in parallel with the maturational activity that prepares the integration of sexual identity, what I will call an unconscious bisexualisation process seems to be quietly at work, a process that clinical observation suggests does not necessarily involute when the specific psychosexuality is fully established.

Being closely connected with the configuration of identifications and their vicissitudes, the Oedipus complex provides the theory of bisexuality (and the problem of its connection with sexual difference) with its only means of achieving coherence and adequate clarity. Rather strangely, Freud does not seem to have resolved to make full use of this resource to elucidate the concept of bisexuality and to determine its integration in drive theory. I would again readily point to his biologism here. … However, on the nature and development of bisexuality, there are really two discernible lines of thinking in his work, which are difficult to reconcile. Often, Freud sees bisexuality as a primal and universal disposition, clearly morbid when it is very pronounced,⁴ which has the natural (i.e. biological) destiny – depending on the consecutive demands at the primacy of genitality – of a gradual diminution in the course of libidinal development. Ultimately, it “normally” no longer consists in anything but subtle individual traits, aim-inhibited desires or capacities for socialisation and sublimation. Even if the orientation of the object choice is subject to discrepancies in relation to anatomical destiny, psychosexual identity – in the vast majority of cases – is finally integrated in accordance with the person’s own sex: this presupposes the successful repression of the initial bisexuality. In other words, the more sexual difference is asserted, the more bisexuality becomes involuted and virtualised. Nevertheless, however dominant this genetic and dynamic correlation may be in Freud’s conception of bisexuality, it has another non-biologistic aspect that may generally be understated. According to this, the differential integration of sexuality, far from excluding an active psychic bisexuality, and far from necessarily requiring its entirely successful repression in accordance with prevailing norms, can (in some cases even should) go hand in hand with an authentic bisexual fulfilment – if not in relation to the erotic choice of object and fulfilment, at least as concerns personal psychic characteristics and functioning. This viewpoint is eloquently illustrated in “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920a), where Freud clearly indicates that: “in normal sexuality also there is a limitation in the choice of object” (he does not refer to more hidden restrictions but to even more important ones that concern “psychical sexual characteristics” in general). He assigns the psychoanalytic treatment of homosexuality the goal of “re-establishing a complete bisexual function” while emphasising the difficulties of such a result, an ideal outcome for which we can only strive. He clearly states on several occasions that, especially in men, psychic hermaphroditism is independent of physical hermaphroditism of whatever nature and degree, as well as that these two sequences are independent of the type of object choice. The three characteristics vary independently of each other and occur in combination in the most diverse fashion in different individuals. It would be making a concession to the layperson and adopting his frequent conformism to favour the modalities of object choice and also to fail to recognise that “In all of us, throughout life, the libido normally oscillates between the male and the female object” (p. 158); it would also be attaching little importance to unconscious sexuality and losing sight “of the general bisexuality of mankind” (p. 143).

This second aspect of the Freudian conception seems to me to be the only one to do justice both to the meaning shift in the concepts of bisexuality and sexuality in psychoanalysis and to the reformulation of the psychosexual problematic in accordance with the oedipal structural model (the “complete” Oedipus complex with all its implications and resonances). It is also the only one to account for the compatibility of sexual difference with bisexuality and to point towards any possible resolution – at least in part – of the divergence of their respective dynamisms. Finally, it is the only model that enables us to imagine their functional association, according to an ideal goal, beyond their many conflictual potentialities.

II

The sexual is not the sole object of analysis, but is its constant object. The transference in the analytic situation could be said to correspond to the principle of libidinal co-excitation postulated by Freud as a consequence of the possible extension of erogeneity to the entire human body. There is in fact nothing in the field this defines that cannot and must not be considered an effect – proximate or remote, pure or combined – of the transference, whether in the strict or broad sense of the word. There is nothing, then, that cannot be considered a sign of the drives and consequently, given the actual conjunction represented by every psychic phenomenon, a sign of sexuality. What is expressed and lived and, in the process, disguised and neglected in the analysand is impelled by a sexual dynamic (even if it is never the only thing in play), pursues the satisfaction of desire and is perpetuated in accordance with an ever-recurrent dissatisfaction. Just as the essence of sexuality could be said to reside in the very impulse that separates the sexual drive from the vital function on which it is based, it is equally legitimate to regard the inherent restrictive conditions in the analytic treatment as a form of experimental reproduction and, consequently, an enforced intensification of this fundamental separation. It is not from the vital function that the sexual dynamic tends to extricate itself here, but from the discharge function. And just as the genesis of sexuality involves its perversion (human sexuality always bears at least some traces of this origin), so the channelling of the drive expression solely according to the possibilities of the analytic transference brings an artificial increase in these first conditions, leading innate perverse sexuality ultimately to become an “affective perversion”.⁵

These general observations are connected with the more specific aspects of our problem. In fact, this capacity for separation revealed by the libido, a sign of its plasticity, applies not only to that from which it separates but also in regard to itself. “It is my belief that, however strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction” (1912d, pp. 188–189), writes Freud. This contains the bold but suggestive and productive hypothesis of an intra-libidinal negativity. Thus, irrespective of the fact that the libido follows a particular specific developmental destiny according to whether it animates an anatomically male or female being, there pre-exists in it a...