From Psychoanalytic Bisexuality to Bisexual Psychoanalysis

Desiring in the Real

Esther Rapoport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000008128
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

This is the first book to assess bisexuality through a range of psychoanalytic and critical perspectives, highlighting both the issues faced by bisexual people in contemporary society and the challenges that can be presented by bisexual clients within a clinical setting.

Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, in addition to using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects.

Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with the topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies.

1
BISEXUALITY

The undead (m)other of psychoanalysis

Evolutionary theory, bisexuality and the father of psychoanalysis

Throughout the history of psychoanalytic thought, bisexuality has been represented as an immature, undifferentiated condition. Postulated by Freud (1905, 1940) as an innate, universal human characteristic, the bedrock of personality and hence of psychoanalytic theory, bisexuality became an axiom for generations of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Arguably the most nebulous and overdetermined of Freud’s foundational theoretical constructions, it is also the one that has received the least critical attention. Theories of gender and sexuality have come and gone; concepts like penis envy and castration anxiety have been vigorously debated, along with the various competing representations of homosexuality – yet bisexuality is seldom at the center of a passionate argument. When invoked, it is usually as a side issue in the discussion of another topic, say, homosexuality or gender. Yet, uncommon as it is to engage critically with the concept of bisexuality, it is equally uncommon to reject it altogether. A strange picture emerges – one in which bisexuality is rarely fully present or fully absent. Moreover, there are not so many differences, in this regard, between the ways classical psychoanalysis and contemporary object relations and relational thought treat bisexuality.

In a footnote to Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud (1905) wrote, “[F]reedom to range equally over male and female objects – as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from which both the normal and inverted types develop” (pp. 145–146). He defined bisexuality as the place of origin as well as the prehistoric past of both the individual and the species. It is the place we have moved away from and the time of which we have nothing but memories. Yes, both a time and place, for one always implies the other, and both are required for a genesis story to be complete.

One of the genesis stories at the heart of modern Western culture is Darwin’s theory of evolution. According to this theory, human beings evolved from apes, passing on their long journey through various intermediate stages, including sexual differentiation. Darwin (1871) described the increased differentiation between the sexes as the mechanism that gradually produced the modern, civilized man – a being with the highest mental faculties. Basing his claims on the discovery of the hermaphroditic ascidians in 1866, as well as on the subsequent embryological studies that demonstrated the presence of both sets of sexual organs in the human embryo until the third month of development, Darwin asserted that “some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous” (p. 525). As humans developed, male and female sexual organs became differentiated and specialized in function, yet both sexes retained atavistic features associated with the other sex. This notion of primordial hermaphroditism, or bisexuality, as it came to be called, became highly influential among late nineteenth-century biological scientists (Angelides, 2001).

Although Freud, along with a few others, extended the biological notion of bisexuality into the psychic sphere, psychic bisexuality for him forever remained secondary to the essential features of human physical development. It was, so to speak, a manifestation of biology in the psychological realm. Insofar as the concept of gender as distinct from biological sex had not yet been articulated, having the physical characteristics of both sexes was “naturally” understood to entail having the psychic characteristics of both genders. And, because Freud’s theory of object choice was based on the idea of identification – one identifies with one parent and feels attracted to the other – bisexuality implied both bigenderism and dual attraction.

Among Freud’s best-known contributions to the theory of sexuality, his distinctions between instinct and aim (1905) and between sex, psychic identification and object choice (1920) paved the way for a more nuanced and less biologically determined understanding of sexuality. His concept of bisexuality, by contrast, remained remarkably overinclusive as well as inextricably linked to biology (Stoller, 1974; Smith, 2002). It referred simultaneously to disharmonious or shifting gender identity, dual attraction and the universal sexual ambiguity of human anatomy. Not surprisingly, a concept that was so loaded “embarrass[ed] all enquiries into the subject” (Freud, 1940, p. 188).

In most of Freud’s writing (“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, 1937, one of his latest works, being a notable exception), bisexuality is construed as the deeper truth of human sexuality that is, however, impossible in practice – at least for the modern man. Human nature is bisexual because the human physique is so, but as man progresses (in line with the Victorian idea of progress) from a natural being to a cultured one, his bisexuality becomes a virtually omnipresent atavism. Ontogeny recapitualating phylogeny, a child is polymorphously perverse. Lacking a solid sense of itself as either male or female and clueless about the ultimate goal of sex – namely, procreation – it can enjoy any form of sexual activity. Not so an adult. Unconsciously, both sexes must continuously struggle with primordial bisexuality; yet, on the experiential level, one is always psychically identified as either a man or a woman, and one’s object choice is always complementary to this identification (Butler, 1990; O’Connor & Ryan, 1993; Magee & Miller, 2002).

Angelides (2001) views Freud’s placement of bisexuality in the past (of both the species and individuals) as an example of a pervasive cultural phenomenon that he calls “erasure of bisexuality in the present tense” (p. 69). He argues that erasing bisexuality from the present tense was a price Freud had to pay for assigning it a central role in the formation of all sexualities. In other words, a theory that suggested continuity between masculinity and femininity, hetero- and homosexuality, and normality and psychopathology was subversive enough. Had this theory also made bisexuality possible and visible as praxis, had it allowed for the possibility of this ambiguous space being populated by mature modern adults, it would have gone a step too far. Allowing bisexuality to exist in the present would have been too great a challenge to the mutually exclusive and complementary gender roles at the foundations of family and society. Such a theory would have been too radical for the audiences and possibly for the author himself. It is worth mentioning here that the idea of psychic bisexuality was born in the context of the passionate friendship with Fliess, which Freud admitted had a “homosexual” component (Masson, 1985) and which evidently evoked in him a profound ambivalence (Kohon, 2018).

After Freud: bisexuality as immaturity

In the decades that have passed since Freud’s death, numerous analytic authors of various persuasions have expressed the view that bisexuality is an innate, universal human characteristic. Unlike a mature sex/gender role or object choice, construed as a developmental achievement, it is seen as a primary, undifferentiated condition. Every healthy adult is assumed to have consolidated an identity as either male or female; ideally, he or she has additionally made the socially valued, unproblematic heterosexual object choice. While the alternative homosexual object choice was, until recently, understood as a more troublesome type of adjustment, widely associated with immaturity (Dimen, 1991; Schwartz, 1998), homosexuality was seen as representing a higher stage of development than the innately given, infantile bisexuality. To use a culinary analogy, heterosexuality, in this view, may be likened to a cake that tastes just right, and homosexuality to one prematurely taken out of the oven; bisexuality, to continue with the analogy, is not a cake at all but amorphous dough whose future edibility is as yet undetermined (Rapoport, 2009).

References to bisexuality that reflect this view permeate psychoanalytic literature. For example, Bettelheim (1954), who studied “primitive” initiation rites in which adolescent participants were required to take on both masculine and feminine roles, argued that the purpose of such ceremonies was to assist youth in relinquishing the polymorphous perversity of childhood and fully accepting mature, genital, socially prescribed sexual roles. Writing three decades later, Fast (1984) proposed that children started out with a “bisexually overinclusive” (p. 15) gender identity that included both masculine and feminine qualities, and then gradually developed differentiated gender characteristics. Providing clinical examples of “residues of primitive notions of bisexual wholeness” (p. 18) in complicated analytic cases, she emphasized that such notions were necessarily relinquished in healthy development. Unlike earlier writers, Fast had the concept of gender, as distinguished from biological sex, at her disposal; nonetheless, she chose to make no distinctions between gender and sex, or gender and sexual orientation, in her discussion of bisexuality.

In Joyce McDougall’s (2000) view, the progression from infantile bisexuality to mature monosexuality is both inevitable and painful:

The obligation to relinquish these instinctual bisexual aims requires a mourning process that is not accomplished with ease. Perhaps one of humankind’s most scandalous narcissistic wounds for our megalomanic childhood desires is inflicted by the necessity to accept our inescapable monosexuality.

(pp. 157–158)

Notice the pairing of “instinctual” with “bisexual” in that quote. Monosexuality, the author assumes, emerges as a result of the complex psychological process of mourning, the capacity for which, according to the shared psychoanalytic wisdom, in itself constitutes a developmental accomplishment; bisexuality, by contrast, is seen by her as an inborn, biologically based instinct. Of course, biological instincts are available to everyone, including those incapable of mourning – nonhuman animals, infants and primitively organized psychotic patients.

Given that bisexuality is associated with very early, primordial stages of psychic development – those at which magical thinking predominates – it is hardly surprising that it is often relegated to the realm of fantasy: “In dreams, we are all magical, bisexual and omnipotent” (McDougall, 1986, p. 215); “the impossibility of having everything accounts for so much misery that the notion of universal bisexual wishes is almost inescapable” (Richards, 2000, p. 38).

The following illustrates how such views can affect the actual clinical practice of psychoanalysis. In a paper with a revealing title, “Gender and Sexual Orientation in the Age of Postmodernism: The Plight of the Perplexed Clinician”, the pioneer Relational psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell (1996) reflected on the difficulties a contemporary analyst faced when sitting with patients who were unsure about their sexual orientation. As an intersubjectivist, Mitchell decisively rejected the classical notion of analytic neutrality as unattainable and emphasized the ongoing impact on the analysand of the analyst’s personal biases. In a case vignette, Mitchell reported, with extraordinary openness, on his process of critically examining his own biases as they came up in reaction to an analysand’s sexual exploration. As the patient, who was erotically responsive to both men and women, dreaded the idea that he might be gay and wished for the analyst to reassure him that he was not, the analyst, Mitchell, felt torn:

Would helping him come to terms with a gay life represent a helpful avoidance of vestiges of homophobia in me or a righteous conformity with what is now politically correct? Would helping him adjust to hetero-sexuality represent my own heterophilia and a collusion with his homophobia or respect for what he wanted for himself? But patients sometimes want things for themselves that are terribly self-destructive.

(p. 69)

Finally, the analyst decides to make an interpretation that is intended not to propel the patient in either direction but, rather, to reflect the current state of events. He suggests that, in ruminating on heterosexuality and homosexuality, the patient is, in fact, choosing asexuality, “which was itself a possible, viable life course” (p. 69). While the earnestness of Mitchell’s self-examination and his willingness to consider multiple possibilities are admirable, it is striking that a sexually active patient’s reluctance to choose between homo- and heterosexuality was conceptualized as his choosing asexuality rather than bisexuality, neither rather than both. What we read between the lines of the vignette is that this open-minded, gay-friendly and well-meaning analyst subscribed to the view of bisexuality as an immature, undifferentiated, pregenital condition to be resolved on the path to adult sexuality. Unlike asexuality, it was not, for him, a “possible, viable life course”.

In the 1990s, a trend emerged among analysts with feminist sensibilities to employ the concept of bisexuality in the service of loosening polarized gender norms and expanding the range of acceptable attitudes and behaviors, particularly for women. In this body of work, bisexuality came to represent cross-gender identifications that were formed in the preoedipal period and, though later disavowed, could still be accessed in adulthood through analytic work. The presence in the psyche of these “bisexual” identifications was used to ground the possibility of gender-atypical mental qualities and activities; for example, they made it possible for a woman to exhibit the traditionally masculine characteristics of competitiveness and assertiveness (Bassin, 1996; Stimmel, 1996; Elise, 1997, 1998). While representing “bisexuality” (which in this literature had been extracted from the domain of sexuality and placed exclusively in the domain of gender) as healthy and useful rather than pathological, authors urging the reactivation of preoedipal bisexual identifications in adult analysis helped further strengthen the already too strong association between bisexuality and early childhood.

As we have seen, a popular tendency exists among analytic thinkers to represent bisexuality as an early, immature and undifferentiated condition. Drawing on Freud, who in turn drew on biological theories, many analytic authors have expressed this view, and it is to be suspected that many more clinical practitioners allow it to guide their daily practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Critiques of this representation of bisexuality, on the other hand, are astonishingly rare – even queer-theory-inspired contemporary relational thinkers do not tend to voice them. In fact, queer theorists in psychoanalysis, as in academia, while eager to deconstruct other notions pertaining to sexuality and gender, have shown curiously little interest in the idea of bisexuality or any of the theoretical assumptions associated with it.

Reinserting bisexuality into the present: voices in the desert

Among the few exceptions to the current of exiling bisexuality into the prehistoric past, Young-Bruehl (2001) problematized the notion of early bisexuality. Her overview of the recent developments in the biological study of sex suggested that even, or perhaps especially, essentialist researchers were now finding it difficult to pinpoint the core determinants of either male or female sex. Should one be judged as male or female on the basis of one’s internal reproductive structures, one’s external sexual organs, one’s chromosomal makeup, one’s hormonal levels or the type of gonads one has? Furthermore, it is recognized that some of these factors change and affect an organism differently over the course of its lifetime. With the very concept of biological sex rapidly disintegrating into multiple loosely related variables, Young-Bruehl argued, the notion of biological innate bisexuality (when not related to object choice) seemed difficult to sustain. Implicitly suggesting that this notion may have reached a conceptual dead-end, Young-Bruehl proposed, instead, a new area of focus: the study of the bisexuality of the patient’s objects, which in her view invariably incorporated traits and characteristics from two or more sources, such as the mother, father and siblings. The object chosen always contains elements of maternal as well as paternal objects, she suggested; hence, it is always bisexual. Bisexuality of the chosen object – namely, how this object integrates its masculine and feminine qualities – is highly important to the chooser. In this innovative theoretical construction, bisexuality is used primarily as a gender category, with all the difficulties that entails, and the significance of bisexual practice is minimized.

It is precisely that use of bisexuality as a gender category which has been critiqued by Layton (2000). Questioning the relationship between bisexuality and preoedipality, she challenged the assumptions underlying the notion of universal preoedipal bisexuality: that most mental attitudes and behaviors could be classified as either feminine or masculine; that in the realm of psychic identification paternal was always synonymous with masculine and maternal, with feminine; and that metaphors derived from genital anatomy and heterosexual intercourse could be helpful in illuminating unconscious motivations for nonsexual activities. Is a little girl actively exploring her environment thereby engaging in a masculine activity and hence being bisexual, or is her behavior not masculine until labeled so by a theorist who equates activity with masculinity? Is a female child flirting with her mother acting out her paternal – hence masculine – identification; or is there, as Elise (2002) and others have shown, a possibility of a mother-daughter eroticism that does not entail a masculine identification on the part of either? Is it useful to invoke masculine identifications to normalize such qualities as curiosity, assertiveness and competitiveness in women? Layton (2000) maintains that preoedipal bisexuality helps naturalize the sociocultural phenomena of gender splitting and gender inequality, by invoking gender identifications to explain attributes that are not inherently gendered. In addition, taking a stand against ignoring bisexual object choice, she argued that, by doing so, analysts colluded with the pervasive cultural trend of rendering bisexual desire and practice invisible.

Why are critiques of the bisexuality-immaturity equation so rare? Why is there not a wider interest among psychoanalytic thinkers in critically examining a foundational concept whose social and political implications seem so profound? Finally, why does psychoanalysis persist in casting bisexuality as something othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Bisexuality: the undead (m)other of psychoanalysis
• 2 Which traditional psychoanalytic meanings of bisexuality are worth keeping, and which had better go?
• 3 Object choice: choosing objects of psychoanalytic inquiry from among the different meanings of bisexuality
• 4 Bisexual subjectivity through the lenses of Lacanian, Object Relations and Relational theories
• 5 Epistemologies of the fence: meeting points between bisexual and contemporary psychoanalytic epistemologies
• 6 Bisexuality and Oedipus, a strained relationship: anti-Oedipal, post-Oedipal and extra-Oedipal bisexualities
• 7 Abjection in action: bisexual patient and transferencecountertransference dynamics
• 8 Women and men: overlapping experiences, different pressures
• 9 Masters of transformation: bisexual and transgender bodies, and the problem of death
• Bibliography
• Index