Abstract
The discourse on psychic bisexuality is explored as it unfolds in Freud’s writings, in contemporary papers by LGBTQ psychoanalysts, and in a volume of essays, Psychic Bisexuality, published in 2018 by a group of prominent French and British analysts (Perelberg 2018). The greater acceptance of nonnormative sexualities and genders is reshaping the discourse on bisexuality and gender in many corners of our profession, yet, as the Perelberg volume attests, that evolution is far from universal. A strain of unquestioned heteronormativity and cisgenderism is evident in Perelberg et al.’s description of the fundamentals of psychic life, a strain that has roots (via a certain one-sided reading of Lacan) in Freud’s unresolved mourning of his inchoate homosexual self. A more embracing vision of bisexuality would seek to “hold,” rather than enact, the grief and anxiety associated with the development of myriad diverse personal patterns.
This paper is about psychic bisexuality, a foundational Freudian concept whose theoretical rigor has suffered under the weight of divergent usage in various corners of the psychoanalytic firmament. Before turning to those different usages and their repercussions for that robust (though not unbreakable) concept, to Freud, or to our own experience as openly gay training analysts—a minority status that inevitably colors the way we frame such issues—we will introduce the concept, viscerally, via excerpts from two poems from the collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong (2016). The first, “Threshold,” begins: In the body, where everything has a price, I was a beggar. On my knees, I watched, through the keyhole, not the man showering, but the rain falling through him: guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders. He was singing, which is why I remember it. His voice— it filled me to the core like a skeleton. Even my name knelt down within me, asking to be spared. [p. 3]
The singing man, we learn shortly, is a father; the poem’s subject, the transfixed young child kneeling nearby, is his son. Vuong’s poem, extending just a few lines more, traces the headwaters of the boy’s desire, his birth as a sexual subject there at that exact instant at the keyhole—“For in the body, where everything has a price, / I was alive”—and the ambivalence and loss that this birth engenders: “I didn’t know the cost // of entering a song—was to lose / your way back. // So I entered. So I lost. / I lost it all with my eyes // wide open.” (pp. 3–4).
The second poem, “Trojan,” appearing a few pages later in the collection, finds the same boy (or so we imagine), older now, dancing in a red dress before a mirror in a silent apartment, the dawning light casting shadows of his movement against family photographs lining the walls. Unlike the subject of the previous poem—an awestruck, even reverential child—the boy here is in perpetual motion, twirling, “the dress / petaling off him like the skin of an apple . . . ,” while a far greater combustion courses silently within. He is the Trojan horse (the poem’s central metaphor), his “belly full of blades / & brutes . . . ,” the mute awakening of the previous poem transformed within his gyrating form into an elemental force, barely contained: “How like / the wind, they will see him. They will see him / clearest / when the city burns” (p. 9).
We begin this psychoanalytic paper with Vuong’s haunting verses in order to remind ourselves (and you) that the bisexuality in which psychoanalysis trades is its own elemental force, and that as analysts we are each forever peering through keyholes, struggling to come to terms with the tunes that Sigmund Freud sang long ago in the waters of his self-absorption. One of the most generative parts of those tunes for us and for many analysts (we suspect) can be found in the ambiguous word “bisexuality” itself. As the interpersonal analyst Mark Blechner (2015) points out in an important recent paper, that term covers a wide range of territory, encompassing an identification with both polar physiological sexes and gender roles (dresses versus pants, “passive” versus “active,” etc., a concept Blechner calls bigenderism), and the more colloquial sense of the word bisexual as pertaining strictly to sexual object choice (gay or straight) and every semiotic possibility in between. That supersaturated term came into Freud’s theoretical vocabulary, famously, during what Harold Blum (1990) points out was the most homosexual phase of his life, his long epistolary self-analysis in the 1890s with the Berlin otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess. The term bisexual was Fliess’s property (a debt that Freud continually recalls), yet the word itself spoke to something deep within Freud, a germ that he needed to make sense of enigmas he was confronting simultaneously in his clinical work with patients and in his self-analysis. So important was that idea, and the lived experience of sharing a loving connection with the man who gave it to him, that Freud for a long time looked past his friend’s glaring eccentricities. He longed to share his ideas and clinical experiences with Fliess, and in his letters unfolded to him, before all others, the tendrils of his theory of unconscious life. At a genital level, it seems clear, their relationship remained unconsummated (though not for want of trying; Freud invited Fliess to enter his nasal cavity on multiple occasions to assuage physiological as well as emotional malaise [see Kris 1954; Masson 1985]), yet with time their vast differences, and Fliess’s oddities, inevitably brought rupture.
Freud’s theory of psychic bisexuality—and with it the whole of psychoanalysis—nonetheless came into being in this homosexual “parenthood” (Blum 1990, p. 22), yet from the outset, simultaneously, Freud the theorist worked to backpedal from the full implications of that procreative act. Despite his theoretical understanding of the wishes of all little boys to at times take the “passive” position and be inseminated by their fathers (Freud 1925, p. 250), he rarely questioned his own dominant heterosexuality, or embraced his feminine side (Orgel 1996). The tremulous possibility of homoerotic consummation (and surrender to “passivity,” for Freud synonymous with “femininity”) was for him a leitmotif that hovered in the background, a road not taken (and perhaps one that never held more than fleeting interest at a conscious level). In continually choosing his heterosexual “masculine” orientation in this way (a “choice” undoubtedly made in early childhood), Freud, not unlike Vuong’s kneeling subject in the “Threshold” poem, nonetheless foreclosed on other paths evident in his transference with Fliess, and experienced an analogous loss: “I didn’t know the cost / of entering a song—was to lose / your way back. // So I entered. So I lost. / I lost it all with my eyes // wide open.”
In keeping with the searing (if unconscious) grief associated with his heterosexual object choice, Freud’s theory of psychic bisexuality, for all its many ambiguities and contradictions, keeps the memory of that other, unchosen (homosexual) possibility alive. In moments when one least expects it—the bravado of his Leonardo paper, when he all but shouts that the great artist’s homosexuality is a developmental miscarriage, a narcissistic adaptation to a flawed domestic space (mother fixation; absent father), it rears up: “everyone, even the most normal person, is capable of making a homosexual object choice, and has done so at some time in his life” (Freud 1910, p. 99n). Or later, in his famous “letter to an American mother,” published posthumously: “[homosexuality] is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness. . . . Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them” (Grotjahn 1951, p. 331).
Such statements, significant not just by dint of being gay-affirmative, but by acknowledging Freud’s grief by not denigrating the homosexual pole of experience he valued and turned away from, exist cheek by jowl with many others that stress the pathology of same-sex object choice. (The pathogenic insinuation of a “certain arrest in the sexual function,” along with another unfortunate metaphor for homosexual desire, “blighted seeds,” belongs to the same paragraph of the “Letter to an American Mother” as the more affirming messages just cited.) To our knowledge, there has been no published tally of the number of homophobic versus homonormative utterances in Freud’s written works, yet in keeping with his dominant heteronormative framing of psychosexual development, 1 we expect that the former would heavily predominate. That these forceful and unexpected homonormative statements exist at all within his writings on the dynamic unconscious, a minority message perhaps in keeping with the numerical percentage of gay or transgender people within a largely heterosexual/cisgender society (4 to 10 percent), is the slender filament—the miracle—that has brought us and so many other LGBTQ individuals into the ranks of the psychoanalytic profession.
The Thirteenth Floor
Reading the recent collection Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue, edited by the London-based psychoanalyst Rosine Jozef Perelberg (2018b), we were reminded of a recurrent dream of a patient from many years ago. The patient hailed from another country and for a short time, at a significant moment in her childhood, had lived on the thirteenth floor of a building there. In the dream, she recalled going back to that home, yet her childhood building merged in the dreamscape with other structures from her working life in New York, a city where, owing to superstition, thirteenth floors are almost never seen (elevators glide seamlessly from twelve to fourteen, precluding panic). The place she was seeking was thus unfindable.
Another association to the Perelberg volume, this one a colleague’s memory growing up in a small Midwest town, centers on the public library there, a modest cinderblock structure that at the time of this memory in the early 1980s held no more than 40,000 volumes. He recalls how, with flushed excitement and a degree of shame, he combed the shelves of the psychology section for books that might help him understand his homosexuality. Even a textbook on abnormal psychology, however—the most promising candidate and the cause for the fleeting hopefulness— contained only a perfunctory rehashing of Freudian tropes (mother fixation; absent father; untreatable), with no sense whatever of how people go through their days shouldering such potent, incurable longings.
Once again, a vital part of lived experience was made untraceable.
Like the thirteenth floor in the apartment building or the books missing from the library shelves, Perelberg’s volume, read from the perspective of two well-traveled gay psychoanalysts, bewilders with its obdurate refusal to grapple forthrightly with gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender experience as part of the continuum of “psychic bisexuality” announced in the volume’s title. Published in 2018 and including contributions from a group of clinicians in the upper echelon of a certain orthodox Lacanian 2 /Greenian sect within the British and French traditions—including the late André Green, Juliet Mitchell (one of the first writers to bring Lacan to the English-speaking psychoanalytic world), Donald Campbell (past president of the British Psychoanalytical Society), and Gregorio Kohon (a noted analyst and the most expansive and engaging writer of the bunch), as well as a number of prominent members of the Soçiété Psychoanalytique de Paris—this is not a hack volume that one would expect to peddle conversion therapy for LGBTQ patients. The near-complete avoidance of LGBTQ experience or of contemporary gender theory in its pages (not just in its purest academic form, per Butler (1990), but in the many articles and volumes by LGBTQ clinicians and their allies that apply such concepts fruitfully to the analytic encounter 3 ), occasioned head-scratching as we browsed through its pages and then, with a deeper reading, a mounting indignation.
Despite its bland title and encouraging promise of cross-cultural dialogue, Perelberg’s volume is very much a polemic, a forceful shoring up of a crucial pillar of psychoanalytic doctrine currently in danger of “collapse into the commonplace” (Mitchell 2018, p. xviii). The pillar in question is the bisexual unconscious, a “psychic bisexuality” that, in a certain narrow reading, exists on an exalted plane, without errors in need of redress or concessions to shifting empirical reality, as Juliet Mitchell, who provides the volume an appreciative foreword, wrote decades ago in the text where she helped launch Lacan (and her interpretation of his ideas) to renown in the English-speaking analytic world: Lacan conceived of his own project differently: despite the contradictions and the impasses, there is a coherent theorist in Freud whose ideas do not need to be diverged from; rather they should be set within a cohesive framework that they anticipated but which, for historical reasons, Freud himself could not formulate [Mitchell and Rose 1982; emphasis added].
For Lacan, as Mitchell recalls, that framework centered on Saussurean linguistics and the irreducibility of the ur-signifer, the phallus, the axis (“law”) around which all of psychic life is said to radiate: we either yearn for it, or seek to embody it, but we invariably fail; a state of unceasing desire, partial satisfaction, and disillusionment is our destiny as psychic beings, the Lacanian version of original sin. The “historical” factors Lacan meant to redress on Freud’s behalf were manifold, from the de-sexed preoedipal psychology of Kleinian object relations, to protofeminist thinkers like Karen Horney and Ernest Jones, squeamish about the phallocentrism in some of Freud’s later writings on female sexuality, to the “neutered” ego psychology of Anna Freud and her British and American followers, to empiricist observers of sexual life, like Kinsey or Masters and Johnson (Mitchell and Rose 1982; Roudinesco 1986; 1994).
Despite his theory’s Manichean overtones, Lacan’s complex “return to Freud” has many compelling parts, not least of which is his insistence on the centrality of bisexuality and its attendant grief as the major motivator of unconscious life. (Our self-representation as gendered beings invariably carries a constitutive loss; as psychic subjects, we will never be whole, a lack that no amount of “attachment security,” “adaptation,” or “loving and working” can close.) Lacan’s version of bisexuality, moreover, avoids the Darwinian reductionism often evident in Freud’s writings; it is not biology but psychosexuality (“sexuation”) that shapes our desires and our relationships to the fractured forms that we embody physically. In certain places, Lacan even chides Freud for his heterosexism, as in his interventions in the Dora case (Freud 1905a), which Lacan famously (and accurately) felt overly privileged Freud’s need to channel his patient’s desires toward her male suitor (and away from his tantalizing wife) (Lacan 1966, in Mitchell and Rose, 1982, pp. 61–63).
While Lacan, unlike numerous American analysts of the era in which he wrote and lectured (e.g., Bergler 1944; Socarides 1968), never sought to change the sexual orientation of his gay patients, his early writing nonetheless enshrined a potent heteronormative dualism that explicitly and repeatedly favors heterosexual and cisgender forms. His reluctance to grapple with the urgency of homosexual desire as a distinct and coequal erotic valence in itself (as opposed to a misguided or perverse effort to grapple with the challenges of gendering: gay men trying to become women; lesbians impersonating men) is evident in his response to the most famous clinical case that Freud devoted to lesbianism, the 1920 paper “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality.” As Perelberg recalls, Lacan thought that the paper was one of the most brilliant of Freud’s texts. He pointed out that the young girl desired nothing from the older woman [her beloved], a relationship of no satisfaction that established the relation of lack to the feminine object. She desired in the woman she loved precisely what she did not have: what she did not have was a phallus [2018, p. 18; emphasis added].
How does one translate this obscure passage in terms that are not homophobic? We suppose this would start from the premise that all people, from the moment they become aware of sexual difference, enter into sexuality from a position of a “lack.” Even small boys, who possess the flesh and blood appendage in an immature form, do not ever possess the more mystical paternal phallus; they invoke it over time through their longing to stimulate their female partner’s reciprocal desire and its partial satisfaction, jouissance, but then clatter back into brokenness—yearning and striving, never reaching or attaining—not even as fathers or grandfathers in their own right.
Perelberg’s summary of Lacan’s response to the Freud case, however, which also alludes to the girl’s “desire” and “love” for the older woman—a palpable tenderness that Freud emphasized in the original text, even as it bewildered him (Freud 1920, p. 145)—suggests a different orientation: a yearning for a “something” that exists apart from the phallus. In Perelberg’s more conservative reading of Lacan, with its unbending, either/or view of the sexual binary, this “something” is—in fact must be—a “nothing” (“no thing”), with “no satisfaction” possible. Thus, even if the girl in question 4 succeeds in seducing the older woman, in making love to her and reaching climax; even if (as is possible today in many places) she marries her lesbian partner and has children and lives out her days amid the tedium and joys one associates with family life, she embodies a “lack” that is greater than the “lack” of her heterosexual neighbors. The lesbian partners, in their marrow, have failed to grapple with their yearning and grief at being cleaved from the essential phallus, have failed to make peace with the primordial brokenness that characterizes the human unconscious, and are thus living in a quasi-delusional denial of psychic bisexuality and thereby of their monosexual (castrated) femininity.
This type of implacable heteronormative dualism, with its brisk dismissal of homosexuality as a flawed (if sometimes unavoidable) attempt to grapple with gender differentiation, is reproduced in Perelberg’s collection ceaselessly and without qualification, and is anointed—numbingly—as the unquestioned “deepest level” of psychosexual bedrock. In replicating this discourse, its authors not only airbrush away Freud’s far more complex and attenuated statements on homosexuality, but pointedly ignore four decades’ worth of writing by lesbian and gay psychoanalysts (and like-minded heterosexual analysts; for an early example, see S. Mitchell 1978) that takes up the intense grieving that invariably accompanies LGBTQ experience: grieving for lost heterosexual possibilities, for normative expectations and gender roles, for real-life family relationships shattered due to homo- or transphobic judgments (see Crespi 1995).
The implications of this unexamined heterosexism are most vividly and disturbingly displayed in the collection’s sole extended clinical report, Donald Campbell’s “Alienating Identifications and Sexuality” (2018). Campbell’s patient, Mr. Jones, a twenty-seven-year-old self-identified gay man, presents in the consultation with complaints about ambivalence: “I can never make up my mind. I can never decide who I want to be with or what I want to do. I really can’t have any meaningful relationships” (p. 227). Yet he does not extend this ambivalence to questions about his sexual life until a month into the analysis, when he notes that he “can’t decide whether to go to a gay massage parlor or a straight one” (p. 228). Campbell does not explore whether perhaps that particular “ambivalence” might be a gift to the analyst (heterosexual fantasies, we gather, were not often present in the patient’s adult life until the treatment began), but latches on to that thin reed as putative evidence of an embryonic heterosexual identity—made up of whole cloth—lurking beneath the patient’s outwardly gay presentation.
That formulation—masturbatory homosexuality as defense against generative heterosexuality 5 —guides the entirety of Campbell’s participation in the case over seven years. When the patient describes heterosexual fantasies (whether from childhood or from his current life), the analyst springs into action: exploring, interpreting, parsing out an historical theory that seems to explain the patient’s blighted heterosexual potential. That theory, when elaborated at length eighteen months into the treatment, sounds—alas—rather familiar: the patient’s father, alternately distant and explosive, was not a consistent enough presence (aka, “phallic representation” or “law”) to allow for identification and differentiation; the mother was decidedly phallic, even castrating, toward the father. Eager as always to please, Mr. Jones heartily endorses these interventions and others like them—“What did she do to Dad’s masculinity? Why didn’t Dad fight back?” (p. 231)—yet despite frequent efforts to embrace heterosexuality and validate the analyst’s doctrine (masturbating to straight fantasies!) is able to achieve orgasm only to images of men (p. 234).
When, however, earlier in the treatment, the patient’s homosexual desires emerge, the analyst finds himself flummoxed: In the second month, Mr. Jones came back after a weekend and said, “I really don’t know how to say this. (Silence). I don’t know. (Silence). It’s really embarrassing.” Then very quietly and hesitantly he said, “I love you.” I acknowledged the feelings with a murmur, but said nothing. This was a moment without context, from someone who felt like a stranger, like someone he might have met in a gay massage parlor. It was unsettling, and I was filled with uncertainty. I did not know who he was in love with in the transference. At that moment, I did not know who I was for him [p. 228; emphasis added].
This pregnant moment, coming only weeks after the session where the patient first disclosed his heterosexual “gift” to the analyst, is not welcomed similarly. It occasions no exploration from the analyst, no interpretations or questions, only a murmur of strained acknowledgment, followed by stunned (“unsettled,” “uncertain”) silence. The analyst recovers by the next session, and comes up with a rationalization for his own “shock and disorientation”—the patient objectified him by engaging him as “a masturbation phantasy” as a means of “avoiding any kind of [intimate] intercourse” (pp. 228–229)—yet we submit that this searing, dissociated chapter in the countertransference, a scant two months into a seven-year treatment, made the case’s eventual failure foreordained. Rather than exploring the patient’s avowed “love” from an analytic position, as decades’ worth of writing on this topic would recommend (“I wonder if telling me you love me is really a question—am I the kind of person who can be trusted to accept your desire to love other men, including, perhaps, me?”), the analyst here, for reasons he does not disclose, crumbles, leaving the patient alienated and alone.
Thus, just like the woman searching in vain for her childhood home on the thirteenth floor, like the teenager scouring bookshelves for a text that might illuminate his desires, Mr. Jones looks to his psychoanalyst for some clue about how to live his life as a sexual being, and comes away empty-handed. 6
Staying, Crossing Over
If gay desire comes off poorly in Perelberg’s volume—a morbid effort to deny gender difference by aping cross-gender object choice, unfortunate yet at times unavoidable—transgender experience fares even worse. What would a theory that insists on the acceptance of polar (“castrated”) gender make of Ocean Vuong’s “Trojan” boy in his red dress, dancing his heart out before the mirror in his family’s apartment? 7 Or others, like the five-year-old girl the American psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou (2014) describes in a riveting recent paper, whose natal male genitalia clash completely with her invariant, subjective sense of herself as female?
Perelberg’s volume takes up such questions in three moments. The first occurs early on, as the editor herself, drawing on Freud and on her background as an anthropologist, sets out data that seem to support the notion that the sexual binary is a universal feature of human cultures around the globe. Perelberg asserts that this binary—phallus/no phallus, “an inherent characteristic of all human beings” (2018a, p. 2)—may assume widely different colorings depending on context, but exists without exception from one culture to the next and within all individuals. This problematic argument, 8 anodyne on the surface, in fact aims to undercut a key claim made by European sexual minorities starting in the mid-nineteenth century as they stumbled into the light of liberal society (i.e., away from religious essentialism; see Ulrichs 1864–1880), and one that is resurfacing powerfully at the present moment: the possibility of a third gender, an “intermediate sex” (Hirschfeld 2000, 2017; Mancini 2010) located somewhere between the poles of male and female. We mention Hirschfeld’s theory not by way of returning to an essentialist/biological view of sexual variation, but rather to stress that sexual minorities were grasping actively for nonpathological terms in which to describe themselves well before Freud’s theories came into being, creating “folkways,” like the discourse of a third sex, that analytic models largely displaced. The roiling possibility of a “third sex,” repeatedly dismissed by Freud in his writings (Freud 1905b, 1910), is of course even more problematic for this orthodox Lacanian repackaging of Freud’s thinking. From what organizing signifier is a third gender cleaved? How, without recourse to pathology, does one explain the failure of a certain subset of humans to obey the “law” of “bisexual” (castrated) essentialism? If perhaps that “law” is in fact more of a cultural code than an immutable metapsychological reality, then what is to stop individuals from crossing over from one polar gender to another (and perhaps back again in some cases, remolding physiology in the process), or taking up residence, without apology, in the borderlands between them?
Perelberg’s selective anthropological analysis in the book’s introduction is one part of this volume’s response. Gregorio Kohon’s conclusion, “Bye-bye Sexuality,” the only chapter to grapple directly (if superficially) with contemporary gender theory, is meant to be its summation, a kind of theoretical coup de grâce on behalf of its authors’ heteronormative vision of psychic bisexuality. In between these two conceptual bookends, to which we will return, there exists one extended clinical illustration of work with a transgender individual, André Green’s chapter, “The Neuter Gender,” on which we will now focus.
This chapter, originally published in 2001, reappears in this book (we imagine) both because of Green’s eminence in the French psychoanalytic tradition, and because it sets out a kind of cautionary tale of the perils of denying “psychic bisexuality.” Despite having a sustained interest in Lacan, Green, who died in 2012, was no Lacanian, and was more apt than some of his Parisian colleagues to make use of concepts drawn from the object relations tradition of Klein, Winnicott, and others across the English channel, as well as from certain American thinkers, in this case, notably, Robert Stoller (1964, 1985). That somewhat more variegated pedigree is evident in his chapter here, as Green grapples with the impact of parental (and, in particular, maternal) fantasies on the formation of children’s gender identity and sexual object choice. This conceptual cosmopolitanism nonetheless exists in the shadow of Green’s mostly unexamined bewilderment toward the patient in the case he presents, a bewilderment that, in his theoretical postmortem decades after the case unfolded, shades into repulsion.
The patient in question, described by Green at various moments as “he” and at others as “she,” seems—as best as we can construct—to have been a natal-gendered male raised throughout childhood as female by a hostile, frequently degrading mother. A prisoner in Nazi Germany during World War II, the patient was subjected to sinister “feminizing” experiments, including the forcible provision of estrogen to produce breasts, undoubtedly (though Green does not state this explicitly) as a preamble to rape. 9 At the time the treatment unfolded in the late 1950s, the patient sought Green’s help in possibly reversing this imposed gender manipulation surgically, either by having “top surgery” to remove the breasts, and resolving into maleness (which would, according to Green, deprive the patient of a major avenue for sexual stimulation, nipple play), or by having “bottom surgery” (removing the penis/testes) and resolving into femaleness. Despite his palpable confusion faced with the patient’s dilemma and history of unthinkable traumas, Green (to his credit) manages to empathically reflect the patient’s subjective reality: “in fact you don’t want to be a man or a woman”—a statement that aligns fully with the patient’s experience: “I think you’re the first person to get to the heart of the matter: I don’t want to give up any of the advantages of the two sexes” (Green 2001, p. 251, emphasis in original).
In his theoretical framing of the case decades later, however—a framing that constitutes the bulk of this chapter—the author gives vent to a less sympathetic reconstruction of the patient’s life story. Rather than embracing Hirschfeld’s long-ago vision of a third or indeterminate gender, evident from birth and manifested by cross-gender identifications that elide “male” and “female” (an admixture that, given the imperatives of the gender binary, almost invariably invokes virulent expressions of regulatory anxiety, per Corbett 2009a), Green looks to his patient’s infantile life to explain the pathological trap of their
10
transgender experience. In this reading, the patient’s biological maleness was infected from birth by discordant and scalding cross-gender fantasies in the mother, who forced them to live like a female (and presumably blocked the healthful incorporation of the paternal, forestalling a psychic differentiation into “monosexual” maleness). The patient’s later traumas cascaded out from this original confusion in the realm of gender (in effect, the incorporation of a maternal delusion), leading them to unconsciously orchestrate the dramatic violation by German soldiers in wartime: The search for contradictory satisfactions was evident: her attitude toward any form of authority, public authorities, for example, was one of rejection, and her need to be kept under tight rein, to be bullied and dominated meant she longed to be in a passive position [Green 2001, p. 251; emphasis added].
Not unlike Campbell in the chapter just discussed, Green sees the patient’s present-day difficulties and ambivalence about how to live life as expressing a core intrapsychic pathology, a morbid type of “neutering” (autocastration)—inflected with derivatives of the death drive—owing to the failure to achieve a coherent psychic/bodily gender identity. To put it succinctly, Green views the patient’s mixed gender presentation not as a “something” in its own right, but as a “no thing,” an evasion of psychosexual imperatives—and an obliteration of heterosexual procreativity. In Green’s heteronormative/cisgender metapsychology, this “neutering” exists, he states explicitly, a heartbeat away from suicide (p. 256).
This dire, pathological framing, of course, depends entirely upon where one begins. If one admits the possibility of a third sex, per Hirschfeld, as a coequal variation within the core matrices of the human unconscious, then the locus of pathology within the case shifts, in this realm at least, from the patient’s individual psyche and personal history, and into the social sphere, including the unconscious life and attitudes of the cisgender, heterosexual analyst, whose alarm at the patient’s “failure to differentiate” (expressed through an incisive application of clinical theory) springs from a failure to grapple with, and grieve, the inchoate possibility of his own mixed-gender self.
The implications here are wide-ranging. Perhaps, in fact, for all of the mother’s putative pathology and hatred for the child, her decision to allow their dressing in female clothing sprang, not from a delusion, but from an empathic resonance with the child’s intrinsic 11 position outside the gender binary. This choice, not pathogenic but in fact affirming of a core expression of psychic reality (a “bedrock” for the patient, albeit a stratum different from the one from which cisgender identity is hewn) does not preclude trauma, owing to pathology in other realms or to the virulent prejudices toward transgender experience in broader society. These include the actions of the enemy troops in wartime—their “gift” of breasts to the patient—a head-spinningly ambivalent gesture. Notwithstanding these traumatic impingements, the patient’s refusal to be bound by the constraints of the gender binary, despite the lifelong pressure to do so, could be plausibly framed as a form of resilience, one that Green, despite the bias evident in his theoretical postmortem, nonetheless supports in his clinical interventions.
Green’s nuanced if ambivalent approach to the transgender patient in his care—analytic in his clinical role (i.e., not allowing his strong personal distaste to dictate his responses), yet pathologizing in his subsequent theoretical reflection on the case—is far less evident in Gregorio Kohon’s polemical summing-up chapter, “Bye-bye Sexuality.” Tying together the varied strands in this volume, and—in particular—making use of the anthropological framing on the sexual binary (phallus / no phallus) as put forward, tendentiously, by Perelberg in her introductory chapter (2018a), Kohon engages energetically, often caustically, with the voices in contemporary society that presume to criticize that perspective, or to suggest that sexuality and gender might be embodied in ways that depart from their immutable laws. After listing—and parodying—the gender descriptors between “male” and “female” proliferating in various places at the present moment (including the ancient but still extant South Asian category, hijra), Kohon engages in a robust peroration on the primacy of biological sex and cisgenderism: In the end, [socially] constructed or not, alternative or straight, there are only two sexes. While it may be considered unfair, discriminatory, unjust, unreasonable, a bore or a challenge, we cannot but accept this reality. . . . In other words, we need to take responsibility for not being more than what we are, to recognize our finitude and give up omnipotence, accepting that our desires can never be fulfilled [Kohon 2018, p. 270].
The homiletic tone of this passage, with its rhetorical appeal to a universalism (“we”) built on the “original sin” of neo-Freudian psychosexuality (its credo: castration into monosexuality; renunciation of “omnipotence”) reaches a sad crescendo a few lines later: Things are never simple. The symbolic order and the generational difference contribute to determine the subject’s destiny from the beginning of conception. The baby will arrive in an already signifying world, which was there well before delivery: parents’ phantasies, wishes, anxieties and dreams; names chosen, the name finally given, and so on. If, later in life, as the result of the vicissitudes of the subject’s history there is a decision to change his/her sex, to modify the original body by mutilating it or adding something to it, to choose a different gender identity, such changes take place in the present, but they never were nor could become a past [p. 271; emphasis in original].
Like Green’s retrospective, pathologizing reconstruction of his patient’s “failure to differentiate” in the realm of gender identity, Kohon’s assault on trans experience, with its scathing disparagement of gender transition surgery as mutilation (i.e., destructive repudiation of a primordial, cisgender essence, aka the “symbolic order”), proceeds from the unquestioned, privileged place of cisgender heteronormativity.
To understand how extreme this perspective is within psychoanalysis at the present moment, one need only turn briefly to a recent book by the American Lacanian Patricia Gherovici, Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017). Far from enshrining the gender binary as the unquestioned bedrock of psychic life, Gherovici, making use of a vastly different reading of Lacan, 12 sees transgender experience as a coequal and creative adaptation to the process of “gendering” that unfolds in every human life. Her reading, sympathetic in many respects to that of Blechner, Saketopoulou, and Corbett, stresses what is all too obvious from decades’ worth of empirical research: that, despite biological morphology and societal expectations, the relational narratives and physiological surfaces that enclose the lives of transgender subjects do not accurately reflect their profound, inner experience of themselves as gendered beings. Far from deserving the epithet “mutilation” or other pejorative terms applied to sexual minorities in psychoanalysis and elsewhere (e.g., “narcissism,” “abomination”), embracing one’s trans-ness and in some cases undertaking surgical intervention to change one’s physical attributes holds out the promise, not of “omnipotence” (Kohon’s word, a delusion), but of a profound, perhaps life-saving 13 personal liberation.
Discussion and Conclusion: The “Personal Pattern” in the Bisexual Mirror
Our work on the current paper in recent months has evoked a degree of incredulity among those in our circle, from colleagues (clinicians, straight and gay) to children and teenagers in our midst, who, like us, live in a progressive “bubble” largely free from the taint of trans- or homophobic utterances. That statements like Kohon’s or Green’s 14 could be published today without qualification in the literature of a profession that exists at its core to help people 15 seems, even for us, to defy comprehension. However, as we have immersed ourselves in Perelberg’s volume, revisiting Freud, Lacan, and a great many other writers along the way, we have come to regard such statements as an inevitable part of an honest engagement with the analytic literature on bisexuality, a literature which—we emphasize—grew out of the contradictions in one’s man’s efforts to understand himself on the cusp of the twentieth century.
As is clear in the preceding pages, Freud is not the only patriarch whose ambiguous shadow hovers over efforts to theorize sexual and gender variation at the present moment. Even a cursory reading of history makes clear that Lacan was of equal—and very likely, greater—stature in shaping the Freudian legacy in continental Europe, particularly in France (Roudinesco 1986; Oliner 1988). Even thinkers who depart widely from his theoretical schema—from members of the orthodox French societies (with whom he famously broke over the issue of session length) to the writers represented in Perelberg’s collection, many also heavily influenced by Green—nonetheless have had to reckon with Lacan’s breathtakingly complex and generative reworking of the Freudian edifice. His vocabulary—the signifier and jouissance, castration and lack, the name of the father, the symbolic order—though all but absent from most contemporary theorizing in the U.S., ripples through the ideas and words of European and Latin American thinkers in far-reaching ways.
In a pungent interview published in 2002, the historian and Lacanian psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco makes the case that Lacan, despite a propensity for intemperate utterances, 16 was at the core no more apt to vilify homosexuality than any other form of erotic expression. In large measure, the historical record bears out her assessment. In an era when psychoanalytic societies on every continent refused to admit lesbian, gay, or bisexual candidates, making use of a cynical framing that equated homosexuality with the “unanalyzable” condition of psychosis, 17 Lacan embraced the training and certification of gay analysts. According to retrospective testimony, he was, moreover, a sympathetic therapist to both gay and transgender patients, 18 more interested in helping tease out their subjective reality than aiding their adaptation to any “law.” Finally, in building up a theory of mental life whose central feature is a blistering skepticism about any claim for psychic normality—systems of self and other, in the Lacanian mirror (Lacan 1966), never capture the elusive essence of the real—he leveled the semiotic playing field for alternative sexualities and gender expressions. In so doing, he provided tools for present-day thinkers, such as Gherovici, that are being used to constructively explore LGBTQ experience and to situate it within the purview of human potentiality.
As Roudinesco points out, however, Lacan also wrote and said a great many things amenable to retrograde constructions, and—despite his theory’s famous complexity—was willing to relinquish nuance if doing so increased his personal prestige (Roudinesco 2002, 2011). What Lacan would have made of the current movement for LGBTQ equality—and for inclusion within the nuclear family, an institution whose pieties he disdained—is anyone’s guess. In his absence, as we have shown in these pages, a spectrum of responses has emerged: each making use of aspects of his terminology; each invoking his legacy and name. 19
With regard to the subject of this paper, psychic bisexuality, a concept we would define, along with Blechner, as the sum total of gender and erotic representations present in the human unconscious, we believe that Lacan’s ideas contain one further significant, and perhaps underappreciated, limitation. In advancing a theory of skepticism, or indeed of protest—fulminating against the presumptions of the dominant Anglo-American theorists of his day; highlighting the “lacks” and “perversions” that inflect every expression of gender or erotic desire—Lacan failed to account for the starkly different impact that such words have for those whose daily lives unfold outside the privileged enclosure of the normative. Unlike Freud, whose subsidiary homosexual identifications, expressed in his relationship with Fliess and memorialized in the monumental theory he bequeathed us, led him to actively contest the oppression of sexual minorities, 20 Lacan never seems to have grappled with the impact of his own residual gay (or transgender) self, or with the corrosive influence of homophobia and cisgenderism within and outside of psychoanalytic discourse (Roudinesco 2002).
As Vuong’s poems remind us, however, every expression of erotic choice and gender identity carries a penumbra of loss, as the vast reservoir of sexual and gender potentialities present in infancy gives way to what Winnicott (1953), in another context, refers to as the “personal pattern.” 21 This type of differentiation, an essential and often mysterious part of development, comes as individuals linger at certain keyholes and thresholds, while leaving others unexplored: other avenues of erotic and affective affiliation; other potential gender expressions, residing both within and without the polar binary. In adult life, the residue of those primeval, unadulterated vistas—and the grief surrounding their relinquishment—persists. It animates not only the flickering forms that populate our nightly dreamscapes, but the beliefs we adopt to justify the naturalness of our own “choices,” whether in matters of private eroticism (Dimen 2000, 2005) or in the sweeping claims of clinical theories.
As our critique of Perelberg’s volume makes clear, clinical theories within psychoanalysis have always been of two minds on this issue: attempting to make space for gender and erotic expressions at odds with normative expectations, while also registering—and often enacting reflexively—the regulatory anxieties that an encounter with the deep bisexual unconscious, and with the dizzying fact of difference, invariably provokes. In excluding LGBTQ experience from its pages, Perelberg’s volume offers a sanitized “psychic bisexuality” in keeping with one pole in the history of analytic thinking; our critique of that volume, and the work of a great many other thinkers active at the present moment, strives to embody its opposite. If Lacan’s writings on “lack” and “loss” teach us anything, however, it would be to reflect (with Hegel) that such roiling dialectics in conscious life seldom yield a satisfying resolution. Rather than attempting to expunge heterosexism or transphobia, to uphold the sanctity of the normative, or to usher in a transgressive, queer utopia, the best psychoanalysis may afford us at the present moment is the authenticity of the individual gaze: the grace to admit our anxiety faced with the fathomless depths of our bisexual inheritance, and the willingness to grieve, and perhaps strive to understand, the myriad patterns expressed in other lives. 22
Footnotes
Rajiv Gulati, Training and Supervising Analyst and faculty, Institute for Psychoanalytic Education affiliated with NYU Medical Center. David Pauley, Training and Supervising Analyst and faculty, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center, New York.
1
Especially the oedipal drama and the adaptation (via identification) to the objective physiology of the genitals and their putative (if debatable) meanings and expectations (i.e., heterosexual genitality).
2
We use the term “orthodox Lacanian” to denote a subset of thinkers who rely on Lacan’s early work in the service of explicit heteronormative/binary constructions of psychic life. We contrast them with other thinkers, and our own reading of Lacan, in the pages that follow (see Gherovici 2017; 
).
3
An extremely pared-down, far from comprehensive, list: Fonagy and Allison 2015; Lemma and Lynch 2015; Drescher 2008; Brady 2011; Chodorow 1992; Corbett 2009a,b; Dimen and Goldner 2004; Ehrensaft 2007, 2009; Goldsmith 1995; Harris 2000; Kiersky 1996; Layton 2000; Saketopoulou 2014; Isay 1989; Blechner 2015; .
4
Freud (1920) insists that the patient, “a beautiful and clever” eighteen year-old, is healthy and suffers no neurotic symptoms (p. 145). The sad later life of Margarethe Csonka (the patient in question), her failure to find a suitable female partner, and her resigned acceptance of a loveless marriage are described in Roudinesco’s recent biography of Freud (, pp. 244–247).
5
“The anxiety [Mr. Jones felt about] intercourse with a woman led him to escape into homosexual fantasies” (, p. 239; emphasis added). Campbell variously describes heterosexual coupling as “generative” and “creative,” and contrasts it with the patient’s “passive, homosexual” submission to the analyst, resulting in a “sterile” analysis (p. 235). The possibility of homosexual relationships as having generativity or creativity does not figure in Campbell’s metapsychology or in his paper. Neither does Campbell explore the impact of the “lack of recognition” from the analyst (a key Lacanian concept, akin to a lack of Winnicottian “holding”) as an iatrogenic factor in the case’s failure.
6
This patient’s intense need to anticipate and fulfill the wishes of the analyst and presumably both parents before him would seem to be the “unthought known” () that lies at the center of his quasi-existential ambivalence. It undoubtedly extends far beyond the issue of sexual object choice, scrambling his psychic life to a near psychotic degree. Rather than investigating the destructive enactment of this theme in the transference, however, Campbell takes an active position (be straight!), colluding in an antianalytic repetition rather than promoting understanding and clinical progress. Mr. Jones’s “failure” at sexual rehabilitation has a long and notorious history in psychoanalytic efforts to correct homosexuality. To see this type of effort described today—even if the analyst in question did not set out with such a program in mind—leaves us dumbfounded.
7
Contemporary psychoanalytic theory on gender variation, most especially Ken Corbett’s generative writing on “girlyboys” (1996, 2009a,; Erhensaft 2007) understands that kind of gesture as a creative effort to encode an intrinsic nonnormative experience of gender and (inchoate) sexual object choice, set against the backdrop of a society that is still deeply uncomfortable and not infrequently hostile toward children who transgress the gender binary. A reservoir of empirical research on gender-variant children makes clear that the vast majority (i.e., two-thirds) of boys like Vuong’s poetic subject end up in adulthood coming out as gay men (Erhensaft 2007, p. 278).
8
Perelberg’s use of anthropology inexplicably omits significant examples from non-Western cultures, such as India, where a “third sex,” in the form of the hijras (natal males who occupy a “feminized” place between the two genders), has been part of the fabric of culture and religious rites for millennia (Reddy 2005). For other examples of gender expressions that fall between or blend the poles of “male” and “female” in cultures around the globe, see the volume of essays edited by the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt.
10
In keeping with the current preference of some transgender individuals, we employ the nonspecific pronoun “they” for this patient, while acknowledging that this option was unavailable to them or to Green as the treatment unfolded in the 1950s. Perelberg, discussing the same pronoun in her introduction, acknowledges the current usage in such instances of “hybridization” (, p. 57) and the seemingly onerous requirement to apply it.
11
Not necessarily inborn, but patterned deeply as an authentic facet of experience (akin to the Winnicottian “true self”) from earliest infancy.
12
13
, p. 20) reminds us that the rate of suicide attempts among the transgender population is ten times that of their cisgender peers, and that “coming out” as trans and taking steps to alter one’s gender presentation (whether through pronoun changes or physiological interventions like hormones or surgery) is correlated with decreased depression and better overall functioning.
14
From Green’s chapter in Perelberg’s volume: “The vicissitudes of biological and psychical development present us with a range of structures (real hermaphroditism, pseudo-hermaphroditism, transvestism, homosexuality, fetishism), each of which lays claim to a distinct pathogeny and different therapeutic responses . . .” (, p. 248, emphasis added).
15
Perelberg disputes this, noting that the purpose of psychoanalysis is “understanding psychosexuality,” a doctrinal, rather than therapeutic, framing.
16
18
See Roudinesco’s description (1994) of Lacan’s analysis of François Wahl, editor of Écrits and an openly gay man (pp. 320–323), as well as Gherovici’s description of his consultations with Henri/Anne-Henriette (2017, pp. 87–89).
19
Maggie Nelson cites floridly homophobic/transphobic statements from Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek, eminent thinkers both heavily influenced by Lacan (see Nelson 2015, pp. 76–77). Other members of the Lacanian circles espousing such ideas include Catherine Millot (Gherovici 2017, p. 95), Charles Melman, and Jean-Pierre Winter. These last two, according to , “launched a real media crusade against homosexuals in the name of Lacanism and psychoanalysis . . . in order to reestablish the lost figure of the authoritarian father which, in their view, is threatened by the new homosexual order.”
20
21
The idea of the “personal pattern” features in Winnicott’s classic paper on transitional objects and phenomena, as he describes the constellation of circumstances that inspire the infant’s anointing of a seemingly random inanimate object—a piece of fluff, corner of a blanket, etc.—for that important developmental role. He emphasizes that the transitional object always arises from the child’s spontaneous gesture (i.e., not via external prescription), though assigns the parents a crucial role in helping to foster the patterning of that symbolic node through family rituals and play into the infant’s inchoate “true self” (Winnicott 1953; Pauley 2018a,). Gherovici and other writers make generative use of Winnicott’s concept of the “true self” to shed light on trans identities, despite the fact that Winnicott himself seems to have held rather conventional attitudes toward gender and gender nonconformity.
22
The importance of such personal perspectives is far from simply theoretical. As points out, the public witness of LGBTQ individuals and their allies in schools through groups like “Gay-Straight Alliances” has had a far-reaching, positive impact on the emotional lives of LGBTQ youth, a population that in aggregate remains at dramatically heightened risk for depression and suicide. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that such groups contribute to disrupting the projective processes that fuel homophobic/transphobic violence.