Constitutional Bisexuality
Freud felt there is a biological substrate—the “bedrock" (34)—of bisexuality,* upon which all later psychological development is anchored. His support for this thesis came from sources as outlandish as Fliess’s theory of periodic numbers that control human fate (28 for females and 23 for males) to the sound embryological studies that demonstrated rudiments of one sex within the other. In the monumental Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he laid out the fundamental rule from which he never turned: “Since I have become acquainted with the notion of bisexuality I regarded it the decisive factor, and without taking bisexuality into account, I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women” (24, p. 220). Henceforth, it was a biological given, for which he demanded no further evidence.
Biological bisexuality was thus considered the anlage of the psychological bisexuality Freud felt was present in all humans. He (and those classical analysts who most closely followed him) found bisexuality—or more accurately, fear of it—etiological in the psychoses, the neuroses, the perversions, the addictions—in all forms of psychopathology, and finally in all normal development. It lay at the root of all symptoms and all behavior. In his last great paper, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1938), he still found it crucial. At the end of this paper, as if to sum up all the rest, he said: “We often have the impression that with the wish for a penis [in females] and the masculine protest [in males] we have penetrated
•He uses "bisexuality” in several ways, ignoring distinctions so as to arrive at the highest level of abstraction. Thus we are often uncertain if he means a prime principle of all living cells, a state of anatomical affairs in the embryo, anal pleasure in the child, friendship in people of the same sex, overt homosexuality, or a universal attribute of human sexuality. He felt they were all aspects of the same phenomenon; I do not.
through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock, and that thus our activities are at an end. This is probably true, since, for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock” (34, p. 252).
Where are we nowadays with this concept that there is a biological bisexuality, and where are we with the related idea that such a “force” is an essential effector of human behavior, normal and pathological? I think most analysts today believe in something like Freud’s biological bisexuality (now more stylishly called “sexual bipotentiality” or "sexual dimorphism”): we know that cells, tissues, and organs in each sex can be modified in the direction of the opposite sex. Most of us, however, would not look on these findings as indicating bisexuality quite as Freud understood the term.
Especially following Jost’s embryological work (recently reviewed in [71]), the evidence has piled up that in mammals anatomical and physiological maleness does not ever occur, regardless of chromosomal sex (XX in females, XY in males), unless the fetus secretes male hormones (apparently initiated by the Y chromosome). Even, and especially, the brain requires such masculini-zation in mammals or else femininity will result.
That humans share in the general rule of the femaleness of mammalian tissue seems borne out when we look at the “natural experiments” of endocrine disorders. There we see in each instance that the fetus that is deprived of androgen at critical times in its development fails to show anatomic maleness. For instance, the XO (Turner’s syndrome) infant, whatever her defects, has no male tissues, for she has no gonad to produce androgen, and in the androgen insensitivity syndrome, the inability of target tissues to respond to circulating androgens restrains fetal development to femaleness. On the other hand, the female fetus that is exposed to increased androgen, as in hyperadrenalism, is masculinized, and in the extreme case, the clitoris is anatomically indistinguishable from a penis.
But those examples teach us about anatomy; none of this per se touches on psychoanalytic theories of behavior, except to indicate, as Freud had already been taught, that the male organism’s tissues can be as if female, and vice versa fof females. Freud’s interest as a psychologist was not in these anatomic matters but in the mind-body problem. How do these physiological states affect behavior? Here we are especially indebted to John Money, whose studies on people with such endocrine disorders as those noted above suggest that the fetal human brain also needs to be “primed” with androgen for normal masculine development, and that if the female fetal brain is exposed to androgens, a mild though measurable increase in masculine behavior in the growing girl can be expected as compared with control females (108). Other studies suggest that an unusual number of males with congenital hypogonadism, and thus, presumably, inadequate fetal androgen (for example, Klinefelter’s syndrome), are feminine in behavior from earliest childhood on, regardless of rearing (110, 137).
Recent reports have suggested that homosexuality in males is caused primarily by biological forces. Geneticists have argued that homosexuality is inherited (72, 128). One worker has described instant cure of homosexuality by neurosurgical means (coagulation of Cajal’s nucleus in the ventromedial hypothalamus), indicating a precise brain center for the behavior (122, 9). Other studies have shown decreased plasma testosterone levels and impaired spermatogenesis (83) and abnormal an-drosterone/etiocholanalone ratio (98) in direct relation to degree of homosexuality. No one of these studies contradicts the others; they may be measuring different aspects of the same process: genes, neuroanatomy, or chemistry. (They may also be flat-out wrong in their conclusions.) And none necessarily contradicts psychoanalytic theory, if each is a piece of the underlying “bedrock” to which Freud referred. However, if the claim is made that these biological mechanisms are the cause of homosexuality, then of course Freud’s theory of disturbed interpersonal relationships (oedipal and preoedi-pal conflict) is in doubt.
But these physiological studies, animal or human, do not explicate human sexual behavior; they only tell us about underlying biological potentialities, as do so many other studies in regard to an aspect of human behavior. (An epileptic seizure tells us something about aggression and violence, as does a decorticated cat, but it does not tell all.) As usual, what is made of those potentialities usually lies in the area of environmental influences. For help in this regard, let us turn to the theories of interpersonal, object relations and of social learning.
Infantile Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex
Freud believed bisexuality (and all sexuality) arises from two sources. The first is biological, as we have already seen. This produces an unalterable part of human psychology, which leads in men to a fear of not being manly and in women an urge to be manly. The second is environmental.
It is not possible to adopt the view that the form to be taken by sexual life is unambiguously decided, once and for all, with the inception of the different components of the sexual constitution. On the contrary, the determining process continues. [24, p. 237] . . . the constitutional factor must await experiences before it can make itself felt; the accidental factor must have a constitutional basis in order to come into operation. To cover the majority of cases we can picture what has been described as a “complemental series" in which the diminishing intensity of one factor is balanced by the increasing intensity of the other; there is, however, no reason to deny the