Bisexual Awareness

Within the depth-psychology corpus, bisexual awareness names not merely a sociological identity category but a fundamental structural condition of the psyche itself. The tradition approaches the theme from at least three distinct angles. Freud, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), establishes bisexual disposition as a constitutional given, arguing that all human beings carry the capacity for both homosexual and heterosexual object-choice and that psycho-analysis ‘is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind.’ His biological-neurological framing treats bisexuality as the bedrock of libidinal possibility, from which developmental pressures produce the narrower adult orientation. Hillman, engaging the same problematic through the lens of archetypal psychology, radicalizes the concept: in The Myth of Analysis (1972) he reads the Dionysian dismemberment myth as encoding a bisexual libido that fuses masculine and feminine, active and passive, life and death into an undivided whole, and argues that analytical practice distorts the soul when it splits that totality in favour of the ‘male knower.’ The Jungian-Kerényi tradition contributes a cosmogonic register, tracing the bisexual ‘primal being’ of Orphic mythology and the hermaphrodite symbol as archetypal images that mediate opposites and point forward to wholeness. Across these positions a key tension persists: whether bisexual awareness is a clinical description of psychosexual development, an archetypal image of totality, or a political-hermeneutic imperative for therapeutic theory itself.

In the library 15 passages

Bisexuality combines not only male and female, active and passive. It also brings together life and death. Dionysus is again destroyed and again reborn; moreover, this is not merely a successional process.

Hillman argues that bisexuality, understood through the Dionysian archetype, is a psychic totality uniting gendered poles with the life-death polarity, thereby transcending Freud’s merely biological or libidinal framing.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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the Dionysian approach, if I may call it such for a moment, would not separate the bisexuality in the symptom, not attempt to get consciousness out of the suffering, extract the active male light from the passive suffering, since this would be to divide the bisexual totality.

Hillman contends that any therapeutic approach that privileges masculine consciousness over feminine suffering violates the bisexual wholeness inherent in the symptom itself, calling for a non-divisive clinical stance.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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psycho-analysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex—freedom 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, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop.

Freud establishes bisexual object-choice as the developmental origin of all sexuality, making bisexual awareness the primordial condition from which unidirectional orientation is a secondary, culturally and biologically constrained achievement.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis

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a bisexual disposition is somehow concerned in inversion… the majority of authors who derive inversion from bisexuality bring forward that factor not only in the case of inverts, but also for all those who have grown up to be normal.

Freud presents the bisexual disposition as universal rather than pathological, positioning it as the constitutional ground underlying both ‘normal’ and ‘inverted’ development.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis

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a bisexual being was born of an egg. Orpheus called it Phanes… We have no reason to suspect in the bisexual nature of this being a secret doctrine of later date, which always remained alien to Greek thought.

Jung and Kerényi locate bisexuality at the cosmogonic origin in Orphic mythology, presenting the bisexual primal being as an archetype of totality native to Greek religious thought rather than a later esoteric importation.

Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949thesis

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Freud makes the astonishing statement: ‘An hysterical symptom is the expression of both a masculine and a feminine unconscious sexual phantasy.’

Hillman foregrounds Freud’s own bisexual theory of hysteria to demonstrate that bisexual awareness is already embedded in the classical psychoanalytic theory of symptom formation, legitimating its archetypal extension.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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We know that there is a biological factor in bi-sexuality, but I am concerned here with the psychological aspect. In women there is universally the wish to be a man… similarly, one finds in men the feminine position, the longing to possess breasts and to give birth to children.

Klein distinguishes the biological from the psychological dimension of bisexuality, grounding her analysis in the universal cross-gender identifications that complicate object-relations development in both sexes.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting

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the hermaphrodite has gradually turned into a subduer of conflicts and a bringer of healing, and it acquired this meaning in relatively early phases of civilization.

Jung interprets the hermaphrodite image as an archetypal ‘uniting symbol’ that mediates psychic opposites, providing the symbolic infrastructure through which bisexual awareness operates as a healing rather than merely transgressive force.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

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When gender is restored to its polymorphous roots in pleasure, rejoined with an awareness of variety, changeability, shifts of role and function—then its pleasure includes a sense of the lower, the multiple and the incomplete.

Berry argues that gender identity needs to be returned to its polymorphous, multiply-gendered foundations, aligning archetypal psychology with a post-Freudian awareness of fluid sexuality that resonates with bisexual experience.

Berry, Patricia, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982supporting

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analytical psychology close to contemporary psychoanalysis and its development of Freud’s bleak but brilliant insight that infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse. In fact, though Jung disputed the term ‘perverse’ (something universal cannot be said to be perverse), his preferred phrase ‘polyvalent germinal disposition’ expresses the same point.

Samuels demonstrates that Jung’s concept of the ‘polyvalent germinal disposition’ is functionally equivalent to the polymorphous-perverse sexuality Freud described, establishing bisexual potential as a shared foundational premise of both traditions.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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it seems to me probable that further research of a similar kind will produce a direct confirmation of this presumption of bisexuality.

Freud expresses confidence that empirical science will validate the universal bisexual disposition he posits theoretically, framing bisexual awareness as the coming destination of biological as well as psychological inquiry.

Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting

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We are cured when we are no longer only masculine in psyche, no matter whether we are male or female in biology. Analysis cannot constellate this cure until it, too, is no longer masculine in psychology.

Hillman recasts therapeutic cure as the psyche’s achievement of bisexual balance — the acceptance of femininity within a previously one-sidedly masculine analytical structure — linking psychological health directly to bisexual awareness.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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the myth of primordial man as a cosmic androgyne, who has disintegrated into the material and bisexual world of alien and conflicting parts, yet retains the capacity for recovering his lost integrity.

Abrams traces the Romantic inheritance of the esoteric myth in which bisexuality marks the fallen, fragmented condition of a once-unified primordial being, framing bisexual awareness as metaphysically redemptive in the Western literary-philosophical tradition.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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as bisexual symbol, 177, 190, 201… bisexual, 177, 180

Abraham’s index entries record the systematic use of bisexual symbolism (notably the sun) across his case-analytic work, registering the concept as a standard category within classical psychoanalytic symbol-interpretation.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927aside

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male and female poles of brain sexuality reflect extremes of a gradient that allows for many intermediary types… each sex does in fact possess circuits for both forms of behavior, but typically to different degrees.

Panksepp provides a neuroscientific grounding for bisexual awareness, arguing that male and female behavioral circuits coexist in every brain along a gradient, lending biological plausibility to the psychological concept of a universal bisexual disposition.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998aside

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