Bisexuality occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a biological hypothesis, a metapsychological principle, and an archetypal configuration. Freud introduced it as a foundational premise: every human organism carries a constitutional double disposition, masculine and feminine, whose unequal resolution shapes object-choice, neurotic structure, and the fate of the Oedipus complex. His 1905 ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ treats bisexuality both as an explanatory key to inversion and as evidence that the sexual instinct is, in its origins, independent of any fixed object. Hillman’s archetypal revision subjects the Freudian framework to mythic elaboration: in ‘The Myth of Analysis’ he identifies bisexuality with the Dionysian libido itself — a double current that unites not merely male and female but also life and death, activity and passivity. For Hillman, bisexual consciousness becomes the telos of analysis; repudiation of the feminine is the very bedrock of neurosis, and cure coincides with the integration of that which has been held in contempt. Klein approaches the term from the angle of internal object relations, locating bisexual identifications — wishes to be the other sex, to possess the other parent’s attributes — within the interplay of envy, admiration, and the drive toward integration. Winnicott reformulates the question clinically as the problem of the ‘split-off’ contra-sexual element, examining what it means for a man to carry an unacknowledged girl-self. Samuels maps the post-Jungian debate, tracing bisexuality’s conceptual cousins — androgyny, polymorphous perversity, polyvalent germinal disposition — across schools. Together these voices reveal an enduring tension between biological grounding and psychological symbolism.
Bisexuality combines not only male and female, active and passive. It also brings together life and death. Dionysus is again destroyed and again reborn
Hillman elevates bisexuality from a biological duality to a Dionysian archetypal principle that reconciles not merely gender opposites but the fundamental polarity of life and death.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
Freud makes the astonishing statement: ‘An hysterical symptom is the expression of both a masculine and a feminine unconscious sexual phantasy.’
Hillman cites Freud’s 1908 paper on bisexuality and hysteria to argue that every symptom is structurally bisexual, encoding both masculine and feminine fantasy simultaneously.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
a bisexual disposition is somehow concerned in… the general bisexual disposition of the higher animals… further research of a similar kind will produce a direct confirmation of this presumption of bisexuality.
Freud posits a universal bisexual constitutional disposition as the biological substratum underlying inversion, framing it as the foundational premise of his theory of sexuality.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
psycho-analysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex—freedom to range equally over male and female objects… 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 argues that bisexual object-choice is the original human condition, with heterosexual or homosexual exclusivity representing secondary restrictions of a more fundamental libidinal freedom.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
we have been in search of essential psychological qualities needed for bisexual consciousness.
Hillman names ‘bisexual consciousness’ as the explicit goal of analytic inquiry, recasting the therapeutic project as the recovery of psychological qualities long devalued under masculine-Apollonic frameworks.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
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 given of bisexuality from its psychological expression in cross-sex identifications and envious wishes, embedding bisexuality within object-relations dynamics of envy and reparation.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
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 argues that the therapeutic aim is a genuinely bisexual psychology, and that analysis remains self-defeating so long as it retains its fundamentally masculine-identified structure.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
The other-sex element may be completely split off so that, for instance, a man may not be able to make any link at all with the split-off part.
Winnicott reframes bisexuality clinically as the problem of a dissociated contra-sexual element whose complete split-off from the functioning personality constitutes a specific pathological configuration.
, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting
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 aligns the Jungian concept of a polyvalent germinal disposition with Freud’s polymorphous perversity, showing that both traditions converge on a bisexual or undifferentiated substrate underlying adult sexuality.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
The ultimate ground of thinking in opposites is the male/female pair, ‘the only real antithesis’… ‘psychic hermaphroditism’… ‘The psyche partakes of both feminine and masculine traits’
Hillman, reading Adler, traces the binary structuring of all psychological thought to a hermaphroditic ground in which both masculine and feminine traits are co-present in the psyche from childhood.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
together with other names of the sort must be derived from hushed-up tales of the god’s bisexuality.
Kerényi identifies Dionysus’s epithets — including ‘the womanish’ and ‘the man-womanly’ — as mythological traces of a divine bisexuality suppressed but structurally central to the god’s nature.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
Along with the demolition of the Oedipus complex, the boy’s object-cathexis of his mother must be given up. Its place may be filled by one of two things: either an identification with his mother or an intensification of his identification with his father.
Freud shows how the bisexual constitution directly determines Oedipal outcomes, with both identificatory paths available to each sex as structural consequences of the double libidinal disposition.
, The Ego and the Id, 1923supporting
this man had to fit into her idea that her baby would be and was a girl… On the basis of this pattern he later arranged his defences, but it was the mother’s ‘madness’ that saw a girl where there was a boy
Winnicott illustrates how the contra-sexual split can be environmentally imposed through a mother’s projective misrecognition, showing bisexuality as partly a relational construction rather than a purely intrapsychic given.
, Playing and Reality, 1971supporting
Homosexuality has received little attention in analytical psychology. So far as I know there has never been a suggestion that homosexuality is either a mental illness or biologically determined.
Samuels notes that post-Jungian analytical psychology has not theorised homosexuality as pathology, implicitly situating the tradition’s tolerance within a broader acceptance of bisexual dispositionality.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985aside