Bisexuality

Defining Bisexuality

The meaning of bisexuality has developed within various academic disciplines, such as psychology, psychoanalysis, biology, and sexology, as well as within sexual identity politics or identity activism. Bisexual scholar and activist Clare Hemmings has noted three primary usages of the term “bisexuality”: (1) bisexuality as synonymous with hermaphroditism, the presence of male and female characteristics in one organism; (2) bisexuality as the coexistence in a human individual of both “masculine” and “feminine” psychological dispositions or personal characteristics; (3) and bisexuality as sexual attraction to both men and women.

History of Bisexuality in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Sexology

Social scientists have used the term bisexuality to refer to varying social phenomena involving human biology and sexuality. In the late 19th century, German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing identified “psychosexual hermaphroditism” as the condition of patients in whom he observed desire for both women and men. British sexologist Havelock Ellis initially adopted this same terminology in his own work. Yet Ellis later began to use bisexuality to refer to sexual dimorphism, the simultaneous presence of female and male sex characteristics in one individual, as well as to sexual desire for both women and men.

Sigmund Freud puzzled over the role and meaning of bisexuality in his psychoanalytic theories of human psychosexual development. Freud continued to develop and redefine his understanding of bisexuality throughout his work on sexuality, which included theories of the origins of homosexuality and the development of masculinity and femininity. Freud initially referred to bisexuality as hermaphroditism but also came to view a bisexual potential in all individuals in terms of the possibility for desire toward females or males.

Freud postulated that before girls and boys experience the Oedipal conflict, they do not yet have a solid gender disposition as feminine or masculine. Accordingly, their sexual object-choice, or preference for female or male sexual partners, has not yet been established. Freud explained that pre-Oedipal females and males experience a bisexual potential before the cementing of a feminine or masculine disposition that directs desire toward one sex/gender. This bisexual potential is supposedly resolved for both girls and boys during the Oedipal conflict, when they cease to desire one or the other parent and repress one side of their bisexual disposition in accord with heterosexual social norms. Freud did not see bisexuality as a stable sexuality in healthy, mature adults.

...