ABSTRACT
In well-meaning efforts to redress the imbalance inherent in Freud’s own views about women, contemporary writers are sometimes in the danger of going too far in denying the inevitability of differences between the sexes. 1 It is odd that, in contrast to Psychoanalysis of the Sexual Functions of Women, so much theoretical effort since then has sought to undermine the inevitability of bisexuality (see, for example, Kardiner, Karush, & Ovesey, 1959; Rado, 1940). Of course the word ‘bisexual’ has historically been used in a wide variety of contexts, from foetal development to manifest homosexual behaviour; and it may have been used for authoritarian clinical purposes. Fortunately, few informed psychoanalysts have tended to stigmatize bisexuality in women as a ‘phallic fixation’ (Benedek, 1959, pp. 729–730), or a consequence of the wish to reject femininity.
