This is the first book to assess bisexuality through a range of psychoanalytic and critical perspectives, highlighting both the issues faced by bisexual people in contemporary society and the challenges that can be presented by bisexual clients within a clinical setting. Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, in addition to using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects. Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with the topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies.

This is the first book to assess bisexuality through a range of psychoanalytic and critical perspectives, highlighting both the issues faced by bisexual people in contemporary society and the challenges that can be presented by bisexual clients within a clinical setting. Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, in addition to using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects. Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with the topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies. c community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender and sexuality studies.

This book engages bisexuality as a concept relevant and even central to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. The author provides an overview of the origins of this concept in Freudian theory and analyzes the ways in which it has been used, theoretically and clinically, in recent decades. Bisexuality' s intersections with clinical and theoretical issues such as erotic transference/countertransference and Oedipus complex are explored, as are the types of pressures and anxieties experienced by bisexuals of different genders. The book's main purpose is to promote a shift away from a traditional psychoanalytic view of bisexuality as an undifferentiated, primitive state that belongs to the past, of both the individual and the species, and has to be given up as a condition for "real" adult sexuality - towards recognition of bisexuality as a form of desire and practice that is alive and present in individuals' lives and, as contemporary bisexual theory has demonstrated, has the power to transform many limiting notions about sexuality. The book aims, not only to promote a better understanding and greater acceptance of bisexual identities and practices among psychoanalytic clinicians, but also to shed light on some of psychoanalytic theory's foundational biases and help shift psychoanalytic thinking from monosexual to bisexual epistemology.

Winner of the American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Edited Book Prize for 2019! Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue clarifies and develops the Freudian conception according to which sexual identity is not reduced to the anatomical difference between the sexes, but is constructed as a psychic bisexuality that is inherent to all human beings. The book takes the Freudian project into new grounds of clinical practice and theoretical formulations and contributes to a profound psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality. The object of pychoanalysis is psychosexuality, which is not, in the final analysis, determined by having a male or a female body, but by the unconscious phantasies that are reached après coup through tracing the nuanced interplay of identifications as they are projected, enacted and experienced in the transference and the countertransference in the analytic encounter. Drawing on British and French Freudian and post-Freudian traditions, the book explores questions of love, transference and countertransference, sexual identity and gender to set out the latest clinical understanding of bisexuality, and includes chapters from influential French analysts available in English for the first time. Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars.

This is the first book to assess bisexuality through a range of psychoanalytic and critical perspectives, highlighting both the issues faced by bisexual people in contemporary society and the challenges that can be presented by bisexual clients within a clinical setting. Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, as well as using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects. Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with this topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender & sexuality studies.

Bisexuality: A Critical Reader presents the essential primary texts on bisexuality from the last 100 years in an easy-to-read format. Exploring this often controversial concept from a range of perspectives, this book places bisexuality in its historical and cultural context and explores its many meanings and uses. Merl Storr's introductions give a straightforward overview of the texts included and sets them clearly in the context of debates on bisexuality. This collection includes pieces by: * Henry Havelock Ellis * Sigmund Freud * Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin * and Hélèn Cixous.

This book outlines three shibboleths of psychoanalysis: psychic bisexuality, the Oedipus complex, and social ontology. It affirms the centrality of the Oedipus complex and illustrates the characterological functioning of the pre-phallic superego.