life, the libido normally oscillates between male and female objects.” Ibid., p. 158. “Man is an animal organism with … an unmistakably bisexual disposition.” Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 105 n. 3. The term “bisexuality,” however, had a much broader valence for Freud than it possesses for most contemporary readers. For Freud, bisexuality at least at times referred to the belief that human beings contained elements of both maleness and femaleness within them. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in Standard Edition, vol. 7, p. 141; Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversion (1919), in Standard Edition, vol. 17, p. 202. This is not to say that Freud believed all human beings were genitally hermaphroditic, but rather that he believed that “in every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex.” Freud, Three Essays, p. 141. Under this particular formulation, bisexuality described how individuals contained both men and women (a conceptualization I call sex-based bisexuality) rather than how they desired both men and women (the contemporary conceptualization of the term “bisexuality,” which I here call orientation-based bisexuality). Yet in Freud’s view, sex-based bisexuality entailed orientation-based bisexuality. If “every human being displayed both male and female instinctual impulses,” and one of those instincts was sexual, then for Freud it followed that “each individual [sought] to satisfy both male and female wishes in his sexual life.” Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 105–6 n. 3. Put differently, if the psyche had both male and female aspects, the psyche must contain desire for both men and women, assuming, of course, that these male and female aspects were themselves heterosexual. Ironically, then, this belief in universal orientation-based bisexuality derived from an unarticulated belief in the universal heterosexuality of the male and female aspects of the psyche. Through such machinations, Freud arrived at the conclusion that “every human being [was an orientation-based] bisexual” and that the “libido [was] distributed either in a manifest or latent fashion, over objects of both sexes.” Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), in Standard Edition, vol. 23, p. 244.
16 The belief that homosexuality See, for example, Richard Cohen, Coming Out Straight: Understanding and Healing Homosexuality (Winchester, Va.: Oakhill Press, 2000).
17 His famous 1935 letter Sigmund Freud to Anonymous Mother (April 9, 1935), in “A Letter from Freud,” American Journal of Psychiatry 107 (1951): 786–87.
18 In The Psychogenesis Freud, The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman, p. 151.
19 In his letter Freud, “Letter from Freud,” p. 787.
20 He put it more bluntly Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York: Jason Aronson, 1988), p. 32, quoting Sigmund Freud, Brief, Die Zeit (Vienna), October 27, 1903.
21 “produced by a certain arrest” Freud, “Letter from Freud,” p. 787.
22 Even more disturbingly Jack Drescher, “I’m Your Handyman: A History of Reparative Therapies,” Journal of Homosexuality 36 (June 1998): 22.
23 Insofar as homosexuality was concerned Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality, p. 16.
24 The new generation of therapists See, for example, Irving Bieber et al., Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York: Basic Books, 1962), pp. 44–117; Albert Ellis, Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1965); Sandor Rado, Adaptational Psychodynamics: Motivation and Control (New York: Science House, 1969); Charles W. Socarides, The Overt Homosexual (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1968).
25 The year after Freud’s death Sandor Rado, “A Critical Examination of the Concept of Bisexuality,” in Psychoanalysis of Behavior: Collected Papers (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1956).
26 His proof Ibid., pp. 145–46.
27 He believed antisex views Rado, Adaptational Psychodynamics, p. 212.