The concept of psychic homosexuality

The author examines the concept of psychic homosexuality, as it is used by French authors, based on Freud's ideas in The Ego and the Id (1923). Being intimately bound up with the organisation and development of psychic bisexuality in both sexes, psychic homosexuality is a concept that proves to have many meanings conceptually and in clinical use. In particular there is the question as to whether it is of the same kind and performs the same function in men as in women. Arguing that the primary relationship with the mother is crucial to the psychic organisation of the feminine and the masculine and that their fate is different in the development of the girl and the boy through to the structured identifications that result from the Oedipus complex, the author describes the case histories of a man and a woman. He concludes that psychic homosexuality might most usefully be considered not as a singular entity but as a set of plural entities. The advantage of this way of conceptualising things is illustrated in the way certain fantasy configurations connected with infantile sexual theories were able to be more richly understood. The author ends by drawing out some implications of these distinctions for technique.