From “Polymorphous Perversity” to Polysexuality: A Note on Psychoanalytic Ideologies and the Critique of Hegemonic Normativity

ABSTRACT

The psychological and sociopolitical significance of Freud’s 1905 assertion of polymorphous perversity and originary bisexuality as being the source of all human sexual expression is explored. The way in which normative sexual development involves a trajectory of loss of our capacities for sensual pleasure is discussed. The notion of humans as all having “polysexual potential” is introduced, and it is argued that appreciating polysexuality as a central feature of our condition has emancipatory value and is thus preferable to the pejoratively toned terminology that Freud deployed.

We may never be privileged to read a definitive and comprehensive history of psychoanalysis in relation to this discipline’s varied—variously complex and sometimes alarmingly reductive—conceptualizations of human sexuality. Such a task would surely prove overwhelmingly daunting. It would also necessarily and inherently be an ambitiously encyclopedic exercise either in ideological critique or in the perpetuation of all those myths (such as those of normative heterosexuality) that come to regulate erotic expression, curtail pleasure, and thus entrench the structures of oppression. Any understanding of erotic pleasures and displeasures is inescapably politicized. Internally to the individual as well as externally in terms of the individual’s sociocultural context, this includes the labeling of them, the theorizing of them, as well as the processes by which many aspects of their expression are suppressed, repressed, and oppressed—all processes that are steeped in ideology. We owe this insight to Foucault’s famous four-volume History of Sexuality (1976, 1984a, 1984b, 2018), and subsequently to critical commentators too numerous to mention here.

The intent of this note is to advocate a critical way of reading Freud’s twin doctrines of “polymorphous disposition” (polymorphe Disposition) or “perversity” (Perversität) and of “original” or “originary bisexuality” (ursprünglichen Bisexualität), as well as to advance the critically significant notion of the inherent polysexuality of being human. Such a reading has been suggested in previous writings (by several commentators, including myself). The distinction of this brief contribution as an intervention in our current debates is to highlight the supreme value of these doctrines for the development of a more robustly fruitful theoretical and practical synthesis of feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic visions of the human condition. That is, to suggest how psychoanalysis is—from its liberatory inception inspired by its radical commitment to ongoing free-associative discourse—inherently a feminist and queer praxis manqué. These twin doctrines signal a series of profound insights into the human condition that still need to realize the radicality of their critical potential.

This note does not attempt to track in any detail the fate of these ideas through the past thirteen decades. Rather, it is merely suggested that such a scholarly accounting could be of vital significance to our current situation. This is because these notions have—and might be further cultivated for their—liberatory relevance in relation to the intrapsychic and interpersonal processes of acculturation and their embeddedness with the mechanisms of sociosexual oppression. I argue that, from the radical standpoint of the search for emancipative praxis, the notion of every human being having polysexual potentiality—in relation to the erotic impulses that are to be experienced, enjoyably or abhorrently, or that are to be repulsively avoided—is greatly preferable to the unremittingly pejorative concept of our “polymorphous perversity.” It is suggested that Freud coined this term in a move that had revolutionary potential, but that was then used retrogressively to justify a heteronormative calculus of “mental health.”

The implication of this notion of our erotic potentiality is that we have, from cradle to grave, the capacity for pleasure or unpleasure (and for pain) from every zone and component of our embodied experience. This note thus focuses on the significance of Freud’s disclosure that we start life with the capacity to engage erotic experiences polymorphously, yet we typically arrive in adulthood—via processes of repression, suppression, and oppression—with a drastically attenuated repertoire of what sexologists call the “sexual patterning” of our erotic pleasures (e.g., Francoeur, 1997). The crucial political question—for all those who treasure freedom, and especially for the feminists and queers that all psychoanalysts should know themselves to be—is how it is that so much of our capacity for embodied erotic enjoyment succumbs to processes and mechanisms by which these pleasures effectively disappear from our psychic repertoire. We become estranged or alienated from our own embodied experience, from the pleasures of the flesh (as well as those of sight, sound, and eroticized thinking). Such a focus—on the way psychoanalysis has, at least in its founding as a unique discipline, unmasked the hegemony of heteromale sexuality—postpones for another occasion questions about how we experience matters of our biological sex, our gender, and our gender roles. Rather, it emphasizes the ubiquitous processes of erotic regulation, containment, and curtailment of embodied pleasures in the ubiquitously oppressive service of the sociocultural status quo.

Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905, is one of the two texts from which the discipline of psychoanalysis erupted via its discovery of the radical fertility of the free-associative method (the other being the 1900 Interpretation of Dreams). It is in the 1905 book that he presents (more fully than in previous papers) “polymorphous perversity” and “originary bisexuality” as essential characteristics of the psychodynamic fabric of human erotics. Although not often explicitly recognized for their critical power, these tenets rip apart the cogency and propriety of heteronormative discourse, as well as providing ground for the critique of phallocentricity with its motif of domination/subjugation that pervades the ideologies of our everyday lives.

Freud’s own thinking veered from the revolutionary toward the conservative (and sometime swayed between them quite rapidly). In the overall scheme of his trajectory, the writings from 1895 to 1915 tend to be remarkably radical, despite his prodigious efforts at diplomacy and scientistic respectability (which he embraced in order to advance his somewhat cultish movement). By contrast, it can be shown that thereafter his engagement with major efforts of grand theorizing entails a gravitation toward ideological revisionism (Barratt, 1984/2016, 1993/2016, 2013, 2016, 2019a). To various degrees, these can be shown to include the theories of narcissism, of object relations, of life and death principles, and of the ego organization and its management of signal anxiety, as well as its potential for splitting—all of which involve conjectures that are experience-far in relation to the curative praxis of free-association and its provision of insights into the vicissitudes of embodied pleasure.

The sequence of the Three Essays is significant. The first two celebrate (or at least document) the inherently “poly” character of human erotics, whereas the last attempts to explain why penile–vaginal coitus seems through “maturation” to take priority within the panorama of human sexuality, relegating all other pleasures either to secondary status or to condemned modalities of “perversion.” This sequencing has made the essays vulnerable to being lampooned or humorously ribbed as a “teleology of the missionary position” (Rubin, 1975). As is well known, long after the Essays, Freud produced an infamous string of papers—ably challenged by feminist and queer theorists—that in many respects constitutes a dogmatic retreat from the potentially radical implications of the first two of the 1905 trio (Freud, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1931). This series is largely responsible for turning so many feminist and queer theorists away from psychoanalysis in toto, thus failing to appreciate its radical potential. Throughout the subsequent century, the mainstream psychoanalytic movement has generally made strenuous efforts both to downplay the significance of sexuality in human functioning (for example, reducing sexuality to a merely behavioral category of “sex acts”) and to expunge theoretically the significance of Freud’s key principle that human sexuality must be understood in terms of the inherently conflictual, contradictory, and contested dynamics of psychic energies. The extent and depth to which our lives are perpetually governed by the movement of embodied erotic energies and the fantasies they generate, consciously and unconsciously—which is arguably the essence of psychoanalysis’s revolutionary insight into the human condition—often seems all but forgotten within “new” ideologies of self, object relations, ego functions, neuroscience, the biology of attachment, the structuration of signifiers, and so forth.

The key to understanding our sexuality, as implied by the first two essays of 1905, is both that it is foundationally fluid or diversely energetic, and that its “normal” development into rather narrow and repetitive patterns of erotic expression (our “sexual identity” and “orientation”) occurs through successive processes of the suppression and repression of the inherent multiplicity of our embodied erotic impulses. Such processes are required and reinforced by sociocultural structures of oppression. Psychological “maturation” thus involves nothing more than a trajectory in which the pleasures of the flesh are progressively lost to our self-consciousness. In short, although our erotic potential is exuberantly polysexual, most of us end up enjoying only a compulsively and defensively maintained repertoire of sexual expression. Through the travails of childhood and adolescence, the inherently multiplicious channels of the motion and commotion of our embodied energies are tamed intrapsychically, as well as domesticated interpersonally, socially, and culturally.

Even today, Freud’s Three Essays continues to be noteworthy for what might appropriately be read as its polemical intent. As he later clarified, this is not a text about biological sex, gender, or gender role, the experience of which may be profoundly influenced by chromosomal and hormonal factors. Rather, it is about the lived experience of pleasure, and the apparent disappearance of so much of our capacity for embodied enjoyment. In the subsequently written third and fourth “prefaces” to the Essays (penned in 1914 and 1920), Freud seems diplomatically careful to specify that he is addressing the psychodynamic vicissitudes of our sexualities—which can be taken to mean the expressive patterns of our lived experience as embodied beings in pleasure/unpleasure (lust/unlust) and pain. This is the conflictually and contradictorily generative determination of our individual repertoire of erotics (whether indulged, abstained, or abhorred)—that is, our “sexual patterning,” which subsumes our sense of having an “identity” or “orientation.” Surely one of the main implications of Freud’s 1905 thesis (although he leaves this tactfully understated, so as not to be impolitic within the cultural milieu of his day) is that potentially any and all erotic activities might have been maintained as enjoyable in our postpubertal sexual life, but most are not. This is not because what we find erotic is encoded in our genes, not because our adult sexual patterning is ordained by hereditary factors. Rather, every individual seems to undergo a “maturational” developmental trajectory in which so many activities appear to be excised from our capacity for pleasure—being suppressed or repressed, leaving us in maturity with a rather narrow repertoire of enjoyment that is then compulsively and defensively sustained.

As is well known, the first of Freud’s Essays outlines the dynamics of libidinal energies in relation to what are called their “aberrations.” In many respects, this is a riposte to Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis, published nine years earlier (Krafft-Ebing, 1886). With its 238 case histories, the latter is a hefty volume, credited as the “classic” and most influential—at least in North Atlantic medicine through the greater part of the last century—text on sexual variations or “pathology.” It describes, nosologically, a very wide range of “deviations” or “perversions,” including homosexuality and other “antipathic instincts” (for example, introducing terms such as “sadism” and “masochism”). Perhaps most significantly, Krafft-Ebing attributes such variations from “normal”—couple only, missionary position—heterosexuality as being mostly determined by “degenerate hereditary” and other biological factors. It is this aspect against which Freud’s writing trenchantly rebels, instigating a profound rethinking of what it means to be human, a “revolt” against the dominant discourse.

The second Essay famously demonstrates how every child enjoys, or has the potential to enjoy, precisely all those activities and fantasies that in adulthood are condemned as psychopathological. The point here is that erotic pleasure is to be appreciated as the being–becoming of the kinesis of subtle energies within us. The increasing inhibition and constriction of our sexual expression not only result from some patterns being stigmatized or forbidden by explicit external forces. These are also the result of complex internally implicit processes of suppression and repression, by which the range of childhood pleasures that were once enjoyed becomes, in adulthood, drastically diminished.

The power and ubiquity of external prohibition are not being underestimated here. There are oppressive consequences if I masturbate anally when my caretakers are watching, if I speak of my enthusiasm for group sex at a bourgeois dinner party, if I swim naked on most public beaches, or in most countries, if I am seen to passionately kiss someone of the same gender. And so forth. The consequences range from derision, scolding, and rejection or exile, to imprisonment, torture, and death. However, the external oppression of sexual activities is far from the only issue (although it is something against which we should struggle vehemently), and it is neither Freud’s revolutionary focus, nor that of these notes.

Not so much an issue of external prohibition, the narrowing of an individual’s repertoire of erotic pleasures is fundamentally a matter of the way in which certain movements of inner energies that were once enjoyed have been interrupted or permanently blocked in the course of “maturation”—as if disappearing into our unconscious and thus succumbing to our internal economies of suppression and repression. This is not just the censorship of behavior, it is the reductive shaping of our desire, by processes in which potential erotic pleasures are lost to our self-consciousness, either vanishing into psychic oblivion or being acknowledged under the banner of condemnation (cf. Quindeau, 2013). In elucidating this, Freud effectively subverts the politically insidious distinction between “normality” and “deviance.” He does so both by writing about sexuality as a movement of subtle energies (and not just as a set of preferred behaviors encoded in our genes and/or bludgeoned by the vicissitudes of external prohibition), and by then centralizing the question how and why so many formerly pleasurable modes of embodied erotic experience—channels of libidinal discharge—seem to disappear from consciousness, even while remaining within our erotic potential. The internally inhibitive processes of suppression and repression thus come to account for how we become erotically diminished as we “mature.”

The radical power of this way of theorizing human sexuality lies in its implication that we all have all manner of erotic impulses within us, yet they remain outside the purview of our self-consciousness. Some inner impulses are suppressed. That is, they are thinkable but are treated as other than anything that might be enjoyed—their expression is regarded either as merely uninteresting or as repugnant. Under the rubric of suppression, there are innumerable “defense mechanisms” by which individuals rule out certain possibilities of pleasure that could be obtained from their embodied experience. Other inner impulses are repressed. That is, they are otherwise than anything that can be entertained in thought—and this applies primarily to our childhood incestuous inclinations, in that the so-called “repression barrier” is established as the intrapsychic inscription of the universal incest taboo. The latter is the result of human oedipality, which is a notion with radical significance that has been much misunderstood both by Freud’s radical critics and by his conservative following (Barratt, 2017, 2019b). It must be emphasized here that Freud’s focus on our adult erotic repertoire being the result of conflictual processes of suppression and repression does not imply that our sexual inclinations are a matter of choice—far from it. That our sexual patterning is psychodynamically determined (rather than by hereditary or simply by direct and indirect forces of social approval and disapproval) does not mean that it is chosen. That our adult modes of sexual expression result from psychodynamic conflict—being perpetually and compulsively maintained by long-standing patterns of defense—should be an insight welcomed by radical theorizing, queer and feminist. It implies, after all, that we are all queer whether we consciously know it or not.

Freud’s notion of “originary bisexuality” is tightly related to his notion of “polymorphous perversity.” It dispels the prevalent ideology that we are either homo or hetero in what is called our “sexual orientation.” Rather, we are all both, even if our self-conscious experience of our erotically embodied impulses does not acknowledge proclivities other than those associated with what we think is our sexual identity or orientation. Freud should not be charged with being homophobic (cf. Freud, 1935). However, there is no question that his theorizing was heteronormative. In the third of his Essays, having established that we are all “perverse” (and “bi”) in the prepubertal vicissitudes of our erotic impulses, Freud feels compelled to explain the putative predominance of heterosexual behaviors in adulthood: that is, how the prepubertal cacophony of erotic impulses succumbs to suppression and repression to such a determinatively significant extent that so many people appear to be, and consciously experience themselves as being, heterosexual and nothing but heterosexual. As mentioned previously, this heteronormativity led to the 1920 series of essays that have been so well challenged by queer and feminist theorists such as Brennan (1992), Butler (1990), Chodorow (1989), Gentile (2016), Irigaray (1985), Kofman (1985), Kristeva (1977), Rubin (1975–2004), and so many others. Together with that of “polymorphous perversity,” the notion that we start life with an equal potential for heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or pansexual erotic encounters in adulthood is surely liberatory.

With the development of their “Heterosexual–Homosexual Rating Scale,” Kinsey and his colleagues are routinely credited with establishing behaviorally that orientation is a continuum rather than a hetero/homo dichotomy (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gebhard, 1953). The score of zero on their scale is ultra-hetero, without any evidence of homosexual activities or fantasies; the score of six is ultra-homo, and a three is an individual with equal propensities in both directions. However, although acknowledging that individuals might shift their position on this scale in the course of their adulthood (an acknowledement later amplified by Klein’s research that is reported in his 1978 text), Kinsey rejected this possibility, as well as the credibility of psychoanalytic or psychodynamic insights into the way in which a person’s relative hetero/bi/homo orientation might be composed. His conviction seems to be that you are what you are as assessed by his scale, and how you got there is not in question (that is, he does not seriously consider the idea that one’s sexual position might be founded by suppression and repression of other and otherwise impulses that remain active within). Yet as early as the mid 1890s, Freud was insistent not only on the diversity of impulses that we all harbor within us, consciously or unconsciously, but thus also on “the bisexuality of all human beings” (e.g., Freud, 1896). He thereby demonstrates that heterosexual expressions, which he takes to predominate adult sexuality, depend on the suppression of homosexual inclinations, and vice versa.

The revolutionary impact of these insights is still underappreciated. We are all queer in our potential for pleasure, and we have our erotic repertoire shaped and vastly reduced by processes that are essentially those of loss—of disappearance—through suppression and repression. Indeed, for most cultures it could be asserted that it seems as if the greater the reduction, the more “normal” are the appearances of the individual’s adulthood (on the condition that the processes of loss compel the person in a hetero direction). Not only are we all latently queer, but—and this point seems crucial—the implication of Freud’s insights is that our adult sexual identity or orientation is, so to speak, not formed on a “positive” or fixed foundation. Rather, it is formed “negatively” by the suppression and repression of impulses that are thus rendered “other” or “otherwise” yet are a component of our forgotten repertoire. Our manifest erotic repertoire consists of whatever remains after all other and otherwise impulses have been suppressed and repressed within us. Such processes of loss by vanquishment can be undone or reversed, and hence there is a fluidity to our erotic repertoire.

For example, individuals who believe themselves to be, and experience themselves as, wholly heterosexual have merely rendered unconscious their capacities for homosexual pleasures. They have sent the representation of such possibilities into unconscious exile, where they nevertheless remain active in their influence upon the individual. The same dynamics apply in reverse to homosexual individuals. This also explains the hatred of “othered” impulses that are then encountered expressed in other persons. For instance, the individual who rates a Kinsey zero is usually found to be homophobic. Excluding his (or her) own homoerotic impulses from consciousness (“othering” them from the repertoire of impulses acceptable to self-consciousness), he (or she) then finds them detestable when manifested by other individuals. Internal processes of prohibition can always break down and free the individual to experience consciously what had been in some way suppressed or repressed. For example, clinically or anecdotally, we all know of men who stigmatize, torture, or even kill homosexuals, and then at some later point engage their intense—previously defended against—wishes to fellate another man or to receive a penis anally.

These dynamics of our inherent bisexuality surely comprise an emancipative insight in ways that are crucial for queer and feminist thinking. Perhaps—with thanks to pre-1915 psychoanalytic praxis—we have now reached the point in our understanding of human sexuality where we can acknowledge that it is politically retrogressive to identify oneself as either heterosexual or homosexual. Like the proposition that “we are all queer,” the notion that “we are all bi!” is potentially liberatory not only in that it fosters an ideology of tolerance, even appreciation, but also in that it helps us account for the vicious attitudes—the hatred—that many individuals have toward the erotically “other.” However, in ways that Freud could perhaps not have anticipated, the notion of “bi” is problematic to the extent that it assumes that the object of desire is either male or female. It thus reinforces a binarism that is now found to be unacceptable, in that neither sex nor gender are to be caught in the dichotomous trap of either/or. Going beyond Freud, the notion of our pansexual potentiality would be preferable to that of “bi.” As far as I am aware, although contemporarily its usage is rapidly expanding in some subcultures, this notion was introduced in an overlooked paper by Stayton (1980). Importantly, it implies that the character and conditions of human sexuality are such that we all start life with the equal possibility of enjoying erotic activities with men, with women, or with transgender individuals, as well as with other entities (such as animals, material things or situations). Yet here it must be noted how the theorizing of pansexuality places its emphasis on the “object” of desire: that is, whom we strive for as partners in pleasure. This is its theoretical limitation.

Freud’s thesis is more radical in that its focus is fundamentally not on the “object” (the person with whom, or even the thing with which, we may share pleasurable activities), but rather on the energetic sources and channels of pleasure and unpleasure within the embodied experience of the individual. With whom the individual partners is, so to speak, a secondary phenomenon. The classic and still politically fecund emphasis of psychoanalysis (defined by its commitment to the free-associative method) is on the erotic-energetic way we live within our embodiment. Thus, the central liberatory insight of 1905 is that human beings are immanently polysexual in their inborn potential for erotic pleasures. Had Freud not been a man of his times, this term would have been his. Today, it should replace, in a politically important and adamantly sex-positive fashion, the radical tenet that we are all polymorphously perverse. As far as I am aware, the notion of polysexuality was introduced in the anglophone literature by Peraldi (1981) and has been developed in my own writings and elsewhere. Our sexuality is now understood as the movement and investment of libidinal energies within us—how such energies of pleasure and unpleasure become channeled and how many channels are closed by internal processes of censorship in the course of our “maturation.” In short, the vicissitudes of our erotic formation involve a trajectory in which, through processes of suppression and repression, we lose so much of our original potential to experience pleasure or unpleasure in every possible zone or component of our embodiment.

It is not only that Freud gradually retreated into a more entrenched attitude of heteronormativity, more or less defaulting—notably after 1915 and especially into the 1920s and 1930s—on the radical implications of his insights into “polymorphous perversity” and “originary bisexuality.” Almost the entire psychoanalytic movement hastened to obscure or renounce these twin tenets. It has done so more or less successfully in three ways:

1. By retreating from Freud’s recognition that the phenomena of our experiential embodiment are foundational to who we are—instead, theorizing about ego mechanisms, representations of the self and object relations, and the governance of our functioning by language communities, comes to the fore.

2. By abandoning Freud’s conviction that there are flows of subtle energies within us that are not to be reduced to biological mechanisms nor to the arena of representationality, and that these can offer pleasure or unpleasure in every zone or component of our embodiment—instead, returning to a Cartesian position in which lived experience is due either to the biology of the body or to the representationality of the mind.

3. By reinstating other outworn dichotomies such as body/mind, male/female, hetero/homo, and so on—by contrast, a more progressive reading of Freud effectively sabotages such binarisms by demonstrating how libidinal energies are neither simply biological nor creations of our thinking.

It still needs to be appreciated that Freud showed us how “normal” development severely and often harshly depletes our potential for embodied erotic pleasures, causing us to suppress or repress so much of our sexuality, and leaving us falsely convinced that we can only enjoy some varieties of erotic pleasure and not others. In this context, the notion of the polysexual potential of the human condition has radical importance for the realization that feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic thinking might be on common ground and a yet more powerful critical force for the future.

Freud did not often use subtitles. However, if we were today to add a subtitle to his 1905 text, it might appropriately be “On the illusions and delusions of sexual identity and orientation” or, alternatively, “Why our sexual identities and orientations must be deconstructed psychoanalytically!”

Acknowledgments

I thank Jill Gentile, Bruce Laing, François Rabie, Lalita Salins, and William R. Stayton for interesting conversations they have each shared with me on this and related topics.

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Barnaby B. Barratt

Barnaby B. Barratt, Ph.D., D.H.S., A.B.P.P. Dr. Barratt practices psychoanalysis in Johannesburg and is Director of online doctoral studies in psychoanalysis with the Parkmore Institute (www.ParkmoreInstitute.org). He is also a Training Analyst with the South African Psychoanalytic Association and a Supervising Analyst with the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, His trilogy, What Is Psychoanalysis? (2013), Radical Psychoanalysis (2016), and Beyond Psychotherapy (2019), which was published by Routledge, won the American Academy of Psychoanalysis book award for theoretical contributions.