Revisiting Psychic Bisexuality The Feminine Within

1. Introduction

 Ana Teresa Vale and Nadja Tröger

Part I: Power, difference and complementarity

2. Mind the Gap: Reflections on the feminine and psychic bisexuality

Conceição Tavares de Almeida          

3. Psychic bisexuality in the construction of subjectivity

 Cláudia Aparecida Carneiro and Eliana Rigotto Lazzarini

4. The feminine side of the force – The elaboration of the feminine identity

 Ana Teresa Vale

5. Bisexuality: Freud and Woolf meet

 Barbara Stimmel

6. Passion and melancholia, red and black: The vicissitudes of the sexual in an analytic process

Rosine Perelberg        

Part II: Challenges in the construction of a gender and sexual identity

7. Crossing borders. Persona, mask, who am I?

 Mona Chahoury Charabaty

8. Integration of the feminine and the masculine in the analysis of a woman 

Ester Palerm Mari    

9. Masculinity as appearance

Silvia R. Acosta

10. Psychic bisexuality and its pulsional vicissitudes 

 Luz Mariá Abatángelo Stürzenbaum

11. When I look into your eyes: An approach to psychic bisexuality in the case of role reversal

Nadja Tröger

12. Of gender and bisexuality

 Ângela Vila-Real 

13. A chronicle of mother-daughter envy

 Dana Amir

Biography

Ana Teresa Vale is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst living and working in Lisbon, Portugal. She was COWAP’s European representative between 2021 and 2025, and a member of the editorial board of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Journal. She is co-editor of the book Pregnancy, Assisted Reproduction and Psychoanalysis, published by Routledge in 2025.

Nadja Tröger is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst living and working in Lisbon, Portugal. She is the COWAP Link for the Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the editorial board of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Journal.

"This book is a rare combination of articles from well-known psychoanalysts from all over the world. They share their complex views on psychic bisexuality, dealing in depth with psychoanalytic theory, very interesting developments on early psychic life, on Freud’s cases, and contemporary clinic. This book captures the essence of the complex issue of psychic bisexuality in our societies, and of the stimulating work of psychoanalytic technique with contemporary patients. This is a brilliant book, exciting and very accessible: a good combination of education and psychoanalytic thinking."

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, MD, PhD, Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Columbia University, Overall Chair IPA COCAP

"In publishing this book, the editors have succeeded in bringing together a collection of esteemed authors from different regions of the world who invite the reader to explore the complex question of the feminine and the masculine, both of which are intricately linked to the concept of psychic bisexuality. The richness of this book also lies in the deep respect and sensitivity with which each author listens to their patients and follows them in the conundrums of the unconscious processes that underlie the vicissitudes one encounters when confronted with questions that touch the most intimate part of one’s identity and sense of femininity and of masculinity, leading to a better understanding of their suffering. Particularly today, in a contemporary world where diversity and respect for the other are under threat, this book enriches the reader by offering the opportunity to discover, or rediscover, the concept of psychic bisexuality from different cultural psychoanalytic traditions, providing new ideas to help us better understand our patients who question gender, sexual identity, femininity and masculinity."

Katy Bogliatto, MD, Training Psychoanalyst from the Belgian Psychoanalytical Society, IPA Vice-President

"Starting from the notion that the field of sexuality today is undergoing  profound changes that could be compared to a 'landslide', this book by many eminent authors, admirably edited by Ana Teresa Vale and Nadja Tröger, investigates the background for a cultural phenomenon that can be seen as constituting the nucleus of the dramatic changes within the present time: psychic bisexuality. To sum it up, the attention on psychic bisexuality could be considered a movement against dominance: the 'primacy of genitality', viewed still by Freud as the most advanced, and in this way most mature form of psychosexuality, to reign over the partial drives, has today lost its place and meaning in sexual practices as well as in psychoanalytic theory. Instead, the rediscovery of the concept of psychic bisexuality as it is extensively elaborated in this book, is seen as a liberation by the younger generation. It opens up a path for a new psychoanalytic understanding of the spread of sexual practices that were before considered improper or even pathological. The authors of this book explore the possibilities clinically and expand into new theories. I can highly recommend reading this book to all who are involved with the training of candidates, but more even with young people of both sexes in their search for orientation in sexual life, intimacy and love."

Rotraut De Clerck, Training Psychoanalyst from the German Psychoanalytic Association, Chair of the EPF Group Psychoanalysis in Literature – Literature in Psychoanalysis, Consultant IPA Culture, and COWAP European Co-Chair