found.At the close of his brief paragraph on the negative Oedipal com-plex in the young girl, Freud remarks that the factor that decides which identification is accomplished is the stren
Trang 1found.At the close of his brief paragraph on the negative Oedipal com-plex in the young girl, Freud remarks that the factor that decides which identification is accomplished is the strength or weakness of masculinity and femininity in her disposition Significantly, Freud avows his confusion about what precisely a masculine or feminine dis-position is when he interrupts his statement midway with the hyphen-ated doubt: “—whatever that may consist in—” (22)
What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself appar-ently founders? Are these attributes of an unconscious libidinal organi-zation, and how precisely do the various identifications set up in consequence of the Oedipal conflict work to reinforce or dissolve each
of these dispositions? What aspect of “femininity” do we call
disposition-al, and which is the consequence of identification? Indeed, what is to
keep us from understanding the “dispositions” of bisexuality as the effects
or productions of a series of internalizations? Moreover, how do we
iden-tify a “feminine” or a “masculine” disposition at the outset? By what traces is it known, and to what extent do we assume a “feminine” or a
“masculine” disposition as the precondition of a heterosexual object choice? In other words, to what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire?
The conceptualization of bisexuality in terms of dispositions, feminine
and masculine, which have heterosexual aims as their intentional
corre-lates, suggests that for Freud bisexuality is the coincidence of two
heterosexu-al desires within a single psyche.The masculine disposition is, in effect, never oriented toward the father as an object of sexual love, and neither
is the feminine disposition oriented toward the mother (the young girl may be so oriented, but this is before she has renounced that “mascu-line” side of her dispositional nature) In repudiating the mother as an object of sexual love, the girl of necessity repudiates her masculinity and, paradoxically, “fixes” her femininity as a consequence Hence,
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