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But what is the proof Freud gives us for the existence of such dispositions?. Taking the prob-lematic of internalization as a point of departure, let us consider the sta-tus of internali

within Freud’s thesis of primary bisexuality, there is no homosexuality, and only opposites attract

But what is the proof Freud gives us for the existence of such dispositions? If there is no way to distinguish between the femininity acquired through internalizations and that which is strictly dispositional, then what is to preclude the conclusion that all gender-specific affinities are the consequence of internalizations? On what basis are dispositional sexualities and identities ascribed to individuals, and what meaning can

we give to “femininity” and “masculinity” at the outset? Taking the prob-lematic of internalization as a point of departure, let us consider the sta-tus of internalized identifications in the formation of gender and, secondarily, the relation between an internalized gender affinity and the self-punishing melancholia of internalized identifications

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud interprets the self-critical attitudes of the melancholic to be the result of the internalization of a lost object of love Precisely because that object is lost, even though the relationship remains ambivalent and unresolved, the object is

“brought inside” the ego where the quarrel magically resumes as an interior dialogue between two parts of the psyche In “Mourning and Melancholia,” the lost object is set up within the ego as a critical voice

or agency, and the anger originally felt for the object is reversed so that the internalized object now berates the ego:

If one listens patiently to the many and various self-accusations of the melancholic, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, some person whom the patient loves, has loved or ought to love the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted onto the patient’s own ego (169)

The melancholic refuses the loss of the object, and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only

Gender Trouble

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