PhD Students (completed)

This thesis is about bisexuality, containment and agency. It argues for bisexual forms of containment and agency, these consisting of both maternity and paternity, thereby modifying unisexual models of containment and agency advanced by Bion and Freud respectively, which stress only one parental form. I pursue my argument by putting together Bionian containment and Freudian agency, each theorist providing what the other lacks.

Bion’s containment model is implicitly gendered, given that it has only a maternal container. Building upon this unisexual container, I create a notion of bisexual containment that consists of a maternal container and a paternal container, the latter based on Freud’s Über-ich. Das Über-ich is the paternal container.

Freud’s structural model is also implicitly gendered, given that it has only a paternal agency in the form of das Über-ich. Building upon this unisexual agency, I create a notion of bisexual agency that consists of a paternal Über-ich and a maternal Unter-ich, the latter based on Bion’s maternal container. The maternal container is das Unter-ich.

The notions of bisexual containment and bisexual agency I advance reinforce the bisexual roots of psychoanalysis. Freud discovered the notion of bisexuality at least ten months before he discovered the notion of the Oedipus complex and I seek to ground my thesis in this discovery. As such, my development of theory seeks to counter the phallocentrism of classical thought and the gynocentrism that Bion was part of. In so doing, I hope to introduce into psychoanalysis a paradigm shift that asserts a bisexual paradigm.