ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsider Freud's 1933 application of his bisexual hypothesis to explain impediments to creativity in a woman. It provides a widening understanding of the significance of bisexual fantasies not in order to overcome castrated genitals, as Freud proposed, but to overcome the traumatically imposed necessity in her childhood to have a castrated mind free of intention and initiative. Freud theorized that women were creatively bereft secondary to infantile fixations on bisexual ambitions to overcome the centrality of castration in their psychology. The chapter discusses creativity and the connections to bisexual fantasies by analysing a creative inhibition in a woman whose life was dominated by her unfulfilled wish to be an artist—a wish that had earned credibility earlier in her life. The woman's creative inhibition was secondary to trauma, not a developmental vicissitude of an inherent bisexual constitution. The initial trauma centred on maternal insistence on control of her daughter's body and mind, rather than supporting agency.
