ABSTRACT
The purpose of this excursion into cultural criticism is to clarify the figures of the androgyne and the homosexual as models of human behavior. The constellation of modern theory that has most legitimized the androgyne as psychological hermaphrodite is that of Jung. He postulates that the objective psyche of each male contains an anima, or feminine principle; that the objective psyche of each female contains an animus, or masculine principle. Optimistic theoreticians of androgyny hope that the illusory total will be more that the sum of the illusory parts, even as they overlook the contradictions between some of the parts. Moreover, the androgyne still fundamentally thinks in terms of 'feminine' and 'masculine'. Though reaching toward erotic freedom, the homosexual often lapses back into the safety of received psychosexual identities and becomes 'butch' or 'femme'. A body of empirical evidence suggests that clever people act out both putatively masculine and putatively feminine traits.
