ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses psychic bisexuality, a foundational Freudian concept of unprecedented reach, but one that sagging under the weight of widely disparate usage in different corners of the psychoanalytic firmament at the moment. The patient hailed from another country, and lived for a short time on the thirteenth floor of a building there at a significant moment in childhood. In the dream, Rosine Jozef Perelberg recalled going back to that home her childhood building merged in the dreamscape with other structures from her working life in New York City, a place where – as is well known, owing to superstition – thirteenth floors do not exist. If gay desire comes off poorly in Perelberg’s volume – a morbid effort to deny gender difference through aping cross-gender object choice, unfortunate, at times unavoidable – transgender experience fares even worse.
