Bisexual Love

by Wilhelm Stekel

By the 1920s, when Wilhelm Stekel wrote Bisexual Love, the erotic capacity to desire both males and females could be envisioned as universal, if likely to be outgrown by adulthood. Stekel holds that homosexuality is a psychic disease based on the fear of love, and as such is curable.

This 1922 book was an important work in the history of psychology and psychoanalysis showing how this “science,” while contributing to the growth of human understanding, also has blocked understanding and human growth. Stekel was a follower of Sigmund Freud, though Freud was not particularly enamored with him. In this general overview of bisexuality, the work exposes the author’s differences with Bloch, Moll, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Hirschfeld.