Bisexuality: The Desire Of the Other

Of course, another reason why bisexuality makes people feel uncomfortable is that it calls into question their own sexual orientation - more than homosexuality presents a challenge to heterosexuals, and vice-versa. This is because it confronts people with the idea that sexuality does not consist of polar opposites but is more of a continuum, and moreover one which people can move along at different stages in their life, or from one relationship to the next. This means that their own straight or gay orientation might not be as stable or unambiguous as they would like to think.
Attraction can take place at many different levels, including those of consciousness and the unconscious. Equally, while not all attraction is sexual - in the sense of seeking some form of physical sexual release - it always involves some element of desire.

The disconnect between desire and the physical sexual urge or need (bound up with reproduction) has been well explored by psychoanalysts. And this disconnect can involve a separation and re-combination of the psychological and physical ‘objects’ of desire.Other-sex and same-sex attraction possibly always expresses the paradox that the other is fantasised as the embodiment of ‘my other’: the other part of myself that is beyond my conscious self-image as a man or woman, as gay or straight - my other half; the one I desire because I do not yet fully possess him or her. Do we perhaps always in this way love in the other an Other self?

We never recapture this unity of the self and the other in this life; our desire is never satisfied; attraction can always surprise us and draw us out.