Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix found.At the close of his brief paragraph on the negative Oedipal complex in the young girl, Freud remarks that the factor that decides which identification is accomplished is the strength or weakness of masculinity and femininity in her disposition Significantly, Freud avows his confusion about what precisely a masculine or feminine disposition is when he interrupts his statement midway with the hyphenated doubt: “—whatever that may consist in—” (22) What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders? Are these attributes of an unconscious libidinal organization, and how precisely the various identifications set up in consequence of the Oedipal conflict work to reinforce or dissolve each of these dispositions? What aspect of “femininity” we call dispositional, and which is the consequence of identification? Indeed, what is to keep us from understanding the “dispositions” of bisexuality as the effects or productions of a series of internalizations? Moreover, how we identify a “feminine” or a “masculine” disposition at the outset? By what traces is it known, and to what extent we assume a “feminine” or a “masculine” disposition as the precondition of a heterosexual object choice? In other words, to what extent we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire? The conceptualization of bisexuality in terms of dispositions, feminine and masculine, which have heterosexual aims as their intentional correlates, suggests that for Freud bisexuality is the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche The masculine disposition is, in effect, never oriented toward the father as an object of sexual love, and neither is the feminine disposition oriented toward the mother (the young girl may be so oriented, but this is before she has renounced that “masculine” side of her dispositional nature) In repudiating the mother as an object of sexual love, the girl of necessity repudiates her masculinity and, paradoxically, “fixes” her femininity as a consequence Hence, 77