| Summary: | Freud’s settlement about the question of hermaphroditism is very ambiguous and entirely involved into psychotic meanings. When he received in his research the dubious notion of “narcissism”, he was forced to confront with ancient myths: not only the Narcissus’ one, but also the Orphaeus, Eros and Psyche’s ones. Freud knews these fabulous witnesses on basic terms: as a scholastic memory or a recorded tale of his friend, Otto Rank. Through this fault, maybe, he absorbed “narcissism” within the larger knowledge of “homosexuality”. However, observed from a literary or a philosophical point of view, the same mythical sources lead to a different ending: “narcissism” is not a disguised or an hidden form of the phallic mother’s fetishism, but a neurotic, impulsive effort to live the libido between the two sexes: that’s to say, an hermaphroditic, “bisexual” - not “homosexual” – attitude. It’s just the thing which Robert Musil wrote at Vienna, while Freud lived and worked there, depicting the love story of the brothers, Ulrich and Agathe, in his masterpiece “The Man without Qualities”.
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