Pansexualist

Wilhelm Fliess's critic Henning commented about both Fliess and Freud in this light when he complained of their joint efforts to displace the Darwinian "principle of selection" in favor of a rampant pansexualist philosophy (1910:232).

Even Wilhelm Reich, who could be described as a more radical pansexualist than Freud himself, could not help speculating on the following lines...

Yet Freud, one must insist, was not a pansexualist. He rejected the epithet with considerable acerbity, not because he was secretly a one-sided adulator of libido, but because, quite simply; he thought that his denigrators were wrong.

Both he and Banks were alarmed to find clear and unmistakable evidence of cannibalism, although it was the practice of sodomy that most intrigued Banks; although a voracious heterosexual, he was hardly a pansexualist.

Whitman is a pansexualist. He makes love with, among others, the sun, the night, the earth, the sea, and the winds (W 30, 49, 53). His synecdochic perception results in his genitalized identification with his environment, including the people around him. The spermatic trope works well to explain the nature of Whitman's decentered phallus. If "sex contains all," sperm describes all (W 101). It also works well to describe the nature of his pansexualist eros.

If sexual orgasm is the royal way to knowledge of God, perhaps such orgasm doesn't have to occur only with a woman. Maybe, as the gays and pansexualists claim, any kind of orgasm will qualify.

Androgyny implies a recognition of the full sexual potential of each individual. Former distinctions were abandoned. It was no longer regarded as improper to pursue a relationship of male to male or female to female; nor was it required to have two partners in a relationship. Practices ranging from onanism to mass interplay were accepted. The pansexualists held that androgyny was needlessly limiting in scope. If one could relate to any man or woman—why not to a giraffe? A condor?