Coming Out ... To Myself, Part 2

The ancient Gnostics and others held that, before Adam and Eve, there was the very first Human Being, Anthropos, also referred to as Adamas or Geradamas. According to Love Between Women by Bernadette J. Brooten (p. 340), the primal human being Adamas was, to a group called the Naassenes, both male and female. I have seen the same idea expressed in terms of more recent Jewish mysticism: the "first man" was really a man-woman, from whom Adam and Eve and the two genders of today derived.

This is of interest to me because, as I said in Coming Out ... To Myself, Part 1, I have just twigged to the fact that an archetypal potency which the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called the Androgyne has been active within me for as long as I can remember. An androgynous symbol such as Anthropos or Adamas, Jung said, manifests this archetype.

We all have the same archetypes, including the Androgyne. My Androgyne, however, seems to have been shouting at me from the depths of my unconscious ever since childhood, while many men never hear a peep from theirs.

One way I measure this is to examine — and this is a delicate subject, folks — my lifelong urolagnia. Also called urophilia, this is defined as "a tendency to derive sexual pleasure from the sight or thought of urination." Specifically, in my case, female urination. It not only turns me on, but I wish to (somehow) identify with it. This has been true since I was a small boy.

I now begin to see what the meaning of this quirk is, and has been, in my life. I am presently assuming that my unusual interest in the various aspects of female "plumbing" is a symptom of archetypal Androgyne activity; it is as if the erotic pleasure I get from urolagnia is a displacement of the pleasure that might otherwise come from identifying with the distinctive anatomy and physiology of the female.


As a child, I had two main girl playmates, L. and G. L. was about three years older than I, G. just a year. For some reason, I was urolagnic toward L. but not G. I remember a time when L. was playing at my house and I began to feel the need to pee. I decided to hold on until L. used the bathroom first, as I imagined that she and I were having a "hold it" contest. This was oddly stimulating to me in a way I later learned was called erotic.

I also remember having the same reaction one time when several of us were playing in G's back yard and there was a toddler's potty there for G's younger brother to use. L., who was much too old for potties, abruptly stopped playing and used this one. I'll never forget that.

On the other hand, when G. would come over to play and had a call of nature, she would have me come in the bathroom with her and "stand guard." She had a phobia of drains and being sucked into the toilet. For reasons I cannot explain, on the many occasions when this happened I never experienced any erotic feelings. Yet when G. started developing breasts and wore a training bra, I would often arrange for us to look at magazines while we were both crouched over them on the floor so I could look down the front of her top, for thrills.

(I am mentioning these details because they may be helpful to anyone who has a similar early biography of odd sexual identity.)

I was "all boy," and then some, it seems ... where the "then some" was female. I played baseball with my male playmates and then went off and played with paper dolls with G. (and her brother).


In thinking about all this, I'm making some educated guesses. First and foremost, that Jung was right about the existence and power of universal archetypes that affect the unconscious mind of each of us. Second, that the Androgyne is one of these. Third, that (for whatever reason) the Androgyne archetype is principally responsible for the "all boy and then some" story of my own life.

Another equally Jungian way of looking at it is to see my inner "all boy yet also female" sexual identity as the working of another archetype, the Anima, which gives every male of the species a sort of "inner female" as an unconscious power center. Frankly, I see no real contradiction here. To my knowledge, Jung held that archetypal images that emerge symbolically into our awareness often overlap and can be explained with reference to more than one archetype.

Still, I favor the Androgyne explanation over the Anima because Jung apparently held that the Anima remains pretty much silent until the midpoint of a man's life span, when it will often come seriously into play for the first time. My assumption is that my life history of urolagnia and other displaced attempts to identify with girls and women goes back well before the usual point of Anima involvement.


But never mind. The overarching point is that archetypes (help) determine who and what we find erotic.

If I'm right about that, then the same principle applies to me with my unusual sexual history as to everyone who is in any of the more well-known categories: heterosexual, and loving it; gay; lesbian; bisexual; transsexual; transgendered; and so forth. We are all responsive to the power of certain archetypes as they assert themselves in various and sundry ways in our individual lives.

Now, Jung held that none of these archetypal powers is inherently bad. What's bad is for the powers to assert themselves in a one-sided way so that they don't balance each other off.

Admittedly, I cannot be sure about my own life history here. If the unusual symptoms and traits I've just described are Anima-driven, it's possible they come from what Jung called "inflation" of a particular archetype — in this case, the Anima — in an undesirable, destructive way.

But if they're Androgyne-driven, their manifestation may be quite healthful. My reasoning: the classic image of the androgynous "first man" as reflected in religious mysticism (see above) betokens a primordial completeness. This sort of image refers to a "time before" there were opposites in the world, including those of male and female, as well as light-dark, good-evil, etc.

As such, this sort of image actually stands for the Jungian ideal of Self-realization. The Self, according to Jung, is the master archetype of all, and it is realized by any particular one of us through a lengthy process of "individuation" by means of which the various forces of the psyche are gradually brought into a beneficent balance.

My inner Androgyne, accordingly, could be the ally of the Self.

And, to the extent that any archetype can be the Self's ally, when archetypal machinations lead one to be, say, gay, gayness can (for that person) be an essential aspect of Self-realization.

Jung called the Self archetype the image of God. If a gay, bisexual, or lesbian, etc., person achieves Self-realization through his or her particular sexual orientation, he or she need not feel that sexual orientation to be sinful.