Sex, the Stranger That makes Us “Strange”

The author examines the theme of the alien from the viewpoint of sexuality: the gender which is not our own appears alien to us. She recalls Freud’s theory of sexuality and the castration complex, which explain the anxiety caused by the alien gender. Interpreting the father as the first alien in the child’s life, she cites a clinical case to demonstrate his structural importance in all later perceptions of what is presented as foreign. Then, through “the disturbing strangeness”, she approaches Jungian theory of the figures of the other: the anima and animus as each person’s inner alien, ending with an evocation of Dionysus the foreigner.