a nascent notion: the drive to become both sexes and its inverse

There's been an unnerving trend I've noted in some of my patients lately.

As far as I can tell it's related to two existing concepts: the problems related to a passive father and something close to Kubie's 'the drive to become both sexes'.

I've been dealing with several patients in which a parent did, or does, everything and the other wasn't, or isn't, there.

The first salient aspects are that the parent who is everything undermines the other parent's attempts to contribute and do things around the house (ie. chores or child-rearing) and sometimes outside of the house too (i.e. work and contribute financially). The "nothing" parent has a bad conscience about not being able to do things and echoistically submitting in the volar stage, becomes nothing . In passive-aggressive fashion he or she can have depression or somato-psychic problems that give him or her indirect revenge against the double-sexed parent.

In some cases I've seen the double-sexed parent switch. The double-sexed parent becomes depressed or physically ill and the other parent does everything. However, it is unclear whether the 'nothing' parent leaps up to enjoy the double-sexed role as the other parent did.

I still have to think more about the drive to be both sexes...

What seems important to me is the volar ontology in which the most primitive form of the ego is involved. One can not want to exist individually, one can want to be both sexes, one can only love someone who is exactly like oneself, etc.

This is in the object drives of course, and this same relation is possible on the ego drive level so that we have something like the founders of movements who need to name old concepts in new jargon so that all the ideas somehow issues from themselves, people who have no ideas and are only saying what someone who was everything has said, and the requirement that others one associates identify with the same ideas as one does, etc.

It seems like a borderline condition. This means that the father is foreclosed but that the early auto-erotic (potentially earlier?) fixations aren't there for psychosis. The mother is definitely the figure of perfection for the person driven to be both sexes and not the father. The goal to be perfect is very much out in the open and spoken about. Like the Madonna the woman with this goal may be a single mother who gives the impression of a virgin birth. The man has both his job of prestige and collects art and wants to be admired for his judgement of beauty is another example.