Word.ws English Dictionary

pansexualism

pansexualism noun: the psychological theory that all human activity (mental and physical) is based on sexuality.

Noun

pansexualism (uncountable)

  1. (historical) The psychological theory that all human activity (mental and physical) is based on sexuality.
    • And so we are back at pansexualism. It cannot, however, be too often insisted that, though Freud heavily emphasized the element of sexuality in human nature, he utterly rejected pansexualism, which he regarded as a travesty of his theory; and on many occasions he explicitly and energetically denied...1981, Richard Wollheim, Sigmund Freud, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 114
    • [W]e are positing that theoretical pansexualism is but the reflection of a real pansexualism, that is, of a movement by which sexuality reinvests the entirety of human activities. Sexuality is not everything, but it is everywhere.2017, Christopher Christian, Morris N. Eagle, David L Wolitzky, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict, Routledge, →ISBN
  2. (derogatory, rare) Pansexuality.
    • 9.10 Polysexuality and Pansexualism. The prefixes pan and poly originate from ancient Greek meaning all and many, respectively. A person identified as pansexual is gender blind. That is, such people can engage in sexual acts with people having any gender [...]. Polysexuality is thus a subset of...2015, Amoakoh Gyasi-Agyei, Three Stages of Salvation: Heavenly-Oriented or Hell-Bound?: Foundations of Christian Theology, Partridge Publishing, →ISBN

Origin of pansexualism

Attested since 1917 (a few years earlier than pansexual, which see for more).

Questions about pansexualism

What does pansexualism mean?
Pansexualism means the psychological theory that all human activity (mental and physical) is based on sexuality.
What part of speech is pansexualism?
Pansexualism is a noun.

Words near pansexualism in the dictionary

  1. pansentience
  2. panser
  3. panserositis
  4. pansers
  5. pansexual
  6. pansexualism
  7. pansexualist
  8. pansexualists
  9. pansexualities
  10. pansexuality
  11. pansexualization

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pansexualism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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