A Type of Anal-Erotic Resistance

It seems particularly fitting that a paper contributed to the Festschrift, prepared in honour of Professor Freud, should concern itself with the application of one of his fundamental contributions to psycho-analysis. The concept of anal erotism in its relation to the development of the ego has provoked the most violent opposition and incredulity. The original masterly contribution, which is compressed in a brief paper, opened up new vistas in character analysis which stimulated subsequent workers in the field to amplify the initial conception (Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Brill, Eisler, Coriat).

The present communication will be mainly concerned with a further investigation of a certain type of anal resistance occasionally encountered in the analysis of stammerers, which had already been briefly referred to in a recent paper.1 There it was pointed out that the oral libido is often expressed in anal terms, and this, in connection with the narcissism, explains the stubborn resistances encountered in the analysis of stammerers. This special form of resistance is experienced in other analytic work, as in the transference neuroses, but it is in the narcissistic neuroses, particularly stammering which is an extreme type of the disorder, that it appears in its most severe form in the guise of constipation. As stammering is an attempt at oral libidinal satisfaction, a close relationship is perceived between anal and oral erotism, both on psychological and morphological grounds. Ferenczi2 has also briefly referred to constipation as a transitory symptom-construction revealing itself in the analysis as a regression of the anal character.

When this anal resistance producing constipation occurs in the analysis of stammerers, there is noted a parallel increase in the speech defect, leading at times to almost complete dumbness, resulting in a poverty of free associations as a form of stinginess in the production