Some Remarks on the Formation of the Anal-Erotic Character

In 1908 Freud published his work on 'Character and Anal Erotism'1 which contains a statement that people who are exceptionally orderly, parsimonious and obstinate had as children taken a long time to control their motions and even afterwards had had to complain of isolated accidents relating to this function. Accordingly character would be something that we acquire, in exactly the same way as any other group of psychogenic symptoms, and would stand in a causal relationship with the vicissitudes of our instinctual life; the anal character would, thus, be based on a fixation during the anal phase.

This paper properly gave rise to a vast number of publications, in one group of which the original triad of anal-erotic character-traits was elaborated into a constantly expanding series of mental attributes. Ernest Jones, with his remarkable critical ability, profited by a wealth of observations drawn from the field of his own experience as well as from that of other workers to create the most satisfying picture we possess of the anal character, i.e. he has provided us with an elaborate catalogue from which those who are anal erotics by disposition or training seem to make a choice dictated by their individual experiences. Numerous other publications concerned themselves with the oral and the genital characters. But it now became apparent that the types of character supposedly associated with the separate sexual zones overlapped. What some of us rightly characterized as anal, others with equal justice attributed to oral strivings. That two diametrically opposed qualities such as parsimony and extravagance should be traceable to the same causes could be explained by the phenomenon of over-compensation. It only remained to try and complete the picture by discovering the conditions under which these qualities emerge in an individual. But the fact that various character-traits were believed to be sustained from different instinctual sources showed us that the erotogenic