Notes on the Anal Stage

In a discussion held recently in the British Society it became clear that the anal stage has been somewhat neglected in the psycho-analytic literature of the last two decades. What is the reason for this neglect? Is it that Freud and the generation of workers closely related to him, such as Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones, and a few others, have already found and said all there is to say about anality? But analysts have not generally refrained from reviewing, repeating, and reconsidering problems whose essence was discovered and presented by Freud. The reason, I believe, lies somewhere else. Psycho-analytic research has increasingly turned to the earliest phases of infantile life, and the interest in the oral stage and earliest processes, even the prenatal condition, has overshadowed the interest in later phases.

In my view this shift of analytic research and speculation has been at some not inconsiderable cost to our understanding of the psychology of the child and the adult, and of the process of development as such. The impact of maturationally determined new events on the growing child—in fact the problem of adaptation to new positions and roles throughout life—is a problem that is certainly worth the analyst's curiosity and research. Life is a continuous process, in which the individual is continually exposed to the occurrence of something new. And there is more at stake than merely a modification of what has already been happening. In this connexion I would mention some recent unpublished discussion remarks by Dr Payne on the problems of adaptation to growing old.

To return to the anal stage: clearly, as it follows the oral stage, orality will make its contribution, and in unconscious fantasy the anus can be equated with the mouth and the faeces with food, but the anus and the faeces are also, or rather primarily, themselves the subject matter of unconscious fantasy, and the advance to the new phase brings something entirely new sui generis into the infant's