Defensive Anality and Anal Narcissism

This paper aims at demonstrating a currently beleaguered assumption: the central importance, the continuing vitality, and the appropriate complexity of Freud's theory of the drives and of his idea of the primacy of the body ego. It is not enough to consider man a thinking machine or a social being; his animal nature must be given a central place in psychology. The paper postulates that 'anal or sphincter defensiveness' is one of the precursors of the repression barrier. Anality has been comparatively neglected in recent psychoanalytic literature, and so has its explorer, Karl Abraham. The paper's thesis is that there is a special defensive importance to anal erogeneity and libido, and to those aspects of ego and superego that are functionally operative (as the 'sadistic-anal organization' (Freud, 1917)) during the so-called 'sadistic-anal' developmental phase. Any of the psychic danger situations can evoke regression to manifestations of 'anal narcissism'—an attempt to master overwhelming feeling by a kind of emotional sphincter action, narrowing down the world to the controllable and the predictable. The basic assumption here is Fliess's idea that the attainment of anal sphincter control functions—with, as-it-were, 'psychic resonance'—as a means to master primal (murderous, cannibalistic) affect. For optimal psychic development, a proper balance must be attained between anal control of, and anal expression of, instinctual derivatives—especially of affect laden with aggression.