You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A topic of such importance as anality requires the craft, creativity and clinical acumen of a senior psychoanalytic scholar. We are fortunate that Dr Shengold has put his thoughts together, no doubt accumulating for some time, in this major composition. All the more so because little has been contributed in this difficult area.
This is a profound book—though this is not immediately apparent—fascinating to read, difficult to summarize. I say this because an unwary reader might enjoyably run through the book as simply an exercise in applied analysis, which among other things it certainly is. Or he might casually view it as a survey of analytic thought regarding anality from Freud to Shengold with marvellous clinical and literary anecdotes written in a delightful style.
When one considers the great problems of the human condition today: greed, power, violence, and world destructiveness (essentially anal sickness, in my opinion), then the work assumes greater and more sombre significance; serious considerations for the responsible analyst. Much has been made of the 'Freudian sexual revolution' and other effects of psychoanalysis on Western society, but the full illumination of Freudian conceptualizations of anality as a way to approach the understanding of history and culture has not been realized. Could the aimless human quest for cosmic power, puerile narcissistic nationalism and a dehumanized materialistic thing-reality resemble, on a group level, the personal soul murder described by Shengold?
Since the perhaps regrettable departure of our concept of 'primacy', i.e. oral, anal, phallic-genital, most of our theoretical and clinical studies about anal patterns have become embedded within or obscured by other categories of conceptions, such as separation-individuation, ego operations, oedipal structures, and self-object concerns. Shengold's work is a rare and much needed clarification of how these other legitimate foci can and must be fitted into and reconciled wi