The Captive, the Treasure, the Hero and the ‘Anal’ Stage of Development

This paper mainly concerns some of the highest and lowest values of life. It is about possessions and possessiveness, and self-valuation. It is particularly concerned with boundary phenomena between me and not-me, mine and not-mine, where the boundary is in dispute. Whereas Winnicott's writings often described the space between mother and infant and the transitional objects or phenomena in this space, the present paper is about the non-space between infant and mother, I and Thou, ego and self and the wishes both to make and also to breach the boundary. The tensions, energy and power generated at the boundary are also described.

I should like to introduce the reader to the area in question by relating the dream of a man in his twenties who was, at the time of the dream, in the process of losing by divorce his passionately loved anima-wife. She was proving too elusive for him to keep. In the dream a beautiful young woman is being held captive in an immensely strong castle by a powerful miser. A superhumanly strong, resourceful, and utterly ruthless man, dark and almost half-animal, armed with a gun, is moving towards the castle at night determined to rescue and win the captive for himself.

The compensatory aspect of the dream is, in the circumstances, clear enough, as the young man at the time felt he had neither the wealth, the retentive powers, nor the strength and potency necessary to retain his wife or to make her truly his. The regressive aspects of the dream, to the anal and phallic stages of erotic development, might be noticed by some. The hope for wealth and potency or indeed the need to develop his life along more practical lines, might be stressed by others. Indeed his subsequent development was a kind of filling out and fulfilment of both anal and phallic aims, not so much an acting-out, I should say, as a realisation.