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Joe Redfearn's (1979) classic paper ‘The captive, the treasure, the hero and the anal stage of development’ is recognized as seminal to the development of Jungian thought about anality, particularly its integration with mainstream (Freudian, Kleinian) psychoanalytic perspectives. This paper develops such an approach through drawing on contributions from Meltzer, Green, Bion, Chasseguet-Smirgel and Kernberg. More specifically, it is argued that over-investment in hero and anima archetypal configurations may represent an attempt to replace the resource of the internal parental couple that, at the level of unconscious phantasy, has been destroyed by the aggrieved child's attack on the primal scene. Unless this usually dissociated sadism can be integrated, the creative epistemophilic instinct may remain blunted, giving rise, through projective identification, to the adoption of a pseudo-adult identity based on appropriation or assertion. This in turn may lead to manic attempts to reach authentic (‘animating’) experience through the (often erotized) excitement of heroic endeavour.
Consideration of both Redfearn's and the author's own clinical material demonstrates how close attention to process as well as content is fundamental to revealing and addressing such likely-to-be dissociated scenarios.