Editorial

In her once marginalized, now increasingly fêted essay ‘Destruction as the Cause of Becoming’ (1912), Sabina Spielrein opens with a question: how could it be that something as essential as the reproductive drive gives rise to negative feelings such as anxiety and disgust? She quickly dispenses with the idea that this was merely due to customary methods of child-rearing, or the spatial coexistence of sexual products with ‘lifeless excreta’ - an idea she attributes to Otto Gross (Spielrein, 2019[1912], p. 97). Four years later, this overlap between sexuality and the ‘anal sphere’, which Spielrein passes over in pursuit of the symbolic elaboration of a proto-death drive, forms the foundation for Lou Andreas-Salomé's psychoanalytic-poetic-philosophical exploration of ‘anal’ and ‘sexual’ as the twin pillars of subjective development. Here the unfairly side-lined ‘anal’ moves into the foreground as the fundamental basis of self-formation - the hinge through which we detach from the animal world, and yet paradoxically turn against ourselves, reject a portion of our living and passionately enjoyed presence as dead excreta.

I will say little further about the text here, as Andreas-Salomé's article, ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’, originally published in Imago in 1916, is skilfully analysed and contextualized by S. Pearl Brilmyer and Filippo Trentin in their illuminating Introduction to the essay and the special section devoted to it which they have co-edited for this issue - except to emphasize that this is the first translation of the text into English. One explanation for this lag of a century, besides the marginalization of the legacy of many of the first female psychoanalysts, is the incredible difficulty of rendering Andreas-Salomé's prose in translation - the final text printed here is the result of the work of five individuals labouring for the better part of a year to bring it to life in a different language. There were some expected difficulties to cope with, including the fa