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For some time now, it has become almost common practice to view the Vienna School's emphasis on regressions to the anal stage as a kind of backwardness - as if, instead of moving on to an objective discussion of actual problems, one insisted on delving into the most unpleasant family gossip. This gives us all the more reason to believe, however, that it is precisely this point, perhaps more than any other, that still awaits a final resolution - not least because it is the point people most often fall back on when vilifying Freud for bringing up the sexual factor. His notion of ‘infantile sexuality’ especially has always raised a great deal of resistance, but it still calls forth less revulsion than anal sexuality. Indeed, while in the first case the outrage is directed at the offensiveness of sullying the child's demonstrations of tenderness with the word ‘sexual,’ in the second case it is the reviled sexuality itself that is sullied through reference to the anal. In a similar vein, the caresses lavished by the child upon its parents are regarded sentimentally and are permitted without constraint, while this other domain has ‘Ew!’ (Pfui) emblazoned across it from the very start. This first prohibition (erstes Verbot) that we have to assimilate into our sense of self marks, for each of us, the beginning of