Response to ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”‘

Lou Andreas-Salomé's 1916 text ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ is remarkable in its capacity to generate questions relevant for our contemporary conversations in psychoanalysis. Among them, one stood out for me: how vertical is our language around component instincts, and how settled are we on crowning the genital as the end point in a progression? I found that Andreas-Salomé's proposition is mostly a vertical one, aligning genitality with the presence of the other, and being populated by the specter of ‘maturation.’ But the construction of the anal as the terrain of the first true ‘repression’ (Verdrängung) complicates this verticality from within. There is a parallel investigation of the anal and the genital, which at certain moments in the text has the effect of a suspension of this very ‘verticality.’ This is where a new and refreshing construction emerges, presenting the anal as a ‘beloved corpse,’ and allowing us to imagine the ‘sexual’ as a genital that is ‘haunted’ by the ‘early, forgotten, anal-erotic corporeality which we had learned to reject as something dead, something not us, excrement’ (p. 30). As an addition to the Freudian imaginary of this haunting, Andreas-Salomé further materializes this presence of the anal - it is, indeed, a ‘beloved corpse,’ and not any kind of abstract ghost. Even so, component instincts remain in a hierarchical relation with the genital: they are ‘semi-exiled drives, […] dispersed all over the body's surface […]. Children of the same house, they gather at the communal feast and carry its drunken ecstasy to the remotest and highest corners of the ego’ (p. 31).

While reading Lou Andreas-Salomé's text, I was reminded of Sándor Ferenczi's Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, which was published in 1924, but drafted as early as 1915. In Thalassa, Ferenczi's language is ‘horizontal,’ as I believe he engages in displacing the primacy of the genital over the other component instincts. How might we point to some of the