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“Anal” and “Sexual.” Lou Andreas-Salome.
Gottfried Keller. Psychoanalytic Assertions and Conjectures Concerning His Life and Work. Concluded. Dr. Eduard Hitschmann.
“Anal” and “Sexual.”— The writer has presented a profound study of the position of the anal interest in relation to the sexual in development. The anal area, she reminds us, is the first area in which the child learns prohibition from without. He is urged toward cleanliness and taught a disgust to which other elements are added which are awakened in his own nature. From outer pressure and inner instinct he first learns renunciation of personal pleasure, a distinction between that which just is and that which should be. The disturbance of the child's original attitude may result in defiance, miserliness, or a flight into a defense which permits again the child's first enjoyment. This may again lead over into pedantry and hypermorality directed against the self as well as against the world.
The libido early attached to the other zones proceeds more easily out in the positive direction into unity of the self and the world, finding the unity first in the parents and then in later objects, perhaps a union with God. The libido attached to the anal zone remains rather in disunity, hatred, it is satanic. Or instead of hate there may be a taking possession of the world as the child once possessed his world in the anal interest. All production has something of this deep involvement.
The child realizes the duality that starts from this early level. A taboo set upon himself, a self defense against anal pleasure alternates with a reaching out beyond into wider paths. The anal erotic, because the earliest interest to be submitted to education, thus as psychic matter affects the whole situation, bodily processes as well as moral reactions. Yet it carries with it in exaggerated degree the feeling of shame and disgust with which it was so early charged. The affect is pushed from the self to the object wh