Freud, “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908) (I)

Freud begins his essay as follows:

“Among those whom we try to help by our psycho-analytic efforts we often come across a type of person who is marked by the possession of a certain set of character-traits, while at the same time our attention is drawn to the behaviour in his childhood of one of his bodily functions and the organ concerned in it.” (169)

Now, if the wide circulation of Freudian ideas in our culture has not prepared us for the argument of the essay, its title — “Character and Anal Erotism” — certainly does. Freud quickly confirms our hunches about the identities of both the “character” and the “organ.” First, the “traits”:

“The people I am about to describe are noteworthy for a regular combination of the three following characteristics. They are especially orderly [ordentlich], parsimonious [sparsam], and obstinate [eigensinnig].” (169)

And a moment later, the “bodily functions and the organ concerned in it”:

“It is easy to gather from these people’s early childhood history that they took a comparatively long time to overcome their infantile incontinentia alvi [faecal incontinence], and that even in later childhood they suffered from isolated failures of this function. As infants, they seem to have belonged to the class who refuse to empty their bowels when they are put on the pot because they derive a subsidiary pleasure from defaecating; for they tell us that even in somewhat later years they enjoyed holding back their stool, and they remember…doing all sorts of unseemly things with the faeces that had been passed.” (170)

But again, the descriptor “anal” has become so much a part even of polite discussion that its intrinsically scandalous content must be recovered with effort. Remarkably, the concept of anality has in the last century become a synonym for the package of traits — “orderly, parsimonious and obstinate” — it was postulated by Freud to explain.

In the essay, then, Freud postulates an “organic connection between this type of character and this behaviour of an organ” (169). What behavior, exactly, does Freud connect to these traits? And what sort of connection does Freud postulate? The organ is of course the “anal zone.” But “behavior” seems to refer by turns to (a) the generic function — defecation — share by all, and (b) the specific conduct — activities, desires, and attitude — that in certain infants surrounds that function. In some instances, this “conduct” anticipates the adult into which such infants reliably develop: an “obstinate” refusal to defecate when the parent or nursemaid desires, or an attitude of “self-will” that easily shades into “defiance.” The amount of “control” exerted by this infant over the whole process, hence the prerogative of “parsimony,” is likewise a source of satisfaction that he does not willingly renounce. But in general, of course, the infant’s “unseemly” conduct is rather the opposite of that “orderliness” or cleanliness that characterizes the adult descendant.

(Those who attribute to psychoanalysis an essentially disenchanting trend — one that “reduces” the higher to the lower — may adduce this essay as evidence. What could be “higher,” after all, than traits which Aristotle might have included among the virtues — that is, dispositions which precisely announce reason’s rule over the soul’s “appetitive” impulses? And what could be “lower” than the animal functions, whose disguised expression these traits ostensibly are?)

For Freud, these infantile behaviors, which reflect a special interest and delight in the organ and its possibilities, admit of endogenous explanation. “From these indications we infer that such people are born with a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong” (170). But what exactly does Freud mean here? In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud tells us that, as a rule, human beings develop through fairly discrete “phases.” Each phase refers to a specific “erotogenic zone” around which — owing to the powerful excitations and pleasures it affords — the child’s interest revolves. For example, the suckling infant at the breast finds its pleasures localized in the oral zone — an amalgam of of appetite- and erotic-satisfaction. (This distinction between the self-preservative and the sexual “drives” is confirmed for Freud when oral activities such as thumb-sucking separate out as independent sources of pleasure, despite their possessing no nutritive value. Such pleasures have nothing to do with satisfying hunger.)

From oral, to anal, to phallic, to genital “zones,” the infant’s attention is directed and then redirected to whichever organ, at a given moment of anatomical development, exerts the greatest “pull.” On a normal path — one that doesn’t prefigure neurosis in the adult — each erotogenic zone, while important in its own right and temporarily eclipsing the others, nevertheless continuously gives place to its “successor,” until the genital zone finally receives its rightful “investment.” All non-genital sites of pleasure are then decisively subordinated to that final zone — at least in non-neurotic cases.

Yet partly for the “constitutional” reasons Freud has identified, the values for the infant of the different zones, which in healthy development are “proportionately” distributed, are in some infants rather disproportionate. In the present case, the anal phase brings with it an order of excitement and stimulation that overshadows those belonging to earlier and later phases. Thus in claiming that the would-be anal “type” is endowed with “a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong,” Freud is suggesting that this zone naturally yields a quality and quantity of pleasure to the developing infant that — unmatched by other zones even at their greatest intensity — “fixates” his or her libidinal development.

Now the “fixations” chronicled by psychoanalysis may be more or less figurative. In the present case they are evidently purely figurative: the child’s concrete behaviors towards the anal zone and its functions, on and off the toilet, do not persist into maturity. In general, the anal characters Freud describes take no more of an interest in this “zone” than anyone else: “none of these weaknesses and idiosyncracies are to be found in them once their childhood has been passed” (170), so that “we must conclude that the anal zone had lost its erotogenic significance in the course of development” (170). Indeed, precisely the mysterious cessation of the behaviors, together with the subsequent — equally inexplicable — emergence of the observed character traits, clears the way for Freud’s argument. In other words: that “anal” types do not exhibit the infants preoccupation with the anal zone is not a circumstance that weakens Freud’s argument; it is rather the basis of it. For just this reason, “it is to be suspected that the regularity with which this triad of properties is present in their character may be brought into relation with the disappearance of their anal erotism” (170).