Concept
Anal erotism
The sexual pleasure bound to the anal zone and to the acts of holding back and expelling, one of the component drives of infantile sexuality. Freud described the anal zone as erotogenic in 1905; in ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908) he traced orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy to its renunciation, in 1913 he placed it in an anal-sadistic organisation of the libido, and in 1917 he described the unconscious equivalence of faeces, gift, money, child and penis. Lou Andreas-Salomé read the anal prohibition as the child’s first encounter with renunciation and the origin of disgust.
Read more- Broader concept
- Psychosexual development
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 4
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1908 Freud counted the anal zone among the erotogenic zones in the Three Essays (1905) and named anal erotism in ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908), where he derived orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy from its transformation.
developed by
- Lou Andreas-Salomé 1916 In »Anal« und »Sexual« (1916) Andreas-Salomé reads the training of excretion as the child’s first prohibition, through which the ego forms and the anal becomes the model of what is rejected and disgusting; she describes the female genital as ‘leased’ from the cloaca, a phrase Freud adopted in 1917.