“Anal” and “Sexual”

Andreas-Salomé argues that the training of excretion is the child’s first prohibition: for the first time the infant must turn against its own impulse, and the ego takes shape as mediator between outer restraint and inner urge. The anal comes to stand for everything rejected and dead, the model of all disgust, while remaining bodily close to the genital, which in women is as if “rented” from the cloaca. Confusing the two meanings lets disgust seep into sexuality. The paper also criticises Jung’s and Adler’s revisions of the libido theory, and Freud took up its image of the vagina in 1917.