Article
“Anal” and “Sexual”
»Anal« und »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.
What it shows
- 1916
Lou Andreas-Salomé developed Anal erotism
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.
- 1916
Lou Andreas-Salomé disputed with Carl Gustav Jung
In »Anal« und »Sexual« Andreas-Salomé criticises Jung’s desexualised libido: by placing the essence of sexuality outside sexuality itself, she argues, he lets the old dualism back in and sides with the older theory that condemned sex.
- 1916
Lou Andreas-Salomé disputed with Alfred Adler
In »Anal« und »Sexual« Andreas-Salomé argues that Adler, like Jung, loses Freud’s conception of sexuality, so that for him neurosis becomes little more than an unfavourable course of the psyche itself, and holds that Freud and Adler must be kept apart even more firmly than Freud and Jung.