Introductory Lectures on Neuropsychoanalysis: Lecture Four Part 3" How the Mind Develops" Anal Stage

THE ANAL STAGE...............Freud's second psychosexual stage is the Anal Stage occuring in the second year or so of life. Freud believed that in this stage the toddler was preoccupied with sexual anal pleasures( the anus being the second erogenous zone.) These anal pleasures and unpleasures , due to their being met or not met by the Mother/Father, created psychic conflicts and resulting compromise formations. This was Freud's anal stage power struggle between the toddler's desire to satisfy anal pleasures and the Parent's neccesary restriction of those pleasures. This power struggle led to angry and aggressive feelings that began to develop in the toddler, along with fears of retribution and/or abandonment( loss of the Object's love) by the Parent. " My will (toddler) verses your will (Parent)" becomes a major issue for the anal stage child. Freud also spoke of this stage as the anal sadistic phase, which Ellman(2010) equated with the toddler's achievement of object choice.........

So as Ellman notes, more than anal pleasures and unpleasures   and their resultant symptoms are going on at this stage with the toddler. The ego has further developed, but not to the point that it can handle strong emotional needs without continued use of the more primitive defense of splitting. The toddler often continues to experience the world as all good and all bad. The same holds true for their object relations--their earliest attachments. These persons in their lives, often the Mother first and the Father second, feel all good or all bad to the toddler. And they perceive them in their minds, their internal object representation of them, as completely good and completely bad. The toddler experiences the Mother who meets it's needs as all good and the Mother who does not meet its needs as all bad. The toddler experiences her as two different Mothers. The ego, at this stage, is not not sufficiently strong enough to handle ambivalence, which is a later ability to see the all good and the all bad mother as one and the same person. This same splitting occurs in the toddler's sense of self. When the world feels good the toddler feels all good. When the world feels bad the toddler feels all bad. The toddler splits itself as well as others. The toddler cannot yet experience others in it's environment as whole objects. They are experienced as part objects.( This ability to experience others as whole objects, known by Mahler and Anna Freud as object constancy, comes at a later stage. For Freud this later stage is called object love........ Melanie Klein believed this level of functioning could also be included in the paranoid/schizoid position, but may move as well to the depressive position. She understood the splitting of the self and object representations resulted from the early narcissistic pleasure ego being judged harshly by the primitive destructive superego. Thus the infant feels either absolutely wonderful or absolutely horrible. The ego at this level has developed partial control over the id but not full control. The toddler is still too controlled by it's basic emotions. It is in a better position than it was at the oral/infant level but not yet where it will hopefully be at the age of three to six years old. For Freud, persons fixated at this stage or those who have regressed to it, may also experience Narcissistic/borderline disorders, because the primitive defenses associated with these illnesses are often required to ward off the intolerable feelings. But Freud also thought that the more neurotic ill of obessive compulsive neurosis wa either a fixation in or regression to the anal sadistic phase.........Mark Solms and neuropsychoanalysis understand the main basic emotional need/drive demand of this stage to be RAGE. This goes along with Freud's destructive/aggressive drive and the toddler's anger and aggression toward the toilet training Mother who limits it's anal pleasures. RAGE results when the anal/toddler's unrealistic, repressed prediction cannot allow it to successfully remove impediments in the way of meeting its basic emotional needs. Depending on the realism of the toddler's prediction, it may have to call upon the more primitive defense of splitting as already mentioned, but also projection and introjection, to protect against the unpleasant feeling. These defenses determine the personality organization of the toddler.