Anal erotism occupies a foundational position in the depth-psychology corpus, serving simultaneously as a clinical observation, a developmental postulate, and a cornerstone of character theory. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality established the anal zone as a genuinely erotogenic site whose excitations, if incompletely sublimated, persist into adult libidinal life. Karl Abraham elaborated this foundation into the most systematically developed account of any erotogenic zone in the literature, tracing how anal fixation and sublimation generate the triad of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy constituting the ‘anal character,’ and linking these formations to the sadistic-anal organization that underlies obsessional neurosis and melancholic states. Jones’s parallel investigations, cited approvingly by Abraham, extended the concept to reversals, contrariness, and the symbolic equation of faeces with money and gift. Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary introduces a more affectively textured reading, situating anal expression within the economy of trauma, hatred, and social revenge. Lacan reframes the anal stage topologically, insisting that failure to traverse its ‘neuralgic point’ forecloses genuine progress in the analysis of desire. Hillman, writing from an archetypal perspective, acknowledges Freud’s anal-erotic triad while situating it within a broader symbolics of bodily centers and ideological superstructure. Across this range, the central tension lies between a strictly economic-libidinal account and a characterological-relational one: whether anal erotism names a quantum of fixated drive or a style of being-in-relation organized around retention, control, and ambivalence.