Anality

The anal character trait is also well suited for displaying feelings of hate… flatus keeps people at a certain distance… it means a defiant emphasis on self-contempt… The tendency toward displacement onto anality may be enhanced by the presence of an abnormal store of retained trauma.

Ferenczi argues that anal character traits serve as vehicles for displaced hatred and self-contempt, and that regression to anality is intensified by unresolved traumatic retention.

Ferenczi, Sándor, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, 1932thesis

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the job of counting money and keeping it secure was understood to be the province of Saturn, god of depression, tightness, anality, and profound vision.

Moore situates anality within a Saturnian mytho-poetic framework, recasting anal tightness not as pathology but as a sacred quality belonging to the god of depression and visionary depth.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis

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if a venerated object is related to the anal region by a child, then this must be seen as a way of expressing respect. Jung has therefore perceived the connection between anality and creativity which many other theorists have developed.

Samuels credits Jung with recognizing that anal symbolism in children expresses reverence rather than mere libidinal fixation, linking anality to creativity rather than pathology.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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The main trouble in Brown’s position in that book is his commitment to the materialistic hypothesis that puts body prior to psyche. Therefore psychic traits such as repression and negation become secondary to the actual libidinal zone of the anus.

Hillman critiques the materialist reduction of psychological phenomena to the anal zone, arguing that body and soul must be held as co-equal rather than placing somatic anality as the ground of psychic life.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis

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The labyrinthine tract of the bowels has already been considered an interiorized underworld… Shit is the great leveler… Diarrhea signals the daylight order at its ‘end.’ The old king falls apart and shits like a baby—decomposition and creation at once.

Hillman amplifies the anal-chthonic connection mythologically, reading bowel imagery in dreams as symbols of underworld dissolution, humiliation, and radical psychic transformation rather than libidinal fixation.

Hillman, James, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting

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only the senex has the sense of time needed for the seasons and their chronic repetition… the dung, the loneliness and the affectionless, objectified sexuality.

Hillman associates anal qualities — patience, conservation, dung — with the Saturnian senex archetype, grounding anal character traits in an archetypal rather than developmental framework.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

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