The Seba library treats Anus in 9 passages, across 4 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Radin, Paul, Hillman, James).
He takes his anus off and entrusts it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children.
Jung interprets the Trickster’s detachable, task-bearing anus as evidence of a pre-unitary somatic condition symptomatic of radical unconsciousness in the archaic psyche.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis
Rosinus (Zosimos) even calls him the terminus ani. In the Bundahish, the anus of Garotman is ‘like hell on earth.’
Jung records alchemical and mythological traditions that assign the anus to Mercurius as his lowest, infernal boundary, emblematic of the god’s simultaneous proximity to divinity and to the most debased matter.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967thesis
Trickster had burnt his anus. He had applied a burning piece of wood to it. After burning his anus, his intestines had contracted and fallen off, piece by piece, and these pieces were the things he was picking up.
Radin’s primary text presents the anus as a site of self-inflicted punishment and corporeal disintegration, illustrating the Trickster’s catastrophic lack of bodily self-awareness.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
He roasts the few he has killed and, exhausted from his encounter, goes to sleep after instructing his anus to keep watch. His anus does its best to awaken him when foxes appear, but to no avail.
Radin’s analytical commentary frames the anus-as-watchman episode as a key instance of Trickster’s fragmented selfhood, wherein a body part is delegated autonomous agency.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
‘I will wait for them to be cooked,’ he said to himself. ‘Now, you, my younger brother, must keep watch for me while I go to sleep.’ He was talking to his anus.
The raw mythic text demonstrates the anus addressed as a kinship figure — a ‘younger brother’ — enacting the Trickster’s undifferentiated, pre-personal body-image.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
He turned his anus toward it and broke wind in that direction and the tree was knocked over and destroyed, roots and all.
The episode in which Trickster uses his anus as a weapon of supernatural flatulence underscores the anal zone’s mythological association with creative-destructive power prior to libidinal differentiation.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
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 Norman O. Brown’s reduction of repression and cultural superstructure to the anal zone, arguing that privileging the anus as material base severs body from soul.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
In this patient the anal zone greatly predominated. In his childhood it had subserved a peculiar auto-erotic practice in which he used to sit down so that the heel of his boot was pressed against the anal region.
Abraham’s clinical case study demonstrates the anal zone as a primary auto-erotic site whose childhood fixation organizes the patient’s subsequent fetishism and evacuation-linked pleasure.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
The kleptomaniac has taken as his sexual aim an oral incorporation of his object, while the paranoiac has made his its anal incorporation.
Abraham distinguishes oral from anal incorporation as divergent libidinal aims underlying kleptomaniac and paranoiac conditions respectively, positioning the anus within a hierarchical schema of psychosexual regression.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting