Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories(^46) 2. Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
biting, cooing, closing their mouth, smiling, and crying. Their first autoerotic expe-
rience is thumb sucking, a defense against anxiety that satisfies their sexual but not
their nutritional needs.
As children grow older, the mouth continues to be an erogenous zone, and by
the time they become adults, they are capable of gratifying their oral needs in a va-
riety of ways, including sucking candy, chewing gum, biting pencils, overeating,
smoking cigarettes, pipes and cigars, and making biting, sarcastic remarks.
Anal Phase
The aggressive drive, which during the first year of life takes the form of oral sadism,
reaches fuller development during the second year when the anus emerges as a sex-
ually pleasurable zone. Because this period is characterized by satisfaction gained
through aggressive behavior and through the excretory function, Freud (1933/1964)
called it the sadistic-anal phaseor, more briefly, the anal phaseof development. This
phase is divided into two subphases, the early anal and the late anal.
During the early anal period,children receive satisfaction by destroying or
losing objects. At this time, the destructive nature of the sadistic drive is stronger
than the erotic one, and children often behave aggressively toward their parents for
frustrating them withtoilet training.
Then, when children enter the late anal period,they sometimes take a friendly
interest toward their feces, an interest that stems from the erotic pleasure of defecat-
ing. Frequently, children will present their feces to the parents as a valued prize
(Freud, 1933/1964). If their behavior is accepted and praised by their parents, then
children are likely to grow into generous and magnanimous adults. However, if their
“gift” is rejected in a punitive fashion, children may adopt another method of ob-
taining anal pleasure—withholding the feces until the pressure becomes both painful
and erotically stimulating. This mode of narcissistic and masochistic pleasure lays
the foundation for the anal character—people who continue to receive erotic satis-
faction by keeping and possessing objects and by arranging them in an excessively
neat and orderly fashion. Freud (1933/1964) hypothesized that people who grow into
anal characters were, as children, overly resistant to toilet training, often holding
back their feces and prolonging the time of training beyond that usually required.
This anal eroticism becomes transformed into the anal triadof orderliness, stingi-
ness,and obstinacythat typifies the adult anal character.
Freud (1933/1964) believed that, for girls, anal eroticism is carried over into
penis envy during the phallic stage and can eventually be expressed by giving birth
to a baby. He also believed that in the unconscious the concepts of penis and baby—
because both are referred to as a “little one”—mean the same thing. Also, feces, be-
cause of its elongated shape and because it has been removed from the body, is in-
distinguishable from baby, and all three concepts—penis, baby, and feces—are
represented by the same symbols in dreams.
During the oral and anal stages, no basic distinction exists between male and
female psychosexual growth. Children of either gender can develop an active or a
passive orientation. The active attitude often is characterized by what Freud
(1933/1964) considered the masculine qualities of dominance and sadism, whereas
the passive orientation is usually marked by the feminine qualities of voyeurism and
40 Part II Psychodynamic Theories