The Anal Character

Abstract

Psychoanalysis is the most breathtakingly ambitious psychological theory. It aspires to account for human cognition, emotion, motivation and culture, as well as explaining the causes of mental illness and the methods of treating it. As a theory of personality it offers elaborate models of the mind’s levels of consciousness, the conflicting agencies that make it up and the tortuous stages through which personality develops. Although it is chiefly a theory of the dynamics of personality — the hidden processes that underlie human behavior — it also contains a less well-known account of personality description. Freud and his followers proposed a small number of character types, each named after a body part. The most interesting is the anal character.