The anal stage take place when children are one to three years old, Freud believes that in this stage the pleasure centre shifts from the mouth to the anus, where children find pleasure in excreting. Freud categorized the anal stage as a shift of erogenous zones from the mouth to the anus and focuses on toilet training.
Freud defines that this period is the period of independence. The child realizes that they are a person which are different from their parents, with an increasing list of individual needs and desires. Freud likewise believed that the ego, the sense of self in relation to the external world, develops during this stage.
The main struggle the child faces in this stage is between the wishful impulses of the id and the ego. Freud defines that the ego facilitates between the primal urges of the id and the realities of the outside world. The more specific conflict of the anal stage, however, revolves around toilet training.
This stage defines that the children need to learn to control their bodily needs, and their parents play an important role in this phase. Toilet training should be based on a system of reward and praise because it can lead to successful direction finding and proper development of the next stage.
Children often feel proud of their accomplishments and begin to see themselves as competent and capable. But at the same time Freud believe that parental responses should not be overly lenient or overly harsh because it can cause the contrary result.
If the parents are too strict with their child, either by being critical or punishing them for not meeting toilet-training goals, could result in anal-retentive personality. Freud defined this personality as overly strict, obsessively neat, or extremely stingy with money. And for the children who experience lenient toilet training could develop the opposite, which is anal-expulsive personality. This demonstrates as a messy, disorganized, and rebellious adult.
Freud believed that during this stage, potty training and learning to control your bowel movements and bladder are a major source of pleasure and tension. Defecation produces erotic pleasure for the child, but with the onset of toilet training, the child is put under pressure to learn to postpone or delay this pleasure.
Toilet training is basically a parent telling a kid when and where they can poop, and it’s a person’s first real encounter with authority. The theory says that how a parent approaches the toilet training process influences how someone interacts with authority as they get older.
Harsh potty training is thought to cause adults to be anal retentive: perfectionists, obsessed with cleanliness, and controlling. Liberal training, on the other hand, is said to cause a person to be anal expulsive: messy, disorganized, oversharing, and having poor boundaries
A psychoanalytic term for a group of personality traits believed to stem from the anal stage of Psychosexual Stage of Development. Between the ages of two and three, the child’s libido is believed to be focused on excretion, and his development then provides him with a prime source of pleasure (“anal erotism”). Moreover, their response to their parents’ requirements for gut control are supposed to determine many of their future character traits. And there are two characteristics involved in the control of elimination—retention and expulsion—and the theory suggest that the child’s character may be influenced more by one than the other.
The child who associates pleasure with eviction tends to become determined, proud, and generous. The ambitiousness and proudness are credited to feelings of confidence created by successful removal, and the generosity is related with readiness to “give” when they are expected to do so. On the other side, the child who stems specific satisfaction from retaining tends to develop the more common “anal character,” characterized by tidiness, stinginess, and stubbornness, which are sometimes termed the “anal triad.”
The tidiness, which also includes punctuality and propriety, results from tidiness to the mother’s demand to be clean. The stinginess is regarded as a maintenance of anal retentivity—just as the child cannot give up his faces, so the adult saves carefully, has a strong “collecting instinct,” and may even become a miser or saver.
The stubbornness is a carryover of the child’s rebellion against the mother’s demand to eliminate. Adults who exhibit these traits in extreme degree are described by psychoanalysts as “fixated” at the anal stage. Compulsive characters are frequently termed anal characters, since they tend to be particular, measured, rigid, overconscientious individuals.
The purpose of psychoanalytic remedy is to make use of the system of transference to launch the energies of fixations. The therapist might also additionally speak with their purchaser’s styles of reactions and attitudes that they have a look at their purchaser unconsciously projecting onto them. This lets them assist their purchaser to carry their subconscious emotions from beyond into aware awareness.
We can also use CBT with the client as it will help them to get aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so they can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.