ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changes in Freud’s theory of successive libidinal stages during the subsequent evolution of psychoanalytic thinking, looking especially at the anal stage. Melanie Klein saw all zones as operating simultaneously. Edna O’Shaughnessy describes various body splits, front and back or upper and lower parts, and illustrates this in a patient with obsessional neurosis who withdrew from relating to a dead breast and slipped down into an idealized anal psychic retreat. His despair about reparation, his imprisoned pain, was defended against by a controlling, perverse, and sadistic transference. She believes that if anal sadism dominates the child’s object relations, it is an abnormal development.
