>>13413502Anal phase is either:
>the stage when a child/toddler wants to claim everything for itself, hence the expression “anally retentive”; being backed up with poop is equated to narcissism, ie refusing to let things go>or; the transitional period when a kid learns to distinguish “me” from “not me” by playing with its own excrement (since poop is the boundary between inner self and outer world, subject and object, etc.)People who accuse Freudian psychoanalysis of being pseudoscience don’t really understand that the stages are meant to represent abstract processes in cognitive development and socialisation, they’re not literal. It’s why psychoanalysis is a “talking cure” and not a medical treatment: what you are doing is using representational language to lead the analysand to some kind of realisation that makes sense to them, it’s not a universal pathology.
