AMERICAN CULTURAL TRAITS:
A FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION
WILLIAM W. TILDEN
Adams gave up the attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the end -- himself.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
America has been described as "a culture of contradictions,"1 and the Freudian paradigm is offered here
as an attempt to resolve a series of those contradictions -- individualism and conformity, abundance and
scarcity, idealism and materialism, perfectionism and skepticism, the "habit of introspection" and the
"longing for community"2 -- and to provide some insights into the web of personality traits and cultural
values associated with this particular cultural phenotype.
THE FREUDIAN PARADIGM
According to Sigmund Freud,3 anal training, which is derived from the need to regulate the time and
place of defecation, presents a child with a situation in which it must choose, often for the first time in its
life, whether to "postpone or renounce a direct instinctual gratification out of consideration for the
environment:"4
The contents of the bowels . . . . are clearly treated as a part of the infant’s own body and represent his
first “gift”: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by
withholding them, his disobedience.5
It was from the conjunction of these two intersecting forces -- the cultural need and the biological urge
-- that Freud derived his series of three character-traits which are based on the transformation of the
"libidinal cathexis which originally attached to the contents of the bowel": namely, orderliness, parsimony,
and obstinacy.6
As further defined and elaborated by Freud's students and colleagues, notably Lou Andreas-Salomé,
Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones and Otto Fenichel,7 these three character-traits are formations
_________
This article was originally published in The Journal of Psychohistory 40 (3) Winter 2013
2
which emerge in various degrees from the three choices open the child as it responds to the culturallyimposed imperative to regulate the time and place of defecation:
The trait of Orderliness, in the first instance, reflects the decision to comply and conform to the
demands made by the environment. Rebellion and resistance to the cultural imperative is a second response,
from which is derived the character-trait of Obstinacy. Parsimony represents a compromise-formation
between the two conflicting demands, since retention allows a child to retain individual control over its own
bodily contents while, at the same time, by not producing them, allows the child to express a measure of
"active compliance" with the environment's need for order and cleanliness.
Although his earlier works reflect a strong bias in favor of biological (or "dispositional") forces, Freud,
especially in his later writings,8 acknowledges the significance of cultural factors in shaping character and
seems to imply that bowel training is the causal agent in the transformation and transmission, if not the
origin, of anal characterology. If so, resistance to the cultural imperative (presumably, because it is too
harshly or prematurely imposed) would appear to be doubly important. As a later student of Freud
observed:
It appears that the child who has been trained in continence of urine and faeces slowly and without
pressure or punishment will yield control over his eliminations without anxiety or resentment,
learning to release without conflict; but a precocious or harshly coercive training that forces the
child, before physiologically ready, to release to the outside demands, will set up resistance,
accentuate retention as a defensive response and focus the child's behaviour upon acquisitive or
compensatory outlets for the denial of possession of his own eliminations.9
Thus, excessively early or rigorous bowel training may not only precipitate the character-trait of
Obstinacy, but may also fixate the child at the anal stage of development, transforming and inverting the
whole constitution of traits: "Obstinacy may become so extreme that the person in question is compelled
always to do the exact opposite of what is required of him."10 By producing (or not producing) his bodily
contents on demand, the child expresses, not his active compliance, but his subconscious hostility to his
environment.
As we will see, a number of classic, cross-cultural studies on child training have ranked the American
middle-class relatively high in the severity of its "socialization" process (that is, in weaning, thumb-sucking,
toilet-training and independence training). According to one study, toilet training in the United States is
relatively early, beginning, even in the era following publication of Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense
Book of Baby and Child Care in 1946, at an average age of six months, compared to two years for the rest of
the sample. 11
The cultural imperative to regulate the time and place of defecation, of course, is a universal, if
3
unspoken, precondition of all permanent human settlements, and one student of Freud, Geza Roheim, has
stated that all urban cultures, to varying degrees, are “based on sublimations or reaction-formations of anal
trends."12
The complex of character-traits and cultural values described by Freud and his colleagues, of course,
has been modified and transformed by the unique circumstances of America’s historical development and
cultural context. It should also be noted that this complex of personality traits is but one among many others
in the Freudian constellation; that there is no single, all-inclusive “anal personality type”; that these
character-traits exist in varying and contradictory degrees among individuals, and, most importantly, that
this phenotype is but one among many other modal personality types represented in American culture.
RESISTANCE
We are all Republicans -- we are all Federalists.
Thomas Jefferson, 1801
A fundamental trait – the third in Freud’s triad – of the anal-erotic character is Obstinacy, or SelfWilledness – the defiant resistance to any form of external interference:
There is an inordinate, and often extreme sensitiveness about interference. Such people take advice
badly, resent any pressure being put on them, stand on their rights and on their dignity, rebel against
any authority, and insist on going their own way; they are never to be driven and can only be led. As
children they are extremely disobedient, there being, indeed, a constant association between defiant
disobedience and unmastered anal eroticism. Later a reaction-formation against this may develop,
leading to unusual docility, but it can generally be observed that the docility is only partial and
conditional.. . . Such people in later life are very sensitive on the matter of exact justice being done,
even to a pedantic extent, and on all kinds of fair dealing. They get particularly agitated at the idea of
something being taken from them against their will, and especially if this is something that symbolizes
faeces in the unconscious, as, for instance, money does; they cannot tolerate being cheated of the
smallest amount. . . .The concept of time is, because of the sense of value attaching to it, an unconscious
equivalent of excretory product, and the reaction just mentioned is also shown in regard to it.
Perhaps, no other single description in psychoanalytic literature goes as far in providing a basis for
interpreting and unifying such a wide range of American cultural values as does this statement by Ernest
Jones. If we may assume that extrapolation from individual case studies to broad cultural phenomena is a
valid and legitimate historiographical tool, resistance to outside interference, as defined here by Ernest
Jones, can be seen as the common denominator underlying such fundamental American values as
individualism, self-reliance, monomania, achievement, exceptionalism, skepticism, alienation, conformity,
4
narcissism and, even, litigious paranoia.
Laissez Faire Individualism: Laissez-faire individualism has been described as a "major tenet of
the American faith,"13 and, until the twentieth century, when new forms of property produced a new
middle-class ethic, Americans traditionally associated liberty with property, and property, in turn, with
virtue, specifically, the anally sanctioned virtues of industry and frugality. Thus, throughout American
history, it was natural that the laissez-faire impulse would be expressed in the form of opposition to
governmental interference -- particularly as represented by the tax collector -- and to all forms of
concentrated power and monopoly which threatened to preempt this sacred relationship between labor
and property. According to Frederick Jackson Turner:
The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.
The tax gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.14
The American Revolution: The American Revolution, of course, represents in archetypal form the trait
of resistance to outside interference.
Edmund S. Morgan has shown that the threat of Parliamentary
taxation was viewed by the colonists as "an attack not merely on property but on industry and frugality,"15
and, in this case, the “intense feeling against any form of injustice” is elevated to the status of what has been
termed “litigious paranoia.”16 According to Bernard Bailyn:
Suspicion that an active conspiracy of power against liberty existed and involved the colonies
directly was deeply rooted in the consciousness of a large segment of the American population. . . .
The Stamp Act was not merely an impolitic and unjust law that threatened the priceless right of the
individual to retain possession of his property until he or his chosen representative voluntarily gave
it up to another; it was to many, also, a danger signal indicating that a more general threat
existed.17
Bailyn quotes John Adams’ belief that "there seems to be a direct and formal design on foot to
enslave all America,"18 and Thomas Jefferson expresses the fear that although
single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day, . . . a series of oppressions
begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers too
plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.19
Colonial resistance to Parliamentary interference was often expressed in anal metaphors. Jefferson,
for example, stated his determination that "we do not mean that our people shall be burdened with
oppressive taxes to provide sinecures for the idle or the wicked."20 The Writs of Assistance evoked the
fear that "our houses, even our bedchambers, are exposed to be ransacked, our boxes, trunks, and chests
broke open, ravaged and plundered by wretches whom no prudent man would venture to employ as
5
menial servants." The British Empire was portrayed, variously, as "ripe for ruin" and infected by a
"proud, arbitrary, selfish, and venal spirit of corruption." The English government was "arbitrary and
despotic"; it had sought to reduce the colonies to slavery by stealing what Trenchard termed "that
precious jewel liberty." It had erected a bureaucracy of "idle drones," "parasitic officeholders" and
"lazy, proud, worthless pensioners and Placemen," who would extort "SUBMISSIVE behavior," "live
lazily upon the labor of others" and "distinguish themselves by their sordid zeal." In order to "support
these shocking enormities and corruptions, the subjects in all quarters must be hard squeezed with the
iron arms of oppression," for "we shall be taxed so long as we have a penny to pay."21.”
Interference Unfair, External and Conspiratorial: Thus was established a pattern of resistance to
"outside" interference which, throughout American history, was to justify both radical reform movements
and rigid defenses of the status quo. In such doctrines as strict construction, states' rights and due process, in
Andrew Jackson's Veto Message on the Second Bank, Henry David Thoreau's “Civil Disobedience” and
Frederick Jackson Turner's theory of frontier democracy, in anti-trust legislation of the Progressive Era and
resistance to the New Deal in the 1930’s, in right-wing anti-communism of the 1950’s, New Left radicalism
of the 1960's and the Tea Party Movement of the 2000’s, runs the common theme of opposition to
concentrated power and monopoly, which is viewed, uniformly, as unfair, external and conspiratorial.
Self Reliance: The obverse of the resentment against external interference is the introspective ideal
of self-sufficiency, which originates in the child's desire to retain individual control over its sphincter
muscles and bodily contents, and results in the premature internalization of parental controls, the socalled Invisible Hand.
Monomania: Another consequence of premature "independence training" is the monomaniacal
"insistence on pursuing one's own path regardless of the influence brought to bear by other people."22 In
the words of Karen Horney, the anal character "tends toward one goal -- to hold on to what he has and
never give away anything."23 To Geoffrey Gorer, the "object is pursued with a fervor and a sense of
dedication . . . without external interference."24
Achievement, Exceptionalism and Megalomania: The anal trait of Obstinacy is also manifested in
such American values as achievement, exceptionalism and megalomania. Karl Abraham, for example,
traces the psychoanalytic origin of achievement to "the special pleasure in the act of excretion," which
comprises besides physical sensations a psychical gratification which is based on the achievement
of the act. Now in that child's training demands strict regularity in its excretions as well as
cleanliness it exposes the child's narcissism to a first severe test. The majority of children adapt
themselves sooner or later to these demands. In favourable cases the child succeeds in making a
virtue out of necessity, as it were; in other words, in identifying itself with the requirements of its
educators and being proud of its attainment. The primary injury to its narcissism is thus
compensated, and its original feeling of self-satisfaction is replaced by gratification in its
6
achievement, in "being good," in its parents' praise.25
Thus, the relationship between "the child's high self-esteem and [its] excretory acts," between its "primitive
feeling of power" and its "pride in evacuation" is immediate and direct.
Ernest Jones also notes this association and describes the "contribution made by anal erotism to infantile
narcissism" in the following terms:
Persons of the type under consideration are apt to have a strongly marked individuality [characterized
by] self-willed independence [and an] exalted belief in personal perfection.26
In extreme cases, this complex of associations leads to a form of megalomania, which is described by
Abraham as follows:
According to my experience this conviction [of pride] is often exaggerated until the patient believes that
he is a unique person. He will become pretentious and arrogant and will tend to underestimate
everyone else. One patient expressed this as follows: "Everything that is not me is dirt."27
Skepticism, Alienation and Nihilism: Since “coercive” bowel training places a “very high love
premium on perfect performance,” it can also lead, paradoxically, not only to overcompensating feelings of
narcissism and megalomania, but also to feelings of inadequacy, alienation and nihilism:
It is a frustrating experience; it too often fosters anxiety and guilt about excretory substances and owing
to the fact that too much is expected of the child he may develop feelings of inadequacy because of his
lack of skill.28
According to Abraham:
The child's idea of the omnipotence of its wishes and thoughts can proceed from a stage in which it
ascribed an omnipotence of this kind to its excretions. Further experience has since convinced me that
this is a regular and typical process. The patient about whose childhood I have spoken had doubtless
been disturbed in the enjoyment of a narcissistic pleasure of this sort. The severe and painful feeling of
insufficiency with which she was later afflicted very probably went back in the last instance to this
premature destruction of her infantile "megalomania."29
Radical Individualism and Mass Conformity: Alexis de Tocqueville observed a fundamental paradox
in American society (which Marvin Meyers termed the "double potentiality") of radical, anarchic
individualism coexisting within a mass culture dominated by Lockean conformity and, often, absolutistic
majoritarianism.30
This paradox can be resolved by recalling Ernest Jones's original description of
Obstinacy: "Later a reaction-formation against this may develop, leading to unusual docility, but it can
7
generally be observed that the docility is only partial and conditional." Thus, docility and conformity are
reaction-formations which conceal basic underlying feelings of hostility and rebelliousness, which are
derived from "the premature destruction of . . . infantile 'megalomania.'"31
This view is confirmed by Karl Abraham, who continues his original description linking achievement to
the “special pleasure in the act of excretion:”
All children are not equally successful in this respect. Particular attention should be drawn here to the
fact that there are certain over-compensations behind which is hidden that obstinate holding fast to the
primitive right of self-determination, which occasionally breaks out violently later. I have in mind those
children (and of course adults too) who are remarkable for their "goodness," polite manners, and
obedience, but who base their underlying rebellious impulses on the grounds that they have been forced
into submission since infancy.
Arrogance and Self-Abasement: The paradoxical mixture of individualism and conformity,
perfectionism and skepticism, arrogance and self-abasement, is common in the literature of American
history and, perhaps, is also related to the child's subconscious identification of self with feces, which would
account for its sense of uniqueness as well as its feelings of worthlessness:
It would appear that in the products of the unconscious -- spontaneous ideas, phantasies, symptoms -the conceptions faeces (money, gift) child and penis are seldom distinguished and are easily
interchangeable. . . . The child is regarded as "lumf" (Lumpf), i.e., as something which becomes
detached from the body by passing through the bowel. A certain amount of libidinal cathexis which
originally attached to the contents of the bowel can thus be extended to the child born through it.32
The Puritans, of course, elevated self-abasement to an art form, and a passage from the diary of Cotton
Mather, to use an extreme, almost pathological example, conveys the arrogant sense of worthlessness
derived from this identification:
I was once emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same Time, there
came a dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I, "What mean, and vile Things are the Children of
Men, in this mortal State! How much do our natural Necessities abase us, and place us in some
regard, on the same level with the very Dogs!" . . . Accordingly, I resolved, that it should be my
ordinary Practice, whenever I stop to answer the one or other Necessity of Nature, to make it an
Opportunity of Shaping in my Mind, some holy, noble, divine Thought. . . . And I have done
according to this Resolution! Be sure, the loathsome and filthy Nature of SIN, and the Method of
Deliverance from it, must make an Article, in some Thousands of Thoughts, on these Occasions.33
Benjamin Franklin describes himself as the "tithe" of his father's children and, in his Table of
Examinations, relates that "I mark'd my faults with a black-lead pencil, which marks I could easily wipe out
with a wet sponge . . . I was surpris'd to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined."34
8
In his Journals, Ralph Waldo Emerson proposes that "good motives are at the bottom of [many] bad
actions" and elsewhere states: "I spend myself prudently; I economize; I cheapen; whereof nothing grand
ever grew . . . I should hate myself less."35 Similarly, Henry Thoreau advises, "If you would avoid
uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable"; "There is no odor so bad as
that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion."36
At times, the alienation passes into nihilism. To Henry Adams, for example, "a fourth child has the
strength of his weakness. Being of no great value, he may throw himself away if he likes, and never be
missed." An atom "vibrating in a void," he survives the "harsh brutality of chance," the "chaos of anarchic
and purposeless forces," by means of his own self-deprecating humor, comparing himself, for example, to a
"coin" who "knew himself to be worthless and not current." "He was for sale. He wanted to be bought. His
price was excessively cheap."37
Mass Culture and Grass-roots Democracy:
On the level of social theory, the subconscious
identification of self with feces is evident in the lumpen conceptualizations of mass culture and grass-roots
democracy. Tocqueville, for example, describes the condition inherent in an egalitarian society in which the
individual is "overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness":
In democratic communities, each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny
object: namely himself. If he ever raises his looks higher, he perceives only the immense form of
society at large or the still more imposing aspect of mankind. . . . What lies between is a void.38
Although this passage seems to contradict Tocqueville’s observation that the majority of Americans
“lives in a state of perpetual self-adoration,”39 the paradox can be resolved by reminding ourselves,
again, that both arrogance and self-abasement are derived from the “premature destruction of . . .
infantile 'megalomania.” The examples noted above of professed modesty, alienation and sense of
insignificance are offset by the underlying cultural narcissism.40 Compare, for example, Franklin’s
observation quoted earlier that “I was surpris'd to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had
imagined” with this admission in the conclusion of the first section of his Autobiography:
In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our national passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it,
struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every
now then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could
conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.41
American Foreign Policy: The principles of resistance to outside interference and the "obstinate
holding fast to the primitive right of self-determination" have exercised a profound influence over
American foreign and are explicitly stated in Washington's Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine, the
9
Open Door Notes, Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Truman Doctrine and, more recently American
intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.42
RETENTION
Life is our dictionary.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar
Parsimony is derived from Obstinacy and is, in fact, a function of it, since, as we have seen, early or
rigid bowel training will, in the words of one psychiatrist, "set up resistance, . . . accentuate retention as
a defensive response, and focus the child's behavior upon acquisitive or compensatory outlets for the
denial of possession of his own eliminations."43
Since "pleasure in having a mass of material stored up entirely corresponds to the pleasure of the
retention of faeces,"44 Parsimony, as defined here, will be discussed in its broader significance as the
retentive mode in general. Derived from the Latin potis sedere (“powerful” + “to sit”), the "libidinal
over-emphasis on possession"45 finds its characterological manifestation in the impulse to collect and
hoard such objective correlatives as money, coins, books, words, stamps, facts and statistics. "All
collectors are anal-erotics, and the objects collected are nearly always typical copro-symbols."46
Copro-Symbology: As we have seen, in Freudian theory, the products of defecation occupy a role
equal in importance to that of the act itself, since “the contents of the bowels . . . are clearly treated as a part
of the infant’s own body and represent his first gift”:
It would appear that in the products of the unconscious -- spontaneous ideas, phantasies, symptoms -the conceptions faeces (money, gift), child and penis are seldom distinguished and are easily
interchangeable.47
Thus, the relationship between money/gift, self and feces is, clearly, a symbolic one:
"Possession” means “things that do not actually belong to the ego, but that ought to; things that are
actually outside but symbolically inside.”48
Because the contents of the bowel occupy such an ambiguous relationship between the internal and
external world, this symbolization process can be viewed as paralleling the child's historical development in
which it gradually learns to differentiate between Self and Non-Self. Sandor Ferenczi, for example, has
traced the process whereby feces are subconsciously abstracted by the child into mud-pies, pebbles, shells,
10
marbles, coins, jewelry and money.49 Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones extend this copro-symbology to
include books, words, stamps, statistics, time and, even, last wills and testaments.50
Gold, Money and Land: Gold, of course, is the primary copro-symbol, and the "unconscious
equivalence of faeces and money" is too well documented to elaborate here.51 In the Freudian model,
land is also a copro-symbol. Writing in the 1830's, Harriet Martineau observed that "the possession of
land is the aim of all action, generally speaking, and the cure for all social ills, among men in the United
States," and Frederick Jackson Turner, in his classic formulation, demonstrated that the pull of "free
land" -- the "agrarian cupidity" and "insatiable land hunger" -- exercised a profound influence over the
development of American character traits and social institutions.52
Capital Accumulation and the Rise of Industrialism: The relationship between anal retention,
capital accumulation and the rise of industrialism should be self-evident:
It does not seem altogether fanciful to correlate the enormous extension of interest in industrialism
that took place a century or so ago with the wave of increased repression of anal eroticism that can
be shown historically to have accompanied it. 53
Progress as Accumulation: Similarly, in popular conception, progress has been associated with
accumulation. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, although pejoratively, articulates this relationship:
It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and a purpose in life. It makes us all parts of a
complicated scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier
region than we were born in. It insists upon everybody's adding somewhat -- a mite, perhaps, but
earned by incessant effort -- to an accumulated pile of usefulness, of which the only use will be, to
burden our posterity with even heavier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own.54
The negative identification of progress with accumulation is carried forward by Henry Adams, who, in
the late nineteenth century, deplores an industrialized society which measures "its progress by the coaloutput," and describes not only history ("like everything else . . . a field of scraps, like the refuse heap about
a Stafford iron-furnace"), but also evolution in the apocalyptic language of anal retention:
[The evolutionist] labored only to heap up evidences of evolution; to cumulate them till the mass
became irresistible. . . A few thousand feet, more or less, of limestone were the liveliest amusement
to the ganoid, but they buried the uniformitarian alive under the weight of his own
uniformitarianism. . . Coal power alone asserted evolution.55
The Acquisitive Mode of Perception: The correspondence between the anal-retentive mode and
Locke's sensational psychology should be readily apparent. Just as, in a child's "spontaneous phantasy, the
abdomen is merely a bag of undifferentiated contents into which food goes and out of which faeces come,"56
11
so the Lockean mind, as paraphrased by Perry Miller, is an "inventory of impressions," in which "ideas are
the hard pellets of sensation, the irreducible atoms of impression, out of which complex ideas are built."57
"It is the mind alone that collects them, and gives them the union of one idea."58
The Quantitative Orientation of Colonial Thought: There is a great deal of cultural and
historiographical evidence to suggest that the acquisitive mode of perception has played a significant role
throughout American history. Daniel Boorstin, for example, describes the quantitative orientation of
colonial thought:
The difference between natural history and the physical sciences suggests the difference between
New World and Old World concepts of knowledge in the colonial period. . . . The physical scientist
must come to his experience ready to organize it by a theory. In contrast, men have often
contributed to natural history merely by keeping a notebook of miscellaneous items which have
caught their attention. . . . How can one believe that a "descriptive" approach to knowledge
confines the imagination? The Goddess of Miscellany reigned even in such early promotional
tracts as Francis Higginson's New-England Plantation (1630) . . . A century later, variegated New
World novelties filled William Byrd's History of the Dividing Line (1728), and Jefferson's most
important literary product apart from the Declaration of Independence, his Notes on Virginia
(1784), was an omnium gatherum of information about minerals, plants, animals, institutions, and
men. This flood of impressions pouring out of America to interest stay-at-home Englishmen was the
main stream of new knowledge. . . . They were a warehouse of "facts" stored more or less at
random, as the discoverer had come upon them. There was no single or necessary order of
material; one did not need to progress from definitions and premises through conclusions.59
Franklin’s Retentive Epistemology: If, as we shall see, "pleasure in indexing and classifying, in
compiling lists and statistical summaries, in drawing up programs and regulating work by time-sheets, is
well known to be an expression of anal-character,"60 Benjamin Franklin would seem to be anal retentive par
excellence:
I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I rul'd each page with red
ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter
for the day. I cross'd these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with
the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little
black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon
that day.61
Franklin's retentive epistemology is also reflected in his love of books and words ("I wanted a stock of
words"), his Poor Richard's Almanack ("it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright"), his occupations as
printer and postmaster, his projects for a subscription library and a paper currency, and his demographical
and time-and-motion studies on street-cleaning and stockade-building.62
Quantitative Expressions of Early American Nationalism: The spirit of early American nationalism
was often expressed in quantitative terms and was channeled through such institutions as the national bank,
12
the postal system, a patent office, the census, the national tariff and a monetary system based on the metric
scheme devised by Thomas Jefferson. Published in 1828, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the
English Language sought to "reduce the words to their original orthography" and preserve their purity and
uniformity;63 it stands as a monument to “American linguistic nationalism,"64 in particular, and the retentive
mode of knowledge, in general.
THE ELIMINATIVE MODE
Philanthropy, Prodigality and Wastefulness: In discussing the various cultural manifestations of
the acquisitive mentality, we are confronted with, seemingly, an insurmountable paradox -- namely, the
equally significant countervailing American traits of generosity and philanthropy and, indeed, even the
very liberation from the "money complex." According to Henry Adams:
The American people . . . had neither serpents nor golden calves to worship. They had lost the
sense of worship; for the idea that they worshipped money seemed a delusion. Worship of money
was an old-world trait. . . . The American wasted money more recklessly than anyone ever did
before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court aristocracy. . . . The American
mind had less respect for money than the European or Asiatic mind, and bore its loss more easily.65
Geoffrey Gorer concurs: "Americans talk far more about money than Europeans and generally value it
far less. . . . Americans rate the possession, and above all the retention, of money very low."66
Thus, the acquisitive mode does not account for the very genuine sense of philanthropy, nor, of course,
for the prodigality and wastefulness which have traditionally been associated with the American character.67
To do so, one must postulate a new category, and, conveniently, this has been done by Freudian psychology,
which subdivides infantile sexual development into two anal stages: an earlier eliminative or, expulsive,
phase and a later retentive one. In the dialectic of acquisition, then, the philanthropic impulse bears the
same analogous relationship to the eliminative mode as the acquisitive does to the retentive. Often
designated "anal erotic," this character type is described as follows:
They like to make presents of money or its equivalent, and tend to become patrons of the arts or
benefactors of some kind. . . . They limit their parsimony or their avarice to certain kinds of expenditure,
while in other respects they spend money with surprising liberality. . . . We can quite understand, from
their contradictory attitude towards defecation, the meanness many neurotics show in saving small
sums of money while they will spend largely and generously from time to time. These persons postpone
emptying their bowels as long as possible . . . but every now and then they have an evacuation on a
grand scale.68
13
PROCRASTINATION AND FEVERISH ACTIVITY
Before proceeding to discuss the cultural manifestations of the eliminative mode and the purification
impulse, we shall discuss one of its corollaries, namely the ancillary traits of procrastination, on the one
hand, and "feverish and concentrated activity" and "thoroughness and dogged persistence," on the other:69
Such people are given to procrastination; they delay and postpone what they may have to do until
the eleventh or even the twelfth hour. Then they plunge into the work with a desperate and often
almost ferocious energy which nothing is allowed to thwart, any interference being keenly resented.
Undue sensitiveness to interference is very characteristic of this type, especially when combined
with marked concentration out of proportion to the importance of the occupation. A kindred trait is
intense persistence on an undertaking once engaged on, from which they allow nothing to divert
them.70
First there is a period of silent brooding, during which the plan is being slowly, and often only halfconsciously, elaborated. . . . Then follows a spell of feverish and concentrated activity, when all
interference is resented and nothing is allowed to prevent the programme laid down being carried
through to the bitter end in all its details . . . when the unconsciously accumulated energy bursts
forth in an orgy of . . . activity. These outbursts of activity are commonly followed by a marked
sense of relief and self-satisfaction, to which succeeds another fallow period of apparent
inactivity.71
The Gospel of Work and the Identification of Poverty with Laziness: The rhythms described
above constitute a major component of the American success ethic and the gospel of work. A sampling
of the literature of the Gilded Age, for example, reveals that success is "nothing more or less than doing
thoroughly what others do indifferently."72 A brilliant mind or a college education "not only is not
required but is not desirable"; to Andrew Carnegie, it was "a simple matter of honest work, ability, and
concentration."73 The persistent American belief in free will and the identification of poverty with
laziness may also be derived from this biological pattern.
MORAL PURIFICATION AND RESTORATION
If, as in Freudian metaphysics, feces represent condensed guilt, the act of defecation seems to represent
the release, or purge, of that guilt. The paradoxical coexistence within an American value system of cosmic
optimism and innate depravity, of prelapsarian innocence and exponential blackness, can only be
maintained by perceiving human evil as a stain or blemish which must be continually cleansed or purged.
The Puritan Thomas Hooker, for example, describes the process of imperfect regeneration as a
14
continual purging out of impuritie, as it manifestgoeth it selfe. You may conceive it by a similitude, if a
pot be boyling upon the fire, there will a scum arise, but yet they are good house-wives, and cleanly,
and neat, they watch it, and as the scum riseth up, they take it off and throw it away, happily more scum
will arise, but still as it riseth they scum it off.74
The cathartic impulse -- which William James called a "letting go"75 -- is manifested not only in the
psycho-theological concept of conversion as a "re-birth," but also in such institutions as the diary, the
jeremiad and the revival, or "Great Awakening," cycle. Ritual rebirth and purification is also a common
theme in the writings of Thoreau: bathing is a "religious exercise"; "moral reform is the effort to throw off
sleep. . . . To be awake is to be alive."76 As we will discuss in the next section, the purification impulse is
also directly related to the first character-trait in Freud’s triad, Orderliness/Cleanliness.
Jacksonian Democracy: The moral purification-restoration theme is implicit in Jacksonian Democracy.
Although Jacksonian Democrats tended to be strict constructionist and opposed paper money as "artificial
wealth," the essentially expansivistic nature of their philosophy is suggested by their support for such
reforms as preemption ("squatters’ rights"), rotation in office,77 general incorporation laws and abolition of
imprisonment for debt, and their opposition to “internal improvements” at federal expense and, in general,
to all forms of concentrated power and monopoly, particularly, as symbolized by the Second Bank of the
United States.
The Frontier as Safety Valve: Precisely because it had so little basis as a historical fact, the idea of the
frontier as a "safety valve" for social discontent can be shown to have exercised a profound, even
subliminal, influence on the American mind. Based on the Census of 1890, Fredrick Jackson Turner's essay
"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" celebrated the frontier as a process of "perennial
rebirth," a "tabula rasa," a historical "palimpsest." Yet, as much as Turner admired the frontiersman's
"coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind,
quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things," he also expressed his reservations about
the "fluidity" and "expansive character" of the frontier for having allowed a
laxity in regard to government affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the
manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. In this connection may be
noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper
currency and wild-cat banking.78
The Progressive Movement: Progressivism has been described by Elmer Davis as a "carnival of
purity," and the purification impulse was manifested in such Progressive reforms as electoral reform,
pure food and drug legislation, conservation and, of course, "trust-busting." In fact, philosophical
pragmatism, which underpinned every twentieth-century reform administration from the Square Deal to
the New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society, can be viewed as a response to the destruction of the "block
15
universe" of Newtonian physics and a celebration of such anti-retentive values as novelty, flux, variety,
spontaneity, open-endedness and continuity with the environment.
The Romantic, Conservation and Green (Ecology/Recycling) Movements: Ernest Jones
describes the anal character’s "exaggerated disgust and aversion sometimes displayed in regard to any
idea of contaminating or spoiling":
Such people are abjectly miserable at the thought of anything, especially objects, being injured,
spoiled, ruined, and their life in an industrial age is one long protest against the intrusion of man,
with all his squalor and ugliness, into the previously untouched spots of Nature. 79
The Romantic, Conservation and Green movements represent cultural expressions of the “fear of
contamination” and “extreme intolerance for waste and disorder,” as well as responses to the
exploitation of the natural environment. Romanticism, especially, idealizes the freedom, variety
and primitive disorder of nature and celebrates the anti-retentive, open-ended, prelapsarian, childlike virtues of pre-urban life, which predates, ontogenically, the imposition of the cultural
imperative which is a precondition for all permanent human settlements.
The Apocalyptic Tradition: If progress can be defined as an "accumulated pile of usefulness"
and evolution measured by its coal output, the final culmination of human history, similarly, can be
compared to an apocalyptic "evacuation on a grand scale.” 80
RATIONALIZATION
The first trait in Freud's triad is Orderliness, of which Cleanliness is a major component. The former
proceeds from the need to regulate the time and place of defecation, while the latter is regarded as a
reaction-formation against dirt ("dirt is matter in the wrong place").
Since "the child's training demands strict regularity in its excretions as well as cleanliness, it exposes the
child's narcissism to a first severe test."81 In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "contrary habits must be
broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform
rectitude of conduct."82 As a result, "early injuries to infantile narcissism, . . . if these injuries are of a
persistent and systematic nature, . . . force a habit prematurely upon the child before it is ready for it."83
Characteristics derived from this trait include an "obsession for order," a "passion for thoroughness and
efficiency," and, as we have seen, a fear of contamination and an extreme intolerance for waste and
disorder.84
Covenant Theology and the New World Parent: Federal, or Covenant Theology -- the "marrow of
16
Puritan divinity"85 -- represents the first major formal expression in America of the impulse for order and
rationality. By means of an elaborate system of covenants, the Calvinistic conception of God as a harsh,
arbitrary, unpredictable and inscrutable sovereign is reduced to that of a reasonable, predictable, relatively
permissive God who is bound by natural law and who works through secondary causes.
Historians have characterized the social structure of seventeenth-century America as fluid, unstable and
disordered, primarily because of the abundance of land and the novelty and hostility of the natural
environment.86 If Freud's Oedipal equations are correct, if, indeed, "God" is a projection of parental
authority, Federal Theology can be viewed as an indirect adaptation to the revolutionary transformation in
the natural and social environment which underlay the shift from an Old World, "authoritarian" parent to the
"liberal," seemingly permissive New World parent.87 In Miller's words, "God prefer[s] to work through the
prevailing rules," relinquishing miracles and special acts of providence and leading by "persuasion and
demonstration" rather than by compulsion and coercion.88 From a child's point of view, the "unfathomable
election" of bowel training is, thus, transformed into the order and regularity of a mutual contract,
sanctification becomes evidence of justification, good works the cause as much as the consequence of
salvation, and success the "natural sequence to perseverance."89
Precisianism: Ernest Jones describes the anal "intolerance for disorder" as
a restless and uncontrollable passion for constantly arranging the various details . . . until everything is
tidy, symmetrical, and in exactly "its right place." . . . In the field of thought this tendency commonly
leads to undue pedantry with a fondness for definitions and exactitude often merely verbal. An
interesting and valuable variety occasionally met with is a great dislike for muddled thinking, and a
passion for lucidity of thought; such a person delights in getting a matter quite clear, has a fondness for
classifying, and so on.90
The “Precisianist” (as Puritans were called) emphasis on literacy, written scripture and diaries can be
viewed as manifestations of this impulse for order and rationality, as can the more generalized American
"obsession with words" and "passion for written constitutions."91 American legalism and litigiousness, in
general, and strict construction, states' rights and due process, in particular, have also been informed by this
mode of signification.
Reason versus Nature: The identification of reason as an instrument for the mastery of nature was a
legacy of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Foreshadowed in John Winthrop's distinction between
natural and civil, or federal, liberty, the dialectical tension between reason and nature is evident in what
might loosely be termed the "counter-reaction-formation" of Romanticism (which exalted the freedom,
variety and primitive disorder of nature), as well as in its antithesis, Naturalism (which sought to reduce the
complexity and random chaos of evolution to the mechanistic determinism of natural selection and survival
of the fittest), and in its synthesis, philosophical pragmatism (which, again, although it celebrated the open-
17
ended, prelapsarian qualities of novelty, flux, spontaneity and diversity, also sought to control and
manipulate the environment through social planning, to control the direction of evolution by diverting the
blind, wasteful flow of "genetic" evolution into the purposeful, scientific channel of "social" evolution92 -- in
short, to replace "drift" with "mastery"93). Albert Weinberg has suggested that, throughout American
history, from the dispossession of the Native Americans to the Apollonian conquest of the moon, "Manifest
Destiny" has been but a series of rationalizations, or slogans, to justify the mastery and conquest of the
natural environment.94
The Obsession with Speed, the Cult of Efficiency and the Movement for Scientific Management:
Since, as we have seen, "pleasure in indexing and classifying, in compiling lists and statistical summaries, in
drawing up programs and regulating work by time-sheets, is well known to be an expression of the anal
character,"95 twentieth-century reform movements for social efficiency and scientific management can also
be viewed as manifestations of the impulse for rationality. Derived from the Puritan conviction, first
articulated in the seventeenth century by William Perkins, that idleness is a sin, since it is a waste of God's
precious time,96 the obsession for order is prefigured in Franklin's maxim “time is money,” his Table of
Virtues and his time-and-motion studies on street-cleaning and stockade-building.
In the same way, nearly a century and a half later, Frederick W. Taylor using his stopwatch, sought to
rationalize the factory process by systematically breaking down industrial tasks into their individual
components in order to improve productivity and eliminate waste.
97
Taylor's efforts to impose rationalization, efficiency and order on the industrial process were paralleled
by other proponents of scientific management, and, by the middle of the twentieth century, the technocratic
principle was firmly established as a conscious, operating force in American social thought and structure,
the pervasive reality of which can be observed today at any fast food restaurant.98
The Metaphor of the Machine: The obsession for speed99 and rationality appears to have reached its
apotheosis in the Information Age of computer technology and systems analysis. Henry Adams' metaphor
of the machine and his principle of acceleration have been validated by the exponential growth of
electronic-based information systems, in which simple binary logic is used to process information at
nanosecond speeds. This has allowed small lap-top boxes and hand-held devices to provide sophisticated
data analysis, desktop publishing and interactive, global communications, as well as sub-instantaneous
access to databases containing the subtotal of virtually all recorded human experience (down to the genetic
level) through a pervasive nexus embracing virtually all aspects of human life and social structure.
THE ANAL MATRIX
18
The dominant role played by the mother in American family life is a fact which is almost universally
accepted among cultural anthropologists. Geoffrey Gorer, for example, describes the American family as
"matricentric" and defines the role of the father as "vestigial," a position which is derived from the rejection
of the European father as a model and source of authority.100 Margaret Mead concurs: the American father
is a "milksop," his attitude toward his children is "autumnal"; the American child has "little respect for the
past," "rejects his father as authority and exemplar, and expects his sons to reject him."101
Idealism as Feminine: According to Gorer, the role of the American mother in shaping the child's
conscience and instilling cultural values is paramount:
The idiosyncratic feature of the American conscience is that it is predominantly feminine. Owing to
the major role played by the mother in disciplining the child, in rewarding and punishing it, many
more aspects of the mother than of the father become incorporated. Duty and Right Conduct
become feminine figures. This makes the role of the daughter herself to become a mother,
particularly easy and straightforward, and helps account for the perpetuation of the situation and
the notable ease and assurance of the American woman. But for the son, the American male, the
situation is far more complicated and confusing. He carries around, as it were encapsulated inside
him, an ethical, admonitory, censorious mother. In all the spheres where moral considerations are
meant to operate -- and in America this means above all in relations between people -- men act as
though they were being guided by (or rebelling against) rules and prohibitions enunciated by a
moral mother.102
One consequence of this maternal conscience and the identification of idealism as feminine is the
deep ambivalence which most American men feel toward women, as an inevitable result of their
upbringing. Women are in childhood not only the main source of love and rewards; they are also the
main source of punishment and threats of punishment, so that with most children love and hate, reliance
and fear, become inextricably tangled.
As a result, the American male typically harbors "a deeply hidden doubt concerning his own masculinity"
and even the "panic fear of [his] own potential homosexuality," which makes "passivity an ever-present and
ever-dangerous temptation."103
Competition among Peers: More important, culturally, is the fact that "the mother's love is conditional
on the child's success in . . . competition with its peers; only if it is successful can the mother give it her
unconditional love, for it proves she has been a success in her role as mother:"104
Because the child is pushed to the very limits of its capacity, because the conditions for its success
are often so vague or so far outside his control, the child becomes insatiable for the signs of love,
reassuring it that it is worthy of love, and therefore a success.105
Gorer’s conclusions parallel those of Margaret Mead, who describes the American child as a "half orphan"
19
who must "earn his parents' love." This attitude, typically, is carried over to school, where competition for
the teacher's approval takes the form of competition for grades.106
The Machine Ideal of Functioning without Friction: In his analysis of the "American Identity," Erik
Erikson discusses the role of the "rejecting mother" in the psychogenesis of the schizoid personality and
describes the "self-made ego" as a "motherless man," a "man without roots," who is guided by a "deepseated sense of having been abandoned."107 Mead, Erikson and Gorer concur that the thrust of child training
in America is toward early independence and self-reliance. Erikson, especially, notes that "worry and haste"
in bowel training and the prematurely-imposed imperative to regulate oneself lead the child to internalize
such machine-like values as "automatic compliance," "clock-like punctuality" and "maximum efficiency"
and results in the "machine ideal of functioning without friction."108
The “Socialization Process”: As we have noted above, these interpretations are substantiated by a
number of cross-cultural studies on child training, including W. M. Whiting and Irvin Child’s Child
Training and Personality, which ranks the American middle-class relatively high in the severity of its
"socialization" process (that is, in weaning, thumb-sucking, toilet-training and independence training) even
in the era following publication of Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care in
1946.
Coercive Bowel Training: These findings are corroborated by an earlier study done exclusively with
anally-fixated children by Mabel Hushka, who notes that, since the pyramidal tract is not fully myelinated
until the eighteenth month, bowel training begun before the eighth month of age is defined as "coercive."
This is contrasted with the official policy of the U.S. Children's Bureau which, as late as 1935,
recommended that toilet training be started by the end of the third month and completed, with "absolute
regularity" and not varying by more than five minutes, by the eighth month.109 In the same way, several
other studies also provide evidence which confirms that, at least since the early nineteenth century,
Americans encouraged relatively early bowel training and habits of cleanliness and regularity.110
Insubordination in Children and Want of Respect for Age: In "The American Child as Seen by
British Travelers, 1845-1935," Richard Rapson relates that foreign visitors to this country, by and large,
detested American children, describing them as precocious, impertinent, arrogant and disrespectful. To
these visitors, American children seemed to have been indulged by parents who "let them go their own
way."111 This view is also evident in William Bridges' "Family Patterns and Social Values in American,
1825-1875," in which an English visitor is quoted as saying that the American child is "too early his own
master." Another nineteenth-century observer stated that "the authority of the parents is no restraint at all,"
for American children are "absolute masters of their fate."
James Fenimore Cooper perceived
"insubordination in children and a general want of respect for age" as endemic to American democracy, and,
to Tocqueville, individualism was a natural consequence of the lack of parental supervision and the early
20
inculcation of self-reliance.112
Permissiveness as a Badge of Successful Independence Training Although this seems to contradict
our earlier definition of American toilet training as "coercive,” the paradox can be resolved by pointing out
that permissiveness is founded on and, indeed, is a proclamation of, early independence training and the
successful internalization of such parental values as independence and self reliance, as Mead, Erikson and
Gorer have shown. To "function without friction" does not entail "breaking the child's will"; in America,
the "socialization" process requires, as a condition of its success, the continual "rejection" of the
socialization process, for the "liberal" American parent must, above all, in the words of Geoffrey Gorer,
avoid the "appearance of authority." 113
THE ORAL DIMENSION OF ANAL EROTICISM
Karl Abraham observed that "the origin of the anal character is very closely connected with the history
of oral eroticism, and cannot be completely understood without reference to it," and, indeed, "the anal
character [is] built on the ruins of an oral eroticism whose development has miscarried."114 Mabel Hushka
and Harold Orlansky have also suggested a possible physiological correlation between inadequate breastfeeding in mothers and their "pathological preoccupation with bowel function."115
It is known that, in laboratory experiments with animals, food deprivation precipitates hoarding. The
Yurok Indians of Northern California, a tribe which, in many ways, exhibits anal traits of the classic, Old
World pattern, also displays severe oral prohibitions and new-born babies are not breastfed until they are ten
days old and are weaned at the age of six months:
During meals, a strict order of placement was maintained and the child was taught to eat in
prescribed ways . . . and above all, to think of becoming rich during the whole process. There
was supposed to be silence during meals so that everybody could keep his thoughts
concentrated on money and salmon.116
Paradox of Scarcity and Abundance: The Yuroks' "morbid fear of starvation," despite the "unusual
abundance of food," seems to parallel the quintessential American paradox of the continued existence of a
scarcity psychology in a land of unprecedented material abundance.117
THE GENITAL DIMENSION OF ANAL EROTICISM
21
Freud noted the "analogy of money to sexuality,"118 and Otto Fenichel observed that money is
associated with potency and its loss with castration: "possessions are an expanded portion of the ego," an
expression of "bodily narcissism."119 To Karl Abraham, the "displacement of libido to the anal zone" results
in the
unconscious tendency to regard the anal function as the productive activity, and to make it
appear as if the genital activity were unessential and the anal one far more important. The
social behavior of these people is accordingly strongly bound up with money. They like to
make presents of money or its equivalent, and tend to become patrons of the arts or benefactors
of some kind.120
The genital nature of anal eroticism is further suggested by the fact that gold is not only a subconscious
copro-symbol but also a symbol of fertility. Max Weber demonstrated that, in contrast to Scholasticism
which stressed the sterility of money, Protestantism regarded money as creative and prolific, as is evident in
Franklin's assertion that "money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on.” The
Oedipal dimension is added to the self-as-feces when the self is interpolated between parent and posterity.
Thus, "he that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds." "121
ANAL SADISM
Among orthodox Freudians, it is widely accepted that anality and sadism share a common etiology.
Karl Abraham, for example, observed that "the sadistic impulses exhibit a special affinity precisely for anal
eroticism,"122 and Ernest Jones noted that "repressed sadism . . . commonly goes with marked anal
erotism."123
We have recognized the presence of two different pleasurable tendencies in the anal-sadistic phase;
a more primitive one of expelling the object (evacuation) and destroying it, and a later one of
retaining and controlling it.124
The bowel and bladder, then, serve as instruments of aggression, as "vehicles of hostile impulses," and,
as such, are endowed with "great and unlimited power to create or destroy every object." As we noted,
Abraham observed that:
The child's idea of the omnipotence of its wishes and thoughts can proceed from a stage in which it
ascribed an omnipotence of this kind to its excretions. Further experience has since convinced me
that this is a regular and typical process.125
22
Power Follows Property: In historical terms, the anal-sadistic component underlies the Federalist
assumption that power follows property, and is evident in a wide range of American cultural values and
historical evidence, including the stake-in-society theory, preemption rights, and William Jennings Bryan's
Cross of Gold speech; it is expressed in Franklin's fear that debt "exposes"126 one to confinement; in
Emerson's "things are in the saddle / and ride mankind";127 in Thoreau's "we do not ride on the railroad; it
rides upon us";128 in Henry Adams's "all one's friends . . . had joined the banks to force submission to
capitalism, a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass"129 and, more recently, in Richard Nixon's
"It is time to get big government off your back and out of your pocket."
Stewardship and Paternalism: The impulse for domination and control is also evident in the concepts
of stewardship and paternalism:
The surrender of excrement is the earliest form in which the child "gives" or "presents" a thing; and
the neurotic often shows the self-will we have described in the matter of giving. Accordingly in
many cases he will refuse a demand or request made to him, but will of his own free choice make a
person a handsome present. The important thing to him is to preserve his right of decision. We
frequently find in our psycho-analyses that a husband opposes any expenditure proposed by his
wife, while he afterwards hands her of his "own free will" more than what she first asked for. These
men delight in keeping their wives permanently dependent on them financially. Assigning money in
portions which they themselves determine is a source of pleasure for them.130
Private Charity and Public Welfare: Related to Obstinacy, or Self-Willedness, this contradictory
attitude is both illustrated and explained by the extraordinary generosity and liberality with which
Americans have contributed to private charity (since the act is individual and voluntary and confers
power as well as prestige to the conferrer) as contrasted with the extreme resistance and illiberality
with which many Americans have regarded matters of taxation, public assistance and social welfare
(since the transfer is collective and involuntary).
The Mastery of Nature: Anal-sadism has played a significant role in American agriculture and
resource development, which have been characterized as extensive, extractive ("mine the soil"131) and
exploitative (the “exploitation of virgin soil" and “drill, baby, drill”132). Henry Nash Smith, Richard
Hofstadter and others have pointed out that the Edenic myth and the yeoman ideal concealed another,
darker side of American agriculture's "dual identity,"133 in which the American farmer was, preeminently,
an agrarian capitalist. Although the machine-in-the-garden was a common, albeit deeply ambivalent,
theme in nineteenth-century American literature, as Leo Marx has shown,134 industrialism was generally
welcomed by Americans as permitting not only economic self-sufficiency and independence, but also the
mastery and conquest of the natural environment.
23
THE OEDIPAL TRIANGLE IN AMERICA
If our extrapolations from the works of Mead, Gorer and Erikson and Bonaparte, Deutsch, Klein and
Roheim are correct, the Oedipal triangle in American culture appears to have been inverted: the Father is
slain, in absentia, by the Mother, who, in turn, is mastered, possessed, and conquered by the Son.135
According to Henry Adams:
The American woman at her best -- like most other women -- exerted great charm on the man, but
not the charm of a primitive type. She appeared as a result of a long series of discards, and her
chief interest lay in what she had discarded. When closely watched, she seemed [to be] making a
violent effort to follow the man, who had turned his mind and hand to mechanics. The typical
American male had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on
keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty, or a
hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he
could admit whiskey or drugs, without breaking his neck. He could not run his machine and a
woman too; he must leave her, even though his wife, to find her own way, and all the world saw her
trying to find her way by imitating him. . . . She must, like the man, marry machinery.
The Democracy of Cupidity: As Louis Hartz has shown, America was "born free" in the sense that the
absence of a strong, overtly-authoritarian father on the European scale precluded the development of a
feudal tradition and, thus, conventional "class conflict."136 However, the inverted triangle throws into
relief the horizontal nature of social conflict in America and the fratricidal nature of the competition for
the mother's love and approval, which, as we have seen, is finite and conditional on the child's
"achievement" and "success" in competition with his peers.
In historiographical terms, the "democracy of fraternity" is supplanted by the "democracy of
cupidity,"137 and, if the Industrial Revolution was a child of the "cruel necessity" of the Puritan
Revolution, which the American Revolution served to "formalize, systematize, and symbolize,"138 the
American Civil War represents, in blood, the liberation and sanctification of these Oedipal forces of
fratricidal struggle. In this sense, the California Gold Rush is emblematic of the latent destiny of
American history, which is oriented toward the death-goal of the mastery, possession and re-union with
the mother.
Conspiracy, Paranoia and Anal Eroticism: Finally, it should be noted that anal eroticism plays a
significant role in the psychogenesis of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, which may represent a
defense mechanism erected against repressed fears of passive, homosexual submission.
139
In paranoia the "persecutor" can be traced back to the patient's unconscious image of the faeces in his
intestines which he identifies with the penis of the "persecutor," i.e., the person of his own sex whom he
originally loved. Thus, in paranoia the patient represents his persecutor by a part of his body, and
24
believes that he is carrying it within himself. He would like to get rid of that foreign body but cannot.140
CONCLUSION
As we have seen, America has been described as "a culture of contradictions," and we have attempted
here to resolve a series of those contradictions by reducing them to the primal contradiction of the
premature destruction of the "symbiosis" with the maternal matrix. Anal training contradicts the child's
"natural Oedipal harmony with [its] mother";141 it is the child's "first repression," its first "glimpse of an
environment hostile to [its] instinctual impulses," and, as a result, "`anal' remains the symbol of everything
that is to be repudiated and excluded from life."142
1
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
Norman Holmes Pearson, "The American Writer and the Feeling for Community," American Studies
Inaugural Lecture, University of Alabama, March 20, 1962.
3
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-1966), VII, 186.
4
Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), 278.
5
Freud, Works, VII, 186.
6
Freud, Works, XVII, 130.
7
Lou Andreas-Salomé, "'Anal' and 'Sexual'," Imago, VI (1916 ), 249-73. Sandor Ferenczi, "The
Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money" (1914), in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (Boston: R. J. Badger,
1916), chap. xiii. Karl Abraham, "Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character" (1921), in Selected
Papers of Karl Abraham (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 370-92. Ernest Jones, "Anal-Erotic Character
Traits" (1918), in Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1913), 680-704.
Fenichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, VII (1938), 69-95.
8
See, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
9
Lawrence K. Frank, "Cultural Coercion and Individual Distortion," Psychiatry, II (February, 1939), 22.
The etiological significance of anal training is further suggested by the fact that, as Freud reminds us,
"painful stimuli to the skin of the buttocks . . . are an instrument in the education of the child designed to
break his self-will and make him submissive.” “Character and Anal Eroticism" (1908), in Works, IV, 171.
10
Fenichel, Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, 279.
11
Margaret Mead, And Keep You Powder Dry (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1943), Erik Erikson,
Childhood and Society (second edition; New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), Geoffrey Gorer, The American
People: A Study in National Character (revised edition; New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1964), J. W.
M. Whiting and Irvin Child, Child Training and Personality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964),
and Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children (New York:
Vintage Books, 2004).
12
Geza Roheim, "The Evolution of Culture," International Journal of Pyscho-Analysis, XV (October,
1934), 387-418. "The Study of Character Development and the Ontological Theory of Culture," in E. E.
Evans-Pritchard, et al. (eds.), Essays Presented to C. G. Seligman (London, 1934), 283.
13
Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2
25
1956), 3.
14
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in The Frontier in
American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920), 30.
15
Edmund S. Morgan, "The Puritan Ethic and the Coming of the American Revolution," The William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., XXIV (January, 1967), 13.
16
Litigious paranoia (paranoia querulans) was identified as a personality disorder at the end of the
nineteenth century and may be etymologically linked to James Bryce’s “vexatious litigation” (The
American Commonwealth, New York: Macmillan, 1893, 628). See also Karl Abraham’s letter to Freud,
dated May 19, 1908.
17
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1967), 95.
18
The Works of John Adams . . . , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1850-56), III, 464, as quoted in
Bailyn, Origins of the American Revolution, 98.
19
A Summary View (1774), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (18 vols.; Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1950-71), I, 125.
20
July 31, 1775, Papers, I, 232.
21
Quoted in Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 117, 130, 113, 103.
22
Jones, Papers, 689.
23
Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937).
24
Gorer, The American People, 158.
25
Karl Abraham, "Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character," Selected Papers (London: Hogarth
Press, 1927), 373.
26
Jones, 684-89.
27
Abraham, 376.
28
Mabel Hushka, "The Child's Response to Coercive Bowel Training," Psychosomatic Medicine IV
(January, 1942), 305.
29
Abraham, Selected Papers, 375-76.
30
Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1957), 28.
31
Abraham, 380, 373-75.
32
Freud, Works, XVIII, 127-30. This ambivalent mixture of pride and shame, narcissism and self doubt
can also be traced to the acculturation process itself:
Children are proud, as it were, of their own excretions and make use of them to help in asserting
themselves against adults. Under the influence of education the coprophilic instinct and
inclinations of children give way to repression; they learn to keep them secret, to be ashamed of
them and to feel disgust at the objects themselves. Strictly speaking, the disgust never goes so far as
to apply to a child's own excretions, but is content with repudiating them when they are the
products of other people.
"The Excretory Functions in Psychoanalysis and Folklore" (1913), which served as the preface to the
German translation of John Bourke's Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (Washington, 1891).
33
Diary of Cotton Mather, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (2 vols.: New York: Frederick Unger
Publishing Co., n.d.) I, 357.
34
Autobiography, 10, 107.
35
The Heart of Emerson's Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1926), 55, 151.
36
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (20 vols.; Riverside Edition;
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1906), 82.
37
The Education of Henry Adams (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), 70, 279-87,
139, 267.
38
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, trans. Henry Reeve, re-trans.
26
Frances Bowen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), Vol. II, 82.
39
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Perennial
Classics, 2000), 256.
40
See, for example, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979).
41
Autobiography, 113.
42
Citing the right of self-determination as justification for American military intervention is, of course,
a fundamental contradiction which has characterized American foreign policy since its beginning.
43
L. K. Frank, Psychiatry, II, 22.
44
Abraham, 385.
45
Otto Fenichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth, The Pyscho-Analytic Quarterly, VII (January, 1938), 79.
46
Jones, 697.
47
Freud, Works, XVII, 127-30.
48
Fenichel, Ibid., 281.
49
Sandor Ferenczi, "The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money," in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis
(Boston: R. J. Badger, 1916).
50
Abraham, Selected Papers, 383-87. Ernest Jones, "Anal-Erotic Character Traits (1918), in Papers on
Psycho-Analysis, 692-97.
51
Abraham, 371.
52
Harriet Martineau, Society in America, ed. Seymour Lipset (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), 168.
53
Jones, Papers, 701. Max Weber, of course, was the first to link capitalism to Protestant psychology,
although he failed to identify the underlying mechanism which links the acquisitive mentality to the
"rationalization" process of industrialism. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).
54
The Marble Faun, in Works, VI, 276.
55
Adams, Education, 490, 221, 231, 399, 231.
56
Jones, 694.
57
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University,
1956), 172-73.
58
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (2 vols.;
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), II, 158.
59
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958),
165-67.
60
Abraham, 388.
61
Franklin, Autobiography, 104.
62
Ibid., 19, 117.
63
Quoted in Boorstin, 281.
64
Boorstin, Colonial Experience, 280.
65
Henry Adams, Education, 328. The classic Old World anal traits of frugality and orderliness/cleanliness
were rooted in a material culture of scarcity and constraint, whereas the permutations which we have been
discussing here may be cultural adaptations to the relative novelty and abundance of the New World.
66
Geoffrey Gorer, The American People, 175-76.
67
See David Potter’s People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1954).
68
Abraham, 380-87.
69
Jones, 683-84.
70
Ibid., 683.
71
Ibid., 683-86..
72
Benjamin Wood, The Successful Man of Business, 1889, 59, as quoted in Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire, 98.
73
Quoted in Irvin Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick,
27
New Jersey: Rutgers Press, 1954), 36. Andrew Carnegie, quoted in Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire, 98.
74
Thomas Hooker, Saintes Dignitie, 4-5, quoted in Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 83.
75
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1902). The moral purification impulse, of course, is a fundamental, motivational
factor underlying nearly all religions.
76
Walden, Writings, II, 98-100.
77
Ironically, both rotation-in-office and civil service reform flowed from the same impulse to purge -- of
tenured office-holders in the first instance and "spoils" in the second.
78
Turner, "Significance of the Frontier in American History," The Frontier in American History, 37, 32.
79
Jones, 702.
80
See Perry Miller’s “End of the World” in Errand into the Wilderness.
81
Abraham, Selected Papers, 373.
82
Franklin, Autobiography, 101.
83
Abraham, 374.
84
Abraham, 377. Jones, Papers, 699.
85
Miller, Errand, 48.
86
Oscar Handlin, "The Significance of the Seventeenth Century," in James Morton Smith (ed.),
Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1959). Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: the Colonial Experience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958).
Sigmund Diamond (ed.), The Creation of Society in the New World ("The Berkeley Series in American
History," Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1963).
87
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America. See also Herbert Moller, "Sex Composition and
Correlated Culture Patterns of Colonial America," The William and Mary Quarterly, II (1945), 113-53.
88
Miller, Errand, 66-67.
89
Henry Wood, Natural Law in the Business World, Boston, 1887, as quoted in Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire
and the General Welfare State, 98.
90
Jones, Papers, 698-99; Gorer, The American People; Boorstin, The Colonial Experience, 281.
91
Gorer, Boorstin, 281.
92
Lester Ward, Glimpses of the Cosmos (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913-18), III, 45-47, as quoted
in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (revised edition; Boston: Beacon Press,
1955), 74.
93
Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961).
94
Albert Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935).
95
Abraham, Selected Papers, 388.
96
The Puritans' obsession with "improving the time" and "numbering the days" is discussed in detail by
David Hackett Fischer in his classic Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 160.
97
Daniel Bell, "Work and Its Discontents: The Cult of Efficiency in America," in The End of Ideology: On
the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (revised edition; New York: The Free Press, 1962), 232.
Recent scholarship suggests that Taylor’s stopwatch, his precisionism and the existence of “Schmidt” may
have been a myth; see Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth: Why Experts Keep Getting It Wrong
(New York: Norton, 2009).
98
Or any Wal-Mart store. With its inexorable logic of ruthless efficiency and ever lower costs, WalMart’s corporate culture represents American capitalism in extremis, the historic culmination and iconic
expression of a long cultural tradition. This tradition is manifested in Wal-Mart’s extreme frugality and
cost obsessiveness, its application of cutting-edge technology to the rationalization of every aspect of the
production, distribution and marketing process, its obstinate resistance to governmental regulation,
taxation and unionization, and its familial philanthropy and paternalism. F.W. Taylor’s “oppressive
dreams,” it seems, have been transferred from the foundry floor to the humble hamburger flipper to the
28
mom-and-pop drug store on Main Street to the assembly line worker in the most distant global sweatshop.
See Nelson Lichentstein’s The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
99
See James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999),
particularly his “paradox of efficiency,” the web of time and motion and the “bleeding-edge time sink.”
100
Geoffrey Gorer, The American People, 54, 27. See also John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making:
Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1996) and Louis
Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America.
101
Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry, chap. iii. As we have discussed elsewhere, the relative
abundance of land, the absence of feudalism and the novelty and fluidity of the natural and social
environments may have contributed to the partial displacement and relative decline in authority and status of
the New World father compared to that of the Old World, a process which begins anew for each first
generation American family.
102
Gorer, 56.
103
Ibid., 126.
104
Ibid., 84.
105
Ibid., 107.
106
Mead, 88-98. Kenneth Keniston has identified the "intense [maternal] pressures for academic
achievement" as one factor common to the childhoods of middle-class radicals of the New Left in the
1960's. (Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968, 54.)
107
Erik Erikson, 285-325.
108
Ibid.
109
Mabel Hushka, 301-08.
110
Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice about Children (New York:
Random House, 2003). Robert Sunley, "Early Nineteenth-Century American Literature on Child Rearing,"
in Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein (eds.), Childhood in Contemporary Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1955), 150-67. Celia Stendler, "Sixty Years of Child Training Practices," The
Journal of Pediatrics, 36 (January, 1950), 122-34. Daniel R. Miller and Guy E. Swanson, The Changing
American Parent: A Study in the Detroit Area (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958).
111
Richard Rapson, "The American Child as Seen by British Travelers, 1845-1935," American Quarterly
XVII (Fall, 1965), 520-34.
112
William Bridges, "Family Patterns and Social Values in America, 1825-1875," American Quarterly,
XVII (Spring 1965), 3-11.
113
This paradox also suggests what may be the critical difference between "shame" and "guilt" cultures.
See, for example, David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1950).
114
Karl Abraham, "The Influence of Oral Erotism on Character-Formation" (1924), in Selected Papers,
395.
115
Hushka; Harold Orlansky, "Infant Care and Personality," Psychological Bulletin, 46 (January, 1949).
116
Erikson, 177.
117
S. H. Posinsky, "The Problem of Yurok Anality," American Imago XIV (Spring, 1957), 3. In the
cultural context we have been discussing, scarcity and hoarding are also driven by economic and class
dynamics and may follow, generationally, the ebb and flow of economic cycles. See also David Potter’s
People of Plenty.
118
Freud to James J. Putnam, December 5, 1909, in Nathan G. Hale, Jr. (ed.), James Jackson Putnam and
Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 90.
119
Otto Fenichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, VII, 80.
120
Abraham, Selected Papers, 379-80.
121
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 49.
122
Abraham, "A Short Study of the Development of the Libido," Selected Papers, 425.
29
123
Jones, 698.
Abraham, Ibid., 481.
125
Abraham, Selected Papers, 375.
126
Franklin, Autobiography, 116.
127
Emerson, "Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing," Complete Works.
128
Thoreau, Walden, Writings, II, 102.
129
Adams, Education, 344.
130
Abraham, Selected Papers, 377.
131
Schlesinger, American Historical Review, XLVIII (January, 1943), 235.
132
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in The Frontier in American History,
18. Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, of course, represents the last American frontier of Alaska.
133
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1950). Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf and Random House, 1955), 59.
134
Lee Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1964), 205.
135
Education, 445-47. The feminist revolutions of the twentieth century, the large-scale integration of
middle-class women into the workplace on a permanent basis and the model of the single-parent household
have radically redefined the gender roles and the division of labor in American society and have, at once,
both radically altered and radically reinforced Adams' insight, which was written in 1907.
136
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America. Herbert Moller, "Sex Composition and Correlated
Culture Patterns of Colonial America," The William and Mary Quarterly, II (1945), 113-53.
137
Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1948), viii.
138
Bernard Bailyn, "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,"
American Historical Review, XLVII (January, 1962), 339-51.
139
Sandor Ferenczi, "On the Part Played by Homosexuality in the Pathogenesis of Paranoia," in
Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (Boston, R. J. Badger, 1916). .
140
Abraham, "Origins and Growth of Object-Love," in Selected Papers, 489.
141
Jones, Papers, 553-61.
142
Lou Andreas-Salome', Imago, IV 249-73.
124