Situating the anal Freud in nineteenth-century imaginaries of excrement and colonial primitivity

Other chapters in this volume have shown that ideas about the gut flourished in multiple genres across continental Europe, Britain and the USA in the nineteenth century. But no thinker developed as much meaning in relation to the lower gut as the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. The anal/excrement Freud can only be historically appreciated both by excavating his uptake of biological and ethnographic thought and by resituating him in the broad continental European fin-de-siecle milieu in which excrement had become the subject of an emergent field of new meanings. This was a field in which ideas about social progress, colonial power and class propriety were seen as given by a particular relationship of modern subjects to the lower gut. In this chapter, Freud's anal ideas are considered both in relation to ethnographic and biological texts that directly influenced his thought and in relation to cultural discourses and social pressures likely to have been at least partially responsible for his unusual theories of the role of the anus and excrement in both social evolution and individual psychic development.