BY
WILLIAM W. TILDEN
BERKELEY
PLAINE STYLE PRESS
REVISED 2010
Plaine Style Press
P.O. Box 7418
Berkeley CA 94707
Revised 2010
ISBN 0-9644146-1-9
Adams gave up the attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting
at the end -- himself.
OPENINGS
Introduction 9
EVIDENCES
I. RESISTANCE 16
Laissez Faire Individualism
Self Reliance
Narcissism, Achievement, Conformity and Alienation
Isolationism and Internationalism
II. RETENTION 33
Retentive Epistemology
III. RATIONALIZATION 65
Precisianism
Reason versus Nature
The Metaphor of the Machine
The Obsession with Speed, the Cult of Efficiency and the
Movement for Scientific Management
USES
1
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.
2
Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1945), 278.
3
Freud, "On the Transformation of Instincts with Special Reference to
Anal Eroticism" (1917), in Works, XVII, 130.
4
Freud, Works, VII, 186.
9
10 CROWN'S CHILDREN
5
Freud, Works, XVII, 130.
6
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.
INTRODUCTION 9
Although his earlier works reflect a strong bias in favor of biological (or
"dispositional") forces, Freud, especially in his later writings, 7
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:
7
See, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).
8
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.
12 CROWN'S CHILDREN
him." 9 By producing (or not producing) his bodily contents on demand, the
child expresses, not his active compliance, but his subconscious hostility to
his environment.
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." 11
9
Fenichel, Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, 279.
10
Freud, Works, XVII, 127-30.
11
Fenichel, Ibid., 281.
INTRODUCTION 9
marbles, coins, jewelry and money. 12 Karl Abraham and Ernest Jones
extend this copro-symbology to include books, words, stamps, statistics,
time and, even, last wills and testaments. 13
12
Sandor Ferenczi, "The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money," in
Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (Boston: R. J. Badger, 1916).
13
Abraham, Selected Papers, 383-87. Ernest Jones, "Anal-Erotic
Character Traits (1918), in Papers on Psycho-Analysis, 692-97.
14
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.
money, and its off spring can beget more, and so on . . . He that murders a
crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds."
14 CROWN'S CHILDREN
16
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 166.
EVIDENCES
I. RESISTANCE
17
Ernest Jones, "Anal-Erotic Character Traits," Papers on Psycho-
Analysis (London: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1923), 686-87.
16
RESISTANCE 17
LAISSEZ-FAIRE INDIVIDUALISM
18
Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1956), 3.
19
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1893). Quoted in Fine, ibid.
20
The Virginia Bill of Rights.
18 CROWN'S CHILDREN
21
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
22
Edmund S. Morgan, "The Puritan Ethic and the Coming of the
American Revolution," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., XXIV
(January, 1967), 13. To Sam Adams, for example, "the industrious man is
intitled to the fruits of his industry" (Boston Gazette, December 19, 1768).
RESISTANCE 19
23
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 95. Litigious paranoia
(paranoia querulans) was identified as a mental disorder at the end of the
nineteenth century and may be etymologically linked to James Bryce‟s
20 CROWN'S CHILDREN
24
The Works of John Adams . . . , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston,
1850-56), III, 464, as quoted in Bailyn, Origins of the American Revolution,
98.
25
A Summary View (1774), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian
Boyd (18 vols.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-71), I, 125.
26
July 31, 1775, Papers, I, 232.
RESISTANCE 21
SELF-RELIANCE
27
Quoted in Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 117,
130, 113, 103.
28
The subtext of paranoia in American culture and the explicit
relationship between “Conspiracy, Paranoia and Anal Eroticism” is
discussed in more detail in that section of this book.
22 CROWN'S CHILDREN
29
See “Independence Training” in chapter 4.
30
Notes on the State of Virginia, in The Life and Selected Writings of
Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York:
Random House, 1944), 280. Ironically, the same arguments for economic
self-sufficiency and independence from foreign control were cited by
proponents of the American System to justify federal support for
manufacturing, banking and “internal improvements.”
31
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Max Farrand (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949).
RESISTANCE 23
32
Albert F. McLean, "Thoreau' s True Meridian: Natural Fact and
Metaphor," American Quarterly, XX (Fall, 1968), 567-79.
33
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in The Writings of Henry David
Thoreau (20 vols.; Riverside Edition; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co.,
1906), II, 353-54.
24 CROWN'S CHILDREN
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:
34
Karl Abraham, "Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character,"
Selected Papers (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 373.
35
Jones, 684-89.
36
Abraham, 376.
RESISTANCE 25
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." 38
37
Mabel Hushka, "The Child' s Response to Coercive Bowel
Training," Psychosomatic Medicine IV (January, 1942), 305.
38
Abraham, Selected Papers, 375-76.
39
Which can veer into exceptionalism, antinomianism and solipsism.
26 CROWN'S CHILDREN
40
Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 28.
41
Abraham, 380, 373-75.
42
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:
43
Diary of Cotton Mather, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (2 vols.:
New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., n.d.) I, 357.
28 CROWN'S CHILDREN
44
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, in The Complete Works
of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George Parsons Lathrop (13 vols.; Riverside
Edition; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1889-1897), V, 595.
45
Autobiography, 10, 107.
46
The Heart of Emerson' s Journals, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926), 55, 151.
47
Thoreau, Walden, 82.
RESISTANCE 29
himself to be worthless and not current." "He was for sale. He wanted to
be bought. His price was excessively cheap." 48
48
The Education of Henry Adams (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1918), 70, 279-87, 139, 267.
49
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley,
trans. Henry Reeve, re-trans. Frances Bowen (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1945), Vol. II, 82.
50
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George
Lawrence (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 256. The full quotation is
worth noting:
In the proudest nations of the Old World works were published which
faithfully portrayed the vices and absurdities of contemporaries. . . But
the power which dominates in the United States does not understand
being mocked like that. The least reproach offends it, and the slightest
sting of truth turns it fierce; and one must praise everything, from the
turn of its phrases to its most robust virtues. No writer, no matter how
30 CROWN'S CHILDREN
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 more
than counterbalanced by the underlying cultural narcissism. 51 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:
famous, can escape from this obligation to sprinkle incense over his
fellow citizens. Hence the majority lives in a state of perpetual self-
adoration; only strangers or experience may be able to bring certain
truths to the Americans’ attention.
52
Autobiography, 113.
53
Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New
York: Random House, 1968), 92.
RESISTANCE 31
production has, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, reached the cul de sac of
"production for waste." 54
54
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 32.
55
Citing the right of self-determination as justification for American
military intervention is, of course, a contradiction which has characterized
American foreign policy since its beginning.
32 CROWN'S CHILDREN
56
Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American
Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 4-6.
II. RETENTION
57
Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Works, VII,
186.
58
L. K. Frank, Psychiatry, II, 22.
59
Abraham, 385.
33
34 CROWN'S CHILDREN
60
Otto Fenichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth, The Pyscho-Analytic
Quarterly, VII (January, 1938), 79.
61
Jones, 697.
62
Abraham, 371.
63
Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of
American Finance, 1865-1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964).
RESISTANCE 35
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. 64
The relationship between anal retention, capital accumulation and the
rise of industrialism is equally self-evident:
64
Harriet Martineau, Society in America, ed. Seymour Lipset (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1962), 168.
65
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).
66
The Marble Faun, in Works, VI, 276. In his Notebooks, Hawthorne
writes:
36 CROWN'S CHILDREN
RETENTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY
67
Adams, Education, 490, 221, 231, 399, 231.
RESISTANCE 37
The idea of solidity we receive by our touch: and it arises from the
resistance which we find in body to the entrance of any other body
into the place it possesses, till it has left it. There is no idea which
we receive more constantly from sensation than solidity. Whether
we move or rest, in what posture soever we are, we always feel
something under us that supports us, and hinders our further
sinking downwards. . . . This, of all other, seems the idea most
intimately connected with, and essential to body; so as nowhere
else to be found or imagined, but only in matter. And though our
senses take no notice of it, but in masses of matter, of a bulk
sufficient to cause a sensation in us: yet the mind, having once t this
idea from such grosser sensible bodies, traces it further, and
considers it, as well as figure, in the minutest particle of matter that
68
Abraham, 390.
69
Jones, 694.
70
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University, 1956), 172-73.
71
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed.
Alexander Campbell Fraser (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), II,
158.
38 CROWN'S CHILDREN
Louis Hartz and Lionel Trilling, one honorifically and the other
pejoratively, have identified the Lockean bias of American culture, in which
reality is perceived as "fixed and given": "There exists . . . a thing called
reality; it is one and immutable, it is wholly external, it is irreducible." 73
To Trilling, Vernon Louis Parrington' s Main Currents in American
Thought (and, to a lesser extent, Charles Beard' s The Rise of American
Civilization) are, especially, representative of this epistemology:
72
Ibid., I, 151-52.
73
A radically different epistemology is offered by Jonathan Edwards.
Although Edwards relates that he had read Locke' s Essay with more
enjoyment "than the most greedy miser finds, when gathering up handfuls of
silver and gold, from some newly discovered treasure," his theory of
knowledge, as outlined in his "Notes on the Mind," which were written in
1720, is described by Perry Miller:
74
Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal
Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1950), 4-5, 10.
75
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 165-67.
40 CROWN'S CHILDREN
77
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England
(New York: New York University Press, 1956), George Littlefield, Early
Boston Booksellers, 1642-1711 (Boston: The Club of Odd Volumes, 1900).
Thomas G. Wright, Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620-1730
(New York: Yale University Press, 1920).
78
Mather, Diary, I, 368.
RESISTANCE 41
79
Morison, Intellectual Life, 113-14.
80
Quoted in Boorstin, 281.
81
Boorstin, Colonial Experience, 280.
82
Abraham, 388.
42 CROWN'S CHILDREN
83
Franklin, Autobiography, 104.
84
Ibid., 19, 117.
85
Ibid., 112, 109, 110. Franklin‟s charming de-conflation of
“appearance” and “reality” illustrates the complex and ambiguous
relationship between these two concepts in American culture. As we shall
see in discussing Order, Franklin‟s assertion that "contrary habits must be
broken, and good ones acquired and established before we can have any
dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct” (Autobiography, 101)
is directly contradicted by his confession that, with respect to Order:
I had not been early accustomed to it, and, having an exceedingly good
memory, I was not so sensible of the inconvenience attending want of
method. This article, therefore, cost me so much painful attention, and
my faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in
RESISTANCE 43
amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to
give up the attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in that
respect. . . . In truth, I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order;
and now I am grown old, and my memory bad, I feel very sensibly the
want of it.
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 Lockean bias of American culture (in which “there exists . . . . a thing
called reality; it is one and immutable, it is wholly external”) and “the
chronic American belief that there exists an opposition between reality and
mind and that one must enlist oneself in the party of reality” may be derived
from this ontogenetic passage from pride to disgust and repression.
Franklin, in effect, reverses this cultural polarity, partially lifting the veil of
repression, recapturing the original feeling of pride and shifting the locus of
reality back to the internal, mental world, which, at their most profound
level, puts him on the same plane as Edwards and Emerson.
(Not incidentally, A. Bronson Feldman has categorized Franklin' s
experiments with electricity and certain other character traits as derived
from an apparently unrepressed flatus complex. "Ben Franklin -- Thunder
Master," Psychoanalysis, V, Summer, 1957, 33-54.)
One of the overriding ironies of American history, of course, was that
Franklin' s public persona was taken literally, the "substance" of his success
was objectified a posteriori. This ignis fatuus of middle-class
"respectability" was to be the motivating force behind a never ending series
of "status anxieties." What Tocqueville described as the "tyranny of
44 CROWN'S CHILDREN
86
Melville, Moby Dick (New York: Hendricks House, 1952), 432.
87
Jessie Bier, "Weberism, Franklin, and the Transcendental Style," New
England Quarterly, XLIII, No. 2 (June, 1970), 179-82.
RESISTANCE 45
bottom of the mine. Their fault is that the gold does not flow pure, but is
drossy and crude." 88 In Emerson' s self-conscious effort to demonstrate the
divinity of the commonplace, to transmute the sordid into the sublime,
anality is etherealized, is displaced upwards: "In the folly of man glitters the
wisdom of God"; "What is there of the divine in a load of bricks? . . .
Much. All." 89
Emerson calls his Journals a "Blotting-Book" and describes them
variously as "the catalogue of my defects"; "this Book is my Savings Bank.
I grow richer because I have somewhere to deposit my earnings." 90 Stephen
Whicher has delineated the cyclical nature of Emerson' s recurrent despair
and sense of powerlessness, 91 and, in his Journals, this dysphoria is often
accompanied by "a goading sense of emptiness and wasted capacity": "I
have for a fortnight past writ nothing. My bosom' s lord sits somewhat
drowsily on his throne." 92
89
Ibid., 192, 85.
90
Ibid., 1, 64, 82.
91
Stephen Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo
Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953).
92
Heart of Emerson' s Journals, 10, 34. We will explore the cultural
manifestations of this common physical malady in “Procrastination,
Concentration and Feverish Activity.”
93
Ibid., 41.
46 CROWN'S CHILDREN
At age 36, Emerson concludes that he has "not once transcended the
coldest self-possession"; yet, with almost exponential self-awareness ("I
have inverted my inquiries two or three times on myself"), 94 he, too, is able
to transcend his own categorical imperatives and attain a measure of "re-
integration":
94
Ibid., 28.
95
Ibid., 148-49.
RESISTANCE 47
he achieved. 96
96
Bier, 188.
97
Thoreau, Walden, Writings, II, 101, 178.
98
Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience," in Writings, IV.
99
McLean, The American Quarterly, XX, No. 3, 567.
48 CROWN'S CHILDREN
100
Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginning of Naturalism in American Fiction:
1889-1903 (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1961), 167, 182-84.
Charles C. Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism. A Divided Stream
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 33.
101
Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, as quoted in
Ahnebrink, 210.
RESISTANCE 49
102
Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol.
III: The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1930), 406.
103
Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (New York:
Harcourt, 1939). C. C. Regier, Era of the Muckrakers (Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1957).
104
Samuel P. Mays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The
Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1959), 132.
50 CROWN'S CHILDREN
Among its many other contributions and innovations, the New Deal has
been described as a Statistical Revolution, and the enormously expanded
data-gathering functions of the federal government flowed from its increased
role and responsibility for directing the national economy and providing for
the general welfare. 106 Today, for example, the United States government
105
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal,
1932-1940 ("The New American Nation Series," ed. Henry Steel
Commager and Richard B. Morris; New York: Harper and Row, 1963),
127.
106
See, for example, the Federal Reports Act of 1942. Not
unexpectedly, right-wing opponents of the welfare state have also employed
the retentive mode. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard
Hofstadter describes their technique:
Printing Office is one of the largest printing houses in the world. A survey
made by the Hoover Commission in the mid 1950s found that the federal
government annually generated:
107
One Hundred GPO Years. 1861-1961: A History of United States
Public Printing, under the direction of James L. Harrison (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 151-52. The Hoover
Commission of 1953-1955 was succeeded by the Paperwork Reduction Act
of 1980, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government of 1993, the
Government Performance Results Act of 1997 and the Government
Paperwork Elimination Act of 1998, which would require federal agencies
to adopt paper-less, web-based information systems.
52 CROWN'S CHILDREN
Geoffrey Gorer has observed that "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." 109
In part, the contradiction can be resolved by stressing the role of "social
conditions in the channeling of libidinous forces." 110 Thus, although "anal
eroticism produces the desire to collect something, . . . what is collected is
determined by [social] reality." 111 As we have seen, Cotton Mather
108
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 may be cultural adaptations to the relative novelty and abundance
of the New World. In this regard, see David Potter‟s People of Plenty:
Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1954).
109
Geoffrey Gorer, The American People: A Study in National Character
(revised edition; New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1964), 175-76.
110
Harold Orlansky, "Infant Care and Personality," Psychological
Bulletin, Vol. 46, No. 1 (January, 1949).
111
Otto Fenichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth," Psychoanalytic
RESISTANCE 53
presented an extreme example of the quid pro quo mentality, giving, in the
interest of "pure Religion," four books and receiving forty. His brother
Samuel, however, in describing Cotton' s son, mentions that, "he is infected
with the disease which is the blemish of the Family viz. to spend
inconsiderately and take no thought about providing against future
unavoidable occasions." 112
Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, the "Apostle of Americanism" 113 and a
"pioneer in collecting and preserving early American manuscripts and
printed laws," 114 was reduced to bankruptcy as a result of his generosity and
hospitality. One might also cite Franklin' s early retirement and his life-long
devotion to projects for public improvement. In fact, other than providing
for one' s children (the "Uses of Posterity" 115), the rationalizing force behind
the acquisitive impulse, "motivating such tremendous sacrifices," was the
"utilitarian doctrine of good works" 116 and the concept of stewardship.
According to Weber:
112
Samuel Mather to Cotton Mather, July 23, 1715, Diary, II, 323.
113
Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1929).
114
Adrienne Koch and William Peden (eds.), The Life and Selected
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 288.
115
Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century
Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932).
116
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 126.
54 CROWN'S CHILDREN
117
Ibid., 170.
118
Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North American Review, Vol. 148 (June,
1889), 661-62.
120
Abraham, 381.
121
Freud, Three Essays, Works, VII, 186.
122
In 1869, Henry Villard observed that:
After the Civil War certain leaders in the American Social Science
Association agreed that philanthropy implies the impulse to relieve a
situation, in contrast with social science, which presumably
endeavors to prevent poverty and other social problems by probing
behind effect to cause. (As quoted in Merle Curti, "American
Philanthropy and the National Character," American Quarterly, X,
No. 4, Winter, 1948, 421.)
56 CROWN'S CHILDREN
123
Abraham, 380-87.
124
Jones, 683-84.
125
Ibid., 683.
RESISTANCE 57
126
Ibid., 683-86.
127
Benjamin Wood, The Successful Man of Business, 1889, 59, as quoted
in Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire, 98.
128
Quoted in Irvin Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of
Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers Press, 1954), 36.
Andrew Carnegie, quoted in Sidney Fine, Laissez-Faire, 98.
58 CROWN'S CHILDREN
129
Perry Miller, Errand, 79
130
Thomas Hooker, Saintes Dignitie, 4-5, quoted in Miller, Errand into
the Wilderness, 83.
131
R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and
Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1955), 58.
RESISTANCE 59
132
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.
133
Walden, Writings, II, 98-100.
134
To Tocqueville:
135
Thomas Coombe, A Sermon, Philadelphia, 1775, 11-12. Quoted in
Perry Miller, "The Moral and Psychological Roots of American
Resistance," in Jack P. Greene (ed.), The Reinterpretation of the American
Revolution, 1763-1789 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 257.
136
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.
RESISTANCE 61
137
Turner, "Significance of the Frontier in American History," The
Frontier in American History, 37, 32.
138
Compare Ernest Jones' s observation that
with Henry Steele Commager and Richard Brandon Morris' s comment that
the New Deal was . . . not a new game with new rules, but a
62 CROWN'S CHILDREN
reshuffle of cards that had too long been stacked against the
workingman and the farmer and the small shopkeeper. Henry
Steele Commager and Richard Brandon Morris (eds.), "The
New American Nation Series," Franklin D. Roosevelt and the
New Deal by William Leuchtenburg, x.
139
Jones, 702.
RESISTANCE 63
140
Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 217-39. Although “the American
nineteenth century proclaimed that the meaning of America' s errand into the
wilderness had disclosed itself as an errand without an end," the deferral of
meaning extended into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well,
during which global warfare, the specter of thermonuclear annihilation, the
threat of population and environmental calamities, the discovery of mass
extinctions and the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms all supported a
continuing code of radical contingency and insured the enduring vitality of
the apocalyptic tradition, “The End of History,” by Francis Fukuyama, not
withstanding.
141
Adams, Education, 82.
142
Ibid., 452.
143
Ibid., 66.
64 CROWN'S CHILDREN
144
Ibid., 427.
III. RATIONALIZATION
145
Abraham, Selected Papers, 373.
147
Abraham, 374.
148
Abraham, 377. Jones, Papers, 699.
65
66 CROWN'S CHILDREN
nexus. Historians Samuel Hays, Samuel Haber, Robert Wiebe and Gabriel
Kolko149 have applied Weber' s formula to American society of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describing the process of
industrialization as a "search for order," during which America was
transformed from a "society without a core" -- that is, a decentralized,
disordered, "distended" collection of "island communities" -- into an
integrated, rationalized, technocratic society governed by a bureaucratic elite
of specialists, administrators and professionals. 150 In fact, this concept -- the
"search for order" -- can be extended back to the very beginning of
American history.
Covenant, or Federal, Theology -- the "marrow of Puritan divinity" 151 -
- 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. The covenant, as described by Perry Miller, is
149
Samuel Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1957), and "The Politics of Reform in Municipal
Government in the Progressive Era," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, LV
(October, 1964) 157-69. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplife: Scientific
Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1964). Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of
Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New
York: The Free Press of Glencoe, a Division of the Macmillan Company,
1963).
150
Wiebe, Search for Order, 11-12, 44.
151
Miller, Errand, 48.
RATIONALIZATION 67
152
Ibid., 60-72.
153
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).
154
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.
68 CROWN'S CHILDREN
PRECISIANISM
155
Miller, Errand, 66-67.
156
Henry Wood, Natural Law in the Business World, Boston, 1887, 6, as
quoted in Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State, 98.
157
Jones, Papers, 698-99; Gorer, The American People; Boorstin, The
Colonial Experience, 281.
RATIONALIZATION 69
158
As Puritans were also called.
159
Lester Ward, Glimpses of the Cosmos (New York: G. P. Putnam' s
70 CROWN'S CHILDREN
replace "drift" with "mastery" 160). 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. 161
To Henry Adams, the American Civil War "helped to waste five or ten
thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity
and uniformity on a people who objected to it." 162 The War had followed a
thirty-year period of disorder, "social atomization" 163 and "intellectual
chaos." 164 Ironically, these same disruptive forces -- identified as
immigration, urbanization, industrialization and westward migration --
160
Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961).
161
Albert Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist
Expansionism in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935).
War, obviously, did not include the four million enslaved African-
Americans who were liberated by it.
163
David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, 1956), 223.
164
Roy Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1948), 7.
RATIONALIZATION 71
played an even greater role in the thirty years that followed the Civil War.
The difference, of course, was that the social disorder of the Gilded Age
was organized and given a measure of "intellectual" cohesion by the
machine, in whose image society was being transformed:
165
Adams, Education, 380, 406.
72 CROWN'S CHILDREN
166
Hays, Response to Industrialism, 24, 2, 48.
167
Abraham, Selected Papers, 388.
168
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. Incidentally, R. W. Ketton-Cremer' s
description of the seventeenth-century East Anglican/Norfolk personality
type as "dour, stubborn, fond of argument and litigation" (as quoted in
Fischer, p. 49) re-raises the question posed in the Introduction as to whether
RATIONALIZATION 73
Franklin' s maxim “time is money,” 169 his Table of Virtues and his time-and-
motion studies on street-cleaning and stockade-building:
The next morning our fort was plann' d and mark' d out, the
circumference measuring four hundred and fifty-five feet, which
would require as many palisades to be made of trees, one with
another, of a foot diameter each. Our axes, of which we had
seventy, were immediately set to work to cut down trees, and, our
men being dexterous in the use of them, great despatch was made.
Seeing the trees fall so fast, I had the curiosity to look at my watch
when two men began to cut at a pine; in six minutes they had it
upon the ground, and I found it of fourteen inches diameter. Each
pine made three palisades of eighteen feet long, pointed at one
end.. 170
In almost exactly 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, eliminate waste and optimize
input/output ratios:
169
Recall Ernest Jones‟ earlier statement on Obstinacy: “They get
particularly agitated at the idea of something being taken from them
against their will . . . 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.”.
170
Franklin, Autobiography, 181.
74 CROWN'S CHILDREN
171
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).
Samuel Haber relates that, as a child, Taylor organized the games of his
playmates according to "strict and elaborate rules," and sought to develop a
"uniform synthetic soil to replace all natural earth for more dependable
putting greens." He once appealed to his doctor to "help him stop
thinking," and constructed a sleeping machine to aid in preventing
nightmares:
172
Or any Wal Mart store. With its inexorable logic of ruthless
efficiency and ever lower costs, Wal Mart‟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
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).
174
With the marriage of computer technology to the bureaucratic state,
the rationalization impulse appeared to have very nearly reached its supra-
rational limits in the Vietnam War, during which rational means were
applied to transparently irrational ends:
76 CROWN'S CHILDREN
That, once found out, and all the rest were plain.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
175
Geoffrey Gorer, The American People, 54, 27. See also Louis Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition in America.
176
Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry (New York: William
Morrow and Co., 1943), 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 family.
78
THE ANAL MATRIX 79
177
Gorer, 56.
Ibid., 126. We will discuss the relationship between this “panic fear”
178
179
Ibid., 84.
180
Ibid., 107. Gorer notes that one consequence of this "insatiable"
desire to be loved is the "fear of rejection" and "dread of isolation." The
popularity, throughout American history, of professional, fraternal and other
voluntary associations, which was observed by Tocqueville, may be a
cultural consequence of this fear and dread, since an "enormous amount of
time is wasted proving boisterously that [one is] just a regular fellow."
Gorer contrasts the American attitude toward things, which is
"untroubled by ambiguity, serene and confident, audacious and creative,"
with the attitude toward people, which is characterized by an "insatiable
need for reassurance," and "the overcompensation of brashness and
boasting."
181
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.)
THE ANAL MATRIX 81
182
Erik Erikson. Childhood and Society (second edition; New York: W.
W. Norton, 1963), 285-325.
183
Ibid. This complex of traits and values is also discussed in
“Independence Training” and “The Culture of Contradictions.”
184
J. W. M. Whiting and Irvin Child, Child Training and Personality
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
82 CROWN'S CHILDREN
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. 185
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. 186
185
Mabel Hushka, "The Child' s Response to Coercive Bowel Training,"
Psychosomatic Medicine IV (January, 1942), 301-08.
186
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).
THE ANAL MATRIX 83
oral and the genital stages of development, and anal eroticism is frequently
expressed through these two modes.
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." 187 The physical trauma associated with teething is
psychologically reinforced by the fact that biting destroys what Erikson
terms the symbiosis with the "maternal matrix." 188 Weaning and the
commencement of toilet training often occur simultaneously, and the oral
imperative to incorporate the lost love-object into the body serves as the
model for the later anal goal of possession and retention.
Mabel Hushka and Harold Orlansky have suggested a possible
physiological correlation between inadequate breast-feeding in mothers and
their "pathological preoccupation with bowel function." 189 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: new-born babies are not breastfed until
they are ten days old and are weaned at the age of six months:
187
Karl Abraham, "The Influence of Oral Erotism on Character-
Formation" (1924), in Selected Papers, 395.
188
Erikson, Childhood and Society, 79.
189
Hushka, Psychosomatic Medicine, IV, No. 1. Harold Orlansky,
"Infant Care and Personality," Psychological Bulletin, 46 (January, 1949).
84 CROWN'S CHILDREN
Whatever system she may be following, she can never have the
easy, almost unconscious, self-assurance of the mother of more
patterned societies, who is following ways she knows
unquestioningly to be right. The American mother is always more
or less anxious, anxious lest she make mistakes or forget part of the
prescribed routine, anxious lest the baby should not respond
properly, often anxious lest she should after all have chosen the
wrong method. . . . The rules which have been accepted for the
upbringing of the particular child tend to acquire an almost
190
Erikson, 177.
191
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 constraints and
may follow, generationally, the ebb and flow of economic cycles. See also
David Potter‟s People of Plenty.
192
Gorer, The American People, 72. See also Hulbert‟s Raising America:
Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice about Children, which was cited
earlier.
THE ANAL MATRIX 85
193
Ibid., 74-77
194
Ibid., 77.
195
Boston Evening Post, November 16, 1767, as quoted in Edmund
Morgan, William and Mary Quarterly, XXIV (January, 1967), 11.
86 CROWN'S CHILDREN
Freud noted the "analogy of money to sexuality," 198 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." 199
To Karl Abraham, the "displacement of libido to the anal zone" results
in the
197
Thoreau, Writings, II, 237.
198
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.
199
Otto Fenichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth," Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, VII, 80.
200
Abraham, Selected Papers, 379-80.
THE ANAL MATRIX 87
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." 201
As we have seen, an important, although bizarre, corollary to the
genital dimension of anal eroticism is the so-called Cloacal Theory of Birth -
- that is, that, in the unconscious, feces also symbolize babies:
According to Jones:
201
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 49.
202
Freud, Works, XVIII, 127-30.
88 CROWN'S CHILDREN
conclude that the baby leaves the body through the only opening
through which he has ever known solid material leave it -- namely,
the anus. 203
One of the most impressive traits in the whole gamut of the anal
character is the extraordinary and quite exquisite tenderness that
some members of the type are capable of, especially with children;
this is no doubt strengthened both by the association with innocence
and purity . . . and by the reaction-formation against the repressed
sadism that so commonly goes with marked anal erotism. . . . It is
quite characteristic even of misers to be passionately fond of their
203
Jones, Papers, 694-95.
204
Becker, The Heavenly City of Eighteen-Century Philosophers, 119.
Weber, Protestant Ethic, 70.
THE ANAL MATRIX 89
INDEPENDENCE TRAINING
205
Jones, Papers, 698.
206
Richard Rapson, "The American Child as Seen by British Travelers,
1845-1935," American Quarterly XVII (Fall, 1965), 520-34.
207
William Bridges, "Family Patterns and Social Values in America,
1825-1875," American Quarterly, XVII (Spring 1965), 3-11.
90 CROWN'S CHILDREN
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,
208
avoid the "appearance of authority."
ANAL-SADISM
208
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).
209
Abraham, "A Short Study of the Development of the Libido," Selected
Papers, 425.
210
Jones, 698.
211
Abraham, Ibid., 481.
THE ANAL MATRIX 91
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. 212
212
Abraham, Selected Papers, 375.
213
Fenichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth," Psychoanalytic Quarterly
VII (January, 1938), 69-95.
214
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of
Ethics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1947), 74.
92 CROWN'S CHILDREN
215
Jones, Papers, 698-99; Gorer, The American People; Boorstin, The
Colonial Experience, 281.
216
Franklin, Autobiography, 116.
217
Emerson, "Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing," Complete Works.
218
Thoreau, Walden, Writings, II, 102.
219
Adams, Education, 344.
THE ANAL MATRIX 93
them better than they would or could do for themselves" 220 with these
observations by Ernest Jones and Karl Abraham:
220
Carnegie, North American Review, V. 148, 662.
221
Jones, Papers, 698.
222
Abraham, Selected Papers, 377.
94 CROWN'S CHILDREN
Given (1) the dominant role played by the mother in the American
family, (2) the relative severity of American bowel training, (3) the
Cloacal Theory of Birth and the identification of babies as feces, and (4)
the fact that anal training "contradicts [the child' s] natural Oedipal
harmony with [its] mother," 223 it might be expected that the sadism
(repressed aggression) of the anally-fixated child would be focused on
the mother' s anus, the "vehicle of hostile impulses," and that the child' s
ambivalent Oedipal phantasies would be directed at mastering and
possessing the mother through this organ. As difficult as it may be to
accept, this hypothesis has been advanced by several psychiatrists and
anthropologists, including Marie Bonaparte, Helen Deutsch, Melanie
Klein and Geza Roheim. Melanie Klein, for example, has documented
a significant degree of pre-Oedipal aggression directed by the child
against the mother, and, from her research, Marie Bonaparte concluded
that "what the small boy yearns to accomplish is an anal, cloacal,
intestinal penetration of the mother, a bloody disemboweling even." 224
Throughout human history, the primary cultural manifestation of this
223
Ernest Jones, "Hate and Anal Eroticism in the Obsessional Neurosis,"
in Papers on Psycho-Analysis, 553-61.
224
Marie Bonaparte, "Passivity, Masochism, and Femininity,"
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XVI (1935), 325-33, Female
Sexuality (New York: Grove, 1965). Helene Deutsch, Neuroses and
Character Types: Clinical Psychoanalytic Studies (New York: International
University Press, 1965), The Psychology of Women (New York: Grune and
Stratton, 1945). Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921-
1945 (London: Hogarth Press, 1948). Geza Roheim, Origin and Function
of Culture (New York: Nervous and Mental Diseases Monograph, 1943),
Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (New York: International University
Press, 1950).
THE ANAL MATRIX 95
225
As paraphrased by Roy Calogeras, "Geza Roheim: Psychoanalytic
Anthropologist or Radical Freudian?" American Imago, 28 (Summer, 1971),
150.
A passage from The Octopus by Frank Norris illustrates the manifestly
erotic nature of this association:
The great brown earth turned a huge flank to it, exhaling the
moisture of the early dew. . . . The rain had done its work; not
a clod that was not swollen with fertility, not a fissure that did
not exhale the sense of fecundity. . . . The land was alive;
aroused at last from its deep sleep, palpitating with the desire
of reproduction. Deep down there in the recesses of the soil,
the great heart throbbed once more, thrilling with passion,
vibrating with desire, offering itself to the caress of the plough,
insistent, eager, imperious. Dimly one felt the deep-seated
trouble of the earth, the uneasy agitation of its members, the
hidden tumult of its womb, demanding to be made fruitful, to
reproduce, to disengage the eternal renascent germ of Life that
stirred and struggled in its loins. Frank Norris, The Octopus
(New York: Doubleday, 1901), 121-22.
96 CROWN'S CHILDREN
226
Jones, Papers, 697.
227
Schlesinger, American Historical Review, XLVIII (January, 1943),
235.
228
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.
229
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.
230
Lee Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 205. The
enduring role played in the national consciousness by such cultural symbols
as the Kentucky rifle, steamboat, locomotive, Colt revolver, skyscraper,
automobile, and ICBM would seem to justify hyphenating our
characterization of American civilization to "anal-phallic." See John A.
Kouwenhoven, Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1948). As we have seen, the
Romantic, Conservation and Green movements represent a reaction against
this mode of thought and, “in an industrial age, . . . one long protest
against the intrusion of man, with all his squalor and ugliness, into the
THE ANAL MATRIX 97
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. 231
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." 232 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.
Margaret Mead discusses the role of "sibling rivalry" in relation to the
cultural imperative that the child earn his parents' love, in the following
terms:
One of the great difficulties for the older child is seen in that the
baby is not scolded for the things for which the older child is
scolded. To win his mother ' s approval, the two-and-a-half-year-
old must be dry, must feed himself, must go to sleep quietly with no
one there; otherwise, the loving approval vanishes from his
mother' s voice. Very well, he has learned, sometimes sorrowfully,
sometimes eagerly, to do all of these things, to take steps upward
and outward towards greater independence of his mother' s
delicious care. And then, along comes this small insignificant
interloper, who can' t do any of the hard things for which he has
been denied his mother' s love -- and the creature is petted and
loved and not expected to do them at all. Undoubtedly this is a
central drama in the life of many American children. The betrayal,
for so it seems, in which mother gives her love in one case and
withholds it in another, is a seed out of which grows the bitterness
towards all those who "have it soft," "get by," "get away with
232
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.
THE ANAL MATRIX 99
233
Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry, 107-08.
234
Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men
Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), viii.
235
Bernard Bailyn, "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in
Eighteenth-Century America," American Historical Review, XLVII
(January, 1962), 339-51.
236
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in Works,
XVIII, and The Ego and the Id, in Works, XIX. See also Sandor Ferenczi,
Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (New York: The Psychoanalytic Quarterly,
Inc., 1938), Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Robert Brunner,
1952), and Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical
Meaning of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959).
100 CROWN'S CHILDREN
237
Brown, Life Against Death, 115.
238
Brown, 102.
239
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, XVIII, 38.
240
Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Works, XXII.
241
Lou Andreas-Salome', "' Anal' and ' Sexual,' " Imago, IV (1916), 249-
73.
THE ANAL MATRIX 101
242
Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family from
Colonial Times to the Present (3 vols.; Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co.,
1917-19). Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). William Bridges,
"Family Patterns and Social Values in America, 1825-1875," American
Quarterly, XVII (Spring, 1965), 3-11. Richard Rapson, "The American
Child as Seen by British Travelers, 1845-1935," American Quarterly, XVII
(Fall, 1965), 520-34.
243
Rapson, 523.
244
Walter L. George, Hail Columbia! (New York, 1921), 199, and Stuart
Wortley, Travels in the United States (Paris, 1951), 67. Quoted in Rapson,
523, 521.
245
Bailyn, Education, 25-26. Bridges, 8.
102 CROWN'S CHILDREN
On another level, parallel to the Edenic myth and the pastoral ideal of
America as Garden of the World, is the counter-myth of the Great American
Desert -- of America as "this vast, savage, howling mother of ours," 246 of
nature as a "hideous and desolate wilderness." This theme runs as a minor
variation throughout American literature and is expressed, for example, in
Parkman' s France and England in North America, 247 Cooper' s The Prairie,
Melville' s Typee, Crane' s "The Open Boat" and Hemingway' s "Big Two-
Hearted River."
Konrad Lorenz has suggested that locomotion is increased by a bad
environment, 248 and one important consequence of "separation anxiety" was
that, according to Erik Erikson, "there was no use regressing, because there
was nobody to regress to. . . . What remained was action and motion right
up to the breaking point." 249 If Lorenz' s hypothesis is correct, one would
expect that the malignity of the environment could be indicated by the
magnitude of the mobility, and in America, mobility -- the so-called M-
Factor 250 -- reached a scale that is unprecedented in human history.
246
Thoreau, "Walking," Writings, IX, 291.
247
See William R. Taylor, "A Journey into the Human Mind: Motivation
in Francis Parkman' s La Salle," William and Mary Quarterly, XIX (April,
1962), 220-37.
248
Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1970).
249
Erikson, 296.
250
George W. Pierson, "The M-Factor in American History," American
THE ANAL MATRIX 103
251
Van Wyck Brooks, Opinions of Oliver Allston (New York, 1941), 84.
Quoted in Schlesinger, American Historical Review, XLVIII (January,
1943), 236.
252
Turner, Frontier in American History, 18.
253
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
(New York: World Publishing Co., 1959).
254
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Thomas
Seltzer, 1923), 83.
255
Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the
Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). See William Cronon' s
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) for the starting point of this process in
North America.
104 CROWN'S CHILDREN
seen, derived from a child' s pride and gratification in the act of excretion,
which serves as compensation for the primary injury to the child' s
narcissism. Social mobility represents not only a drive away from parental
control and toward economic independence and self-sufficiency, but also a
yearning in the opposite direction for parental love and approval and
signifies, in Freudian terms, the Oedipal wish of re-uniting with the
mother. 256 Norman Holland, for example, from his analysis of the novels of
Horatio Alger, Jr., concludes that the rags-to-riches theme, common in the
success literature of the nineteenth century, represents the Oedipal attempt at
becoming father-of-oneself and reflects the wish-fulfilling phantasies of
young boys to displace a weak father and become "the sole support of an
adoring mother." 257
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." 258 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." 259 To Geoffrey Gorer, the "object is
256
The deep ambivalence which often attends personal achievement and
the struggle for maternal approval is illustrated by the personification of
success as a Bitch Goddess and the prevalence of witchcraft and spider
themes in American culture (which, in Freudian symbology, represent the
orally-castrating mother) and the relative absence, even among
fundamentalist sects, of male devil-figures (the Pope, for example, is
depicted as the Whore of Babylon).
257
Norman N. Holland, "Hobbling with Horatio," The Hudson Review,
XII (Winter, 1959-60), 557.
258
Jones, Papers, 689.
259
Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Times (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1937).
THE ANAL MATRIX 105
260
Gorer, The American People, 158.
261
Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry, 91.
262
Horney, Ibid. The affinity between nihilism and anality, which we
discussed earlier in “Narcissism, Achievement, Conformity and
Alienation,” is further suggested by the fact that the "toilet trauma" is the
prototypical "limit situation," which is characterized by such existential
clichés as "grace under pressure," resistance, reductionism, repetition-
compulsiveness, stoicism, tight-lipped silence ("You' ll lose it if you talk
about it") and, of course, irony and absurdity ("He is the legitimate son of
President Wilson"). Witness Henry Adams ("Nihilism has no bottom") or
Ernest Hemingway ("He was in despair / About what? / Nothing / How do
you know it was nothing? / He has plenty of money"). Adams, Education,
431; Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 245; A Farewell to Arms, 58; "A
Clean, Well-Lighted Place," in The Hemingway Reader, ed. Charles Poore,
418.
263
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York:
Doubleday, 1957).
106 CROWN'S CHILDREN
264
Norman Holmes Pearson, "The American Writer and the Feeling for
Community," American Studies Inaugural Lecture, University of Alabama,
March 20, 1962.
265
Jones, Papers, 553-61.
266
Lou Andreas-Salome', Imago, IV 249-73.
267
Journal, ed. James K. Hosmer, 1908, II, 44.
268
Abraham, Selected Papers, 390.
THE ANAL MATRIX 107
The anal zone lends itself more than any other to the display of
stubborn adherence to contradictory impulses because, for one thing,
it is the modal zone for two conflicting modes of approach, which
must become alternating, namely retention and elimination. 269
The child wishes to receive milk from its mother . . . but must in
return give up its excrement. That is the first exchange, the prototype
of commerce. . . . When something is lost from below, something
new must be introduced from above. The equilibrium between
receiving and giving must be preserved. 270
Ernest Jones notes the "tendency to be occupied with the reverse side of
various things and situations:"
269
Erickson, Childhood and Society, 81-82.
270
Fenichel, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, VII, 91.
271
Jones, Papers, 690-91.
108 CROWN'S CHILDREN
272
The Education of Henry Adams, 7-9.
273
Erikson, Childhood and Society, 288.
THE ANAL MATRIX 109
274
Henry Harper Hart, "The Identification with the Machine," American
Imago X (Summer, 1953), 95.
275
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 8-10.
276
Abraham, Selected Papers, 391.
110 CROWN'S CHILDREN
277
Sandor Ferenczi, "On the Part Played by Homosexuality in the
Pathogenesis of Paranoia," in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (Boston, R.
J. Badger, 1916).
On the other hand, Dwight W. Miles ("The Import for Clinical
Psychology of the Use of Tests Derived from Theories about Infantile
Sexuality and Adult Character," Genetic Psychology Monographs, Vol. 50,
No. 2, November, 1954, 235) notes that:
278
Abraham, "Origins and Growth of Object-Love," in Selected Papers,
489.
279
Totem and Taboo (1913).
280
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 96. See also Daniel Boorstin,
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1948), chap. 1.
THE ANAL MATRIX 111
Romanticism ("all visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks" 281),
Literary Naturalism (the "black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man"),
Progressivism ("reality now was rough and sordid. It was hidden,
neglected, and off-stage. It was conceived essentially as that stream of
external and material events which was most likely to be unpleasant." 282),
right-wing anti-communism283 and New-Left radicalism284 reflect a radical,
self-justifying disjunction between appearance and reality. 285
Behind Winthrop' s "the Eies of all people are uppon us" ("soe that if
wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee have undertaken . . .
wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world"), Jefferson' s
"enemy within our bowels," and Adams' s "inevitable effect of this lesson"
(which was "to make a victim of the scholar and to turn him into a harsh
judge of his masters. If they overlooked him, he could hardly overlook
them, since they stood with their whole weight on his body")286 lurks the
281
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 161-62.
282
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 201.
283
Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, and Bell, The End of Ideology.
284
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1956).
285
And, one might add, Freudianism:
286
For the epigraph of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud chose a
quotation from Virgil: Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo.
Not incidentally, in his Introduction to "Character and Anal Erotism,"
112 CROWN'S CHILDREN
very real fear that, as Ishmael discovered when the jaw-bone tiller smote his
side and he awoke with his back to the Try-Works, something is "fatally
wrong."
Historically, this vis a tergo has been self-creating, springing from its
own Platonic conception of itself, and, if were ever needed, the final irony
of American history might well read as that of an endless inversion-without-
inversion, of a narcissistic love-object that lacked a "vital center," of a "last
heroism" that was forever doomed to the perpetual vibration, if not between
tyranny and anarchy, at least between self and other, unity and chaos,
without ever touching either.
Freud confesses:
I can no longer say on what precise occasions I first received the
impression that a systematic relationship exists between this type
of character and the activities of this organ, but I can assure the
reader that no theoretical anticipation of mine played any part in
its production. My belief in such a relationship has been so much
strengthened by accumulated experience that I venture to make it
the subject of a communication.
THE ANAL MATRIX 113