Anal Stage - Anal Stage Related To Cognitive Psychology

Anal Stage Related To Cognitive Psychology

According to the field of cognitive psychology which acknowledges the existence of internal mental states, Freud’s Anal Stage falls right into this category. These internal mental states are referring to belief, idea, motivation, and knowledge. Freud revolves the basis of his stages around these main ideas also. The result of whether a child completes this stage successfully or becomes fixated has a lot to do with the child’s knowledge of his or her past with their toilet training experience, the motivation he or she received from the parents during the stage, and the child’s own belief in how they should react to the situation. Cognitive psychology also focuses and studies on how people perceive, remember, and learn their surroundings, environment, and experiences. These are the three main reasons as to why a child will later on become either anal-retentive or anal-expulsive as an adult.

According to a study done by Adelson and Redmond consisting of 61 female students at Bennington College where they compared the ability for anal-retentive and anal-expulsive memory. In order to diagnose the anal fixation the Blacky Test was administered to the subjects. The recall tests were given to five freshman literature classes in which the researcher explained to the students to read the papers carefully because they will be asked questions on them. The class had ten minutes in order to read the papers. In order to test immediate recall, the subjects were asked to write down everything they could remember right after reading the papers. A week later the researchers returned to the classrooms and asked the same students to write down everything they still remembered.
“At a first glance, psychoanalytic theory seems to offer no explicit statement on the problem, but a closer examination yields this hypothesis: individuals fixated at the late anal phase (the so called anal retentives) have a greater ability to recall verbal material than those fixated at the early anal phase (anal-expulsives)”.

Anal-retentive individuals were found to have a better memory for verbal recall compared to those who were anal-expulsive. Anal retentives significantly show a better recall for both the immediate and delayed verbal material. Their results are consistent over time.

The ability for a child to successfully complete the Anal Stage affects their life as an adult not only in the way they interact with others, but how they function intellectually and on a daily basis.