Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/103

 ANAL-EROTIC CHARACTER TRAITS IN SHYLOCK 357

and by the reaction-formation against the repressed sadism that so commonly goes with marked anal erotism'.^ This is well shown in the speech of Salanio where the elopement of Shylock's daughter Jessica is described:

My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter! (II, viii).

That Shylock is a miser, that he collects, gathers and hoards money and gives none or very little out, even in the management of his own household, is demonstrated in the speech of Laun- celot Gobbo, the servant of Shylock, where he states: 'I am famished in his service, you may tell every finger I have with my ribs' (II, ii). Shylock is a miser because money means power to him and, as Ferenczi states, ^ 'The adult's symbolic interest in money gets extended not only to objects with similar physical attributes, but to all sorts of things that in any way signify value or possession. . . The enjoyment at possessing it has its deepest and amplest source in coprophilia'.

Studies in anal erotism have demonstrated that whenever archaic methods of thought prevail, such as the neuroses, dreams superstition and unconscious thinking, money has been brought into the closest connection with filth and scatological rites. This superstition is shown in the fairy tale of the goose which laid the golden eggs and in many legends, poems and linguistic ex- pressions. Ferenczi has also emphasized the transition from the infantile idea of excrement to the apparently remote symbol of

money. '

For instance, in the analysis of a compulsion neurotic with strong anal-erotic traits and superstitions the following dream occurred: He was paying the man in coin for commission on some goods and the man gave the money to a horse to eat and then the dreamer recovered the money from the manure of the horse and stuffed it into a big sausage for safe keeping have a dream which coincides with the superstition of bringing Here we the discovery of treasure into association with the act o

) 1 Ernest Jones : ' Anal-Erotic Character Traits ', Papers on Psycho- Analy.-is, 2nd. ed. 1918, p. 682.

2 S. Ferenczi: 'The Ontogenesis ot Interest in Money", Contributions to Psycho -Analysis, 1916, Chap. XIII.

' Loc. cit.