Talk:Anal retentiveness

message: I appreciate that a second paragraph was added, but it's unsourced and it conflicts some with my understanding of the term, so I'd like to see a valid reference if it's to be included.  Here's the text I removed: 
The so-called "anal" stage of infantile development denoted and named from discovering and playing with the infant's own feces is also characterized by learning that screaming and yelling causes a parental response. This learned cause and effect carried on later in life was named anal-retentive - or to stay in the (retain) anal developmental stage. Calling anal retentive anything to do with constipation is a modern misnomer. More accurately described, an anal retentive individual would be one with a character disorder exhibited by tyrannical behavior. Presumably the negative name was Freud's own description of those individuals with character disorders who would never seek psychoanalysis. The main presentation of character disorder is that the rest of the world has a problem as opposed to neuroses where the neurotic individual thinks he/she is the problem. Only neurotics seek help yielding hundreds of subset disorders while character disorders are still a mystery and have no subsets.
I've never heard of anal-retentive personalities being "tyrannical".  I'll go ahead and trawl some university psych websites and see if I can find a good reference. --Hurtstotouchfire 07:22, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the article covers the conversational and psychological meanings, but doesn't have the medical definition. According to The American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary, Anal-retentive (adj) Indicates personality traits, such as meticulousness, avarice, and obstinacy, originating in habits, attitudes, or values associated with infantile pleasure in retention of feces. I think it's worth considering for inclusion in the wiki article article. Possibly a range of it's different meanings in each field, and a range of meanings in differing dialects or communities. This could absorb and categorize the different meanings without causing contention by eliminating the need to have a single narrow definition, arbitrarily chosen. Penyulap talk 12:42, 21 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Bulking up article

message: I'm not totally happy about the "current usage" definition even as originally proposed by User:Wayland and which has lasted till now. While pedantry is implied by the term, I think a better definition would refer primarily to neatness, tidyness, order, & cleanliness. 
Now this entry shows I'm anally-retentive myself. But have I contradicted my own argument?
Mmowat 08:27, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revision of "current usage" definition 

message: "These people develop into neat, organized, careful, meticulous, obstinate people often men with money who are passive-aggressive."  Is this really part of Freudian theory, or is there some 'countertransference' going on on part of whoever wrote it?  The tone seems hostile and biased towards such individuals.  And the sentence construction is also quite akward.  Not to be anal =)
::It certainly reads as non-NPOV, and there's no source for all those adjectives. Men with money? Heh, you wish. ;-) It was correctly taken out from the article I believe. Raystorm 13:41, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Awkward/biased sentence 

message: Can someone please help contribute what exactly causes either of these please, and what also causes neither? It's not clear between the two articles what the differences are in the causes. E.g. in anal expulsive it mentions that the child was "liberally" trained. What does this mean, and in what way would the child have been trained in order to have become anally retentive? --Rebroad (talk) 20:38, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Differences between anal retentive and anal expulsive 

message: I don't really think they are appropriate here, so I took them out. The concept already has basically no empirical basis, so a reference like this is both redundant and tangential.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.10.126.184 (talk) 06:10, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  References to The Nurture Assumption 

message: Someone should have a look at these changes (link to history comparison) which are still active in the current article version. In fact, all changes after 
23 February 2010 seem to be made by some jokers (apart from the reversion, of course).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.179.234.67 (talk) 03:50, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vandalism 

message: I wish there were twenty readers who would all list their understanding of anal retentive, so that we could see a spectrum of thinly divided choices. From this, to order these thoughts from the extremes. Then to come to a generalized understanding of the term anal retentive. I am not getting that so far.
My concept is a personality unwilling to give of itself, as in a child who comes to understand it can control its parents actions and time, by not excreting. Then generalizing, to every interaction, with everybody, for all times thereafter, brings to mind, why bother!  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.195.246.52 (talk) 18:07, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anal retentive (new section) 

message: I understand that this is effectively a real term in American English, though I have not come across it in the UK.  Perhaps a note to that effect would avoid confusion for non-American readers.  Also, the OED contains the following simple definition : overly ordered and fussy. (So in the UK, we simply say 'fussy' for the same thing.) It also says that this is the meaning in all varieties of English.  This makes sense, since as far as I recall, it was a joke term used in American sitcoms of the 1980s, which everyone else vaguely understood as an insult of some sort.  Thanks to this article, I've just found out what it means, although I don't think I'll be using it any time soon because it sounds liked it means 'deliberate constipation'. Summerdoor (talk) 14:01, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Better meaning 

message: At present "Anal fixation" redirects to this page. This seems unhelpful to me as anal expulsiveness is also an anal fixation, so some kind of short article on anal fixations in a general sense (possibly taking the form of a simple disambiguation page) should be made to avoid creating a false equivalence between anal fixation and anal retentiveness. Anditres (talk) 18:51, 10 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirect from anal fixation