anal character

"Those psychoanalysts who find a connection between sadism and an anal character will not be surprised that bathrooms seemed to fascinate young Goldwater," Ginzburg wrote, citing a tidbit from TIME's June 23, 1961, cover story on the increasingly popular Senator about how as a young boy he built his own radio transmitter and "wired everything in sight, from toilet seats to his bed headboard."

In court, he denied ever needing to consult a psychiatrist or that he had had the breakdowns —"I don't know what an anal character would be. I tried to look it up in a dictionary, but I couldn't find it," he said, according to TIME.

“I don’t know what an anal character would be,” he testified, according to news accounts.

During his libel trial, Mr. Goldwater was mystified by some of the psychiatrists’ comments about his personality, including one calling him an “anal character.”

In the Freudian-dominated theories of the early twentieth century, it was a sign of an “anal” character: hoarders refused to let go of what they had.