Authority and autonomy

This stage, although it is the level of belief beyond which many adults never develop, is related with the time when a child learns to coordinate and impose some form of order on experience, when the sounds produced by the mouth are controlled into speech, when the muscles upon which excretion depends also come under control (hence the expression 'anal phase'). The child also learns that the knowledge and skills of adults can enrich his or her own experience and thus accepts the authority of adults - although this is also the stage at which the independent control the child is learning is sufficient to sometimes question or resist that authority. This latter independence is the ground for later independence of thought and belief rather than conformity and conventionality. If stifled if may limit openness to experience in a way not encountered either at the previous nor the following stage, as mirrored at the adult level by unthinking and unquestioning adherence to the faith one has always had.

This is the second of three stages of belief described by Michael Jacobs and which relates the anal stage of Sigmund Freud with the anal religion of Heije Faber and the levels of mythic-literal faith and synthetic-conventional faith of James Fowler. It is also related to the conventional moral judgement of Lawrence Kohlberg, with the conscious liberal world view of Paul Tillich and with the autonomy versus shame and industry versus inferiority levels of Erik Erikson (although not necessarily with the physical ages these latter are said to represent).