The Dream of My Return Quotes

“The different stages mankind has gone through during its millennia of evolution are experienced by each human being over the course of his lifetime on a vastly reduced scale. Before the Ice Age, man, like other mammals, couldn't control his bladder and bowels: he wandered through the mountains emptying them whenever they filled up no matter where he was. The Ice Age led to a great change in civilization. When humans took shelter in caves and were forced to live a sedentary life, they discovered that they did not like to defecate or urinate where they slept, so they learned to control their bladder and bowels and demand that others do the same— which is why the best way to toilet train a puppy is to place his bed where he does his business ... This was also the first time a human being experienced the emotion we now call anxiety, which consists of having to choose between two options: either he satisfies his instinct to empty himself wherever he happens to be, which means he'd have excrement next to his bed, as we call it now, or he controls his bowels and bladder and empties himself elsewhere. In the first two or three years of his life, every human being goes through this entire process that humanity underwent over the course of thousands of years. Do you understand? When a child is being toilet trained, he confronts anxiety for the first time: either he follows his instinct and does his business whenever he feels pressure on his sphincters, or he pleases his parents and controls his bowels and bladder as they've demanded he do. Anxiety and bowel control are closely related. If a child is raised strictly and is thereby strongly repressed, he will have anxiety throughout his life about his bowel control and, hence, his colon. And when, as an adult, he needs to decide between two options, he will feel anxiety, and that anxiety will make him tense up his sphincter and his colon. This is the cause of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, an ailment most human beings suffer from at some point, even if they're not aware of it. This is your ailment.”
― Horacio Castellanos Moya, The Dream of My Return