The hole and the tendency to fill

The hole and the tendency to fill describes how an opening encountered in the world can acquire existential meaning: it becomes an image of lack that invites the person to supply fullness through bodily involvement. The account traces this tendency from childhood exploration to eating and, more cautiously, to sexuality, presenting the hole not as a mere physical feature but as a symbol whose meaning existential psychoanalysis must elucidate.

The Hole as an Existential Symbol

The discussion begins with the objective hole as a feature of the world. Its significance is not confined to the opening itself: the hole can illuminate the structure and meaning of the anal zone, giving a transcendent meaning to erogenous sensations that had previously been only experienced. The argument therefore moves from an object encountered in the world to a way of understanding human being; the hole is a symbol of a mode of being that existential psychoanalysis is asked to interpret.

At its origin, the hole appears as a nothingness to be filled with the child’s own flesh. The child is drawn to put a finger, or even an arm, into it, as though the opening were an empty image of the self. The imagined completion is not simply to observe or cover the gap: the child would crawl into it and fit within it, contributing to a fullness of being in the world. In this account, filling becomes a bodily project through which an apparent emptiness is answered by the body’s presence.

From Filling to Fullness

The image of fitting the body into an excavation leads to a broader account of filling. To plug a hole is described as a sacrifice of the body in the service of plenitude: the For-itself is subordinated so that it can shape, perfect, and preserve the totality of the In-itself. The act thus carries a paradox. The person seeks fullness by giving something of the body, while the intended result is a more complete world of being.

The text identifies the tendency to fill as one of the fundamental tendencies of human reality, recurring beyond the child’s first encounter with an opening. Much of adult life, it proposes, consists in plugging holes, filling empty places, and symbolically establishing plenitude. The childhood image is therefore not discarded as a passing curiosity; it becomes a pattern for understanding later efforts to overcome emptiness and make completeness present.

The Mouth and Eating

The account makes that pattern concrete in the child’s relation to the mouth. When the child puts fingers into the mouth, the gesture is interpreted as an attempt to wall up the openings of the face. The finger is imagined as merging with the lips and roof of the mouth, blocking the oral opening as cement fills a crack in a wall. The desired result is a dense, uniform, spherical plenitude, associated in the passage with Parmenidean being.

Thumb-sucking extends the same interpretation: the child seeks to dissolve the thumb into a sticky paste that would seal the mouth’s opening. The discussion then connects this early tendency to eating. Nourishment is figured as cement that seals the mouth, and eating is, among other things, a way of being filled. The movement from hole to mouth to food gives the concept a distinct progression: an opening presents lack, bodily contact tries to close it, and nourishment supplies an imagined fullness.

The Sexual Interpretation and Its Limits

Only from this account of filling does the text proceed to sexuality. It interprets the feminine sex as an opening that calls for being and presents penetration and dissolution as imagined means by which an opening might become fullness. It also describes the woman, within this theoretical construction, as experiencing her condition as an appeal because she is in the form of a hole. The passage associates this interpretation with the origin of Adler’s complex and connects it to the idea of castration.

The argument expressly distinguishes this early contribution from a complete explanation of sexuality. It presents the tendency as presexual: it may become one component of sexuality as an empirical, complex human attitude, but it does not derive its origin from sexual being. This qualification matters to the concept’s structure. The hole and the wish to fill it are offered as an antecedent pattern that can inform later sexuality, not as an exhaustive account of it. The discussion’s central movement remains the passage from an objective opening to a symbolic lack, and from that lack to repeated attempts to establish fullness.