Steiner's polarity between tooth formation, a mineralising current driving from within outward, and sexual maturation, the opposite current driving from outside inward, trading places as second dentition completes.
Dentition and Sexualisation in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the polarity between two opposed developmental currents in the human organism, presented in Spiritual Science and Medicine (GA 312), the course for physicians he gave at Dornach in the spring of 1920. Dentition is a mineralising process that drives from within outward, and it reaches completion when the second teeth have come through the gums around the seventh year. Sexualisation is the counter-process: it drives from outside inward, advancing at the opposite pole of the organism in the same measure as tooth formation concludes. The two currents counteract one another in a rhythm, so the change of teeth and puberty frame the second seven-year period of human development. Steiner bound the same axis to intestinal peristalsis, the polar opposite of tooth building, which is why anthroposophic physicians and dentists read the state of the teeth as an index of the whole constitution.
Dentition and Sexualisation names one of the sharpest polarities in Steiner's medical course: the organism pushes mineral substance outward until the second teeth stand complete, while sexual maturation presses inward from the periphery, gaining ground exactly as tooth formation ends. For the physician this pair becomes a diagnostic axis, since the state of the teeth speaks about peristalsis, fluorine activity, and the ripening of the whole human being.
In Steiner's Own Words
What is the reality of this whole emergence of the teeth? It is nothing less than a movement of the mineralising process from within outwards. When the second teeth are all through the gums, this pushing outward of the mineralisation has reached completion. It is opposed by the process of sexualisation, which again drives from outside, inwards; and these two opposite processes act and counteract one another, as in a rhythm. In the same measure as the process of dentition becomes complete, the process of sexualisation proceeds apace at the opposite pole. And in recognising this you will also become aware of another process directed inwards and backwards, and also a polar opposite to dental formation and function, and actually closely associated with it; namely the peristaltic motion of the intestines. Here, then, are two intimately connected processes.
What it Means Today
Mainstream growth science keeps meeting the same axis from its own side. In 1973 the Montreal orthodontic researcher Arto Demirjian, with the statistician Harvey Goldstein and the London auxologist James Tanner, published "A New System of Dental Age Assessment" in the journal Human Biology. Tanner is the physician whose Tanner stages still define how clinicians grade sexual maturation, and his name on a dental paper is the telling detail: the Demirjian method scores the calcification of seven mandibular teeth on radiographs and converts them into a maturity age that can be read against pubertal development. Orthodontists use this pairing in daily practice, timing functional appliances to the pubertal growth spurt by checking dental maturity against markers of sexual maturation. The two calendars Steiner set against each other in 1920 are still the two clinicians consult. Thalira synthesis: where auxology reads teeth and puberty as two clocks telling one time, Steiner reads them as two currents flowing in opposite directions, so the years between the change of teeth and sexual maturity are not a plateau but a held balance, and a child's teeth announce forces that will later withdraw to work at the other pole.
The lecture itself ends in practice. Steiner advises the dentist whose patient shows badly decaying teeth to look first at the opposite pole: quiet an over-vigorous intestinal peristalsis through rest or mild digestive sedatives, and bring the limbs into movement permeated with soul. This is why he ranks eurythmy above merely physiological gymnastics, and why he warns that excessive dance work in young girls tends to show itself later in their teeth.
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