The Seba library treats Excrement in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Edinger, Edward F., Jung, Carl Gustav, Abraham, Karl).
Excrement PUTREFACTIO Mutilation Impotence / Poison; Dragon King Blackness Innocent Coagulatio Slaying / Defeat Sacrifice
Edinger explicitly catalogues Excrement as a central symbol of the alchemical putrefactio-mortificatio stage, clustering it with blackness, poison, mutilation, and defeat as necessary conditions of the transformative opus.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
if a much venerated object is related by the unconscious to the anal region, we have to conclude that this is a way of expressing respect and attention, such as the child feels for these forbidden functions.
Jung argues that the unconscious linkage of venerated figures to the anal region reflects infantile reverence rather than degradation, recuperating excremental symbolism as a form of archaic devotion.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
His free associations gradually led us to the deeper motive
Abraham traces a patient’s compulsive collection of mother-of-pearl buttons to deeper anal-erotic symbolism, with the footnote explicitly citing excrement as the psychoanalytic referent anchoring the case.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
excrement, 183, 185, 227; see also Dung, Shit
Hillman cross-indexes excrement with dung and shit as underworld substances, situating them within the depth-psychological imagination of chthonic reality rather than within pathological registers.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
‘Well, well, it may even make me give another push, but it won’t make me defecate,’ so he exclaimed defiantly.
Radin’s Winnebago trickster cycle presents defecation as a site of bodily autonomy and comic transgression, illustrating the mythological dimension of excrement as an index of the trickster’s unruly somatic existence.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting
‘Man is a god who shits.’ Faced with the incongruous image of a defecating divinity, we can either howl in outrage or laugh out loud.
Citing Becker’s formulation, Kurtz uses the image of a defecating divinity to ground a spirituality of humility, treating excrement as the emblematic marker of human finitude set against divine aspiration.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994aside
OKWP [n.] ‘muck, excrement’ (Epich., Ar., Stratt.). IE *sk-or ‘excrement’
Beekes traces the Greek term for excrement to the Indo-European root *sk-or, providing the etymological substrate that anchors the symbolic field across classical and depth-psychological usage.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside