Within the depth-psychology corpus, feces occupies a surprisingly rich conceptual territory that extends well beyond mere bodily waste. The classical Freudian lineage — represented here by Abraham, Freud, and their developmental successors — establishes feces as the child’s first piece of private property, the original object of anal-erotic economy, and a symbolic currency homologous with money, gift, and retained possession. Abraham in particular elaborates the unconscious equation of expelling feces with the psychic ejection of a love-object, linking anal-sadistic organization to obsessional character, melancholia, and manic states. Hillman, writing from an archetypal vantage, reclaims this material differently: diarrhea becomes a movement into the underworld, the Greek borborygmus connecting intestinal rumblings to the filthy mire of Hades, while the child’s polymorphous delight in bodily products belongs to a broader Dionysian sensibility. Grof situates feces within the perinatal matrices, where coprophilic imagery signals the crushing encounter with birth biology and the paradoxical relief attending biological contact. Greene, in a more pedagogical register, traces toilet training as the crucible where creative self-production first meets social shame. Across all these positions, feces functions as a threshold substance — liminal between interior and exterior, self and world, creation and abjection — and its symbolic weight in clinical, archetypal, and transpersonal frameworks is consistently underestimated when treated as mere regression.
he treats that person in the same way as he does his earliest piece of private property, i.e. the contents of his body, his feces… it signifies to the unconscious mind of each an expulsion of that object in the sense of a physical expulsion of feces.
Abraham argues that at the anal-sadistic libidinal stage the object is unconsciously equated with feces, so that losing a love-object is experienced as its literal bodily expulsion.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis
The word that medicine still uses for rumblings in the intestines (borborygmus) is the word Plato and Aristophanes used for filthy mire in the underworld… Shit is the great leveler. We are crossing a border.
Hillman reframes feces and diarrhea as archetypal underworld phenomena, linking intestinal imagery linguistically and symbolically to the realm of death and dissolution.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
As children we take a certain pride in producing our feces. It is one of the first things our bodies produce. We feel that feces is something we are creating. Inherently, we don’t feel shameful about it, but eventually we learn that it is bad.
Greene identifies feces as the child’s first creative product, whose subsequent shaming by socialization initiates lasting conflicts around bodily autonomy, authority, and creative expression.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987thesis
coprophilia (fascination by feces and other materials usually considered revolting), coprophagia (eating feces in or outside of a sexual framework)… The deepest motivational force for these deviations appears to be the association between the contact with such biological materials and the termination of the agonizing experience of birth.
Grof interprets coprophilic phenomena as rooted in the perinatal matrices, where contact with feces and biological waste is unconsciously linked to the relief marking the end of birth agony.
, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975thesis
it had passions, sexual desires, lusts to kill; it feared, sacrificed, rejected; it hated and longed and it was composed of erogenous zones, preoccupied with feces, genitals, and deserved the name polymorphous perverse.
Hillman, summarizing Freud’s radical reimagination of childhood, places fecal preoccupation alongside genital and erotic experience as constitutive of the polymorphous child body.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
Their interest is concerned with the question of what remains of the material introduced into their body as a lasting possession. It is evident that they identify the content of the body with money.
Abraham traces the anal-character’s equation of retained body contents (feces) with money and permanent possession, underpinning the psychoeconomics of obsessional parsimony.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
Cleansing the body essentially consists of wiping away sweat, urine, feces, mucus, and other discharges and substances which, in and of themselves, are not erotic but obnoxious.
Within the yogic framework, feces is classed among the body’s polluting emissions whose contemplation serves to dissolve erotic illusion and free the practitioner from somatic identification.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting
Words for intestines and bowels, entera, koilia, can also be used for ‘womb.’ Koilia can also mean ‘excrement.’ The womb is easily aligned with
Padel documents the Greek linguistic convergence of womb, bowel, and excrement, situating feces within a broader cultural logic connecting feminine interiority, impurity, and chthonic power.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
the symptoms of the obsessional neurosis were the result of a regression of libido to this stage of development, which is characterized by a preponderance of the anal and sadistic component instincts.
Abraham situates the anal-sadistic stage — within which feces carries its primary symbolic charge — as the developmental ground of obsessional neurosis and related character pathologies.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting
eliciting emotions like fear and disgust with images of horrifying, repulsive things—spiders, snarling dogs, bloody gore, feces
Keltner notes feces as a standard disgust-eliciting stimulus in emotion research, marking its conventional role as a paradigmatic aversive object in experimental psychology.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023aside