Dictionary:

coprophilia

  (kŏp'rə-fĭl'ē-ə)

An abnormal, often obsessive interest in excrement, especially the use of feces for sexual excitement.

The term "coprophilia" is used to describe a predilection for fecal and related matters. On January 4, 1898, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess: "Today I am sending you No. 2 of the "dreckological" reports . . ." (1985, p. 291). In creating this neologism from the German word Drek, meaning mud, filth, excrement, he was, according to Max Schur (1975), testifying to the abundant amount of anal material in his self-analysis at the time.

Food can remind children of excrement: "He protests loudly—in the form of overcompensation—the successful overcoming of his coprophiliac inclinations," Freud explained to his pupils (Wiener Psychoanalystiche Verinigung,1962-1975, p. 177). Repression of an olfactive coprophilic pleasure can determine the choice of a fetish (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d). In the same vein, on February, 24, 1910, he wrote to Karl Abraham: "I regard coprophilic olfactory pleasure as being the chief factor in most cases of foot and shoe fetishism" (1965a, p. 87).

He later indicated, in his article On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (1912d), that when man changed to the erect position he raised his smelling organ above ground level. It was then that "the coprophilic instinctual components [ . . . ] proved incompatible with our aesthetic standards of culture" (p. 189). Reflecting in the same article on sexual impotence of a psychic origin, he stated: "The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals—inter urinas et faeces—remains the decisive and unchangeable factor" (p. 189).

Coprophilia takes on an entirely different meaning in the light of work on mourning and the notion of loss. Reflecting on the subject of mourning, Karl Abraham (1924) detected in certain rites the link between loss and attachment to the content of the intestines. Given the specific features of the two opposite pleasures of anal eroticism, retention and expulsion, he distinguished the same opposition in the sadistic instincts. There would then be a link between the expulsion of the anal object and the melancholy that results from the expulsion of a person. Psychoanalysis thus facilitated the establishment of a link between melancholy, obsessional neuroses, and coprophilia. Abraham went on to write: "The coprophagic instinct seems to me to conceal a symbolism that is typical of melancholy" (1924, p. 444). The motion of introjection can then be considered as a psychic mechanism that is of central importance for melancholics.

Bibliography

Abraham, Karl. (1924). Melancholia and obsessional neurosis. In Selected papers of Karl Abraham (pp. 422-432). London: Hogarth.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.

——. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. SE, 11: 177-190.

Freud, Sigmund, and Abraham, Karl. (1965a). A psychoanalytic dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham: 1907-1926. (Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud, Eds.; Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham, Trans.). New York: Basic Books.

Freud, Sigmund, and Fliess, Wilhelm. (1985c). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess: 1887-1904. (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap/Harvard University Press.

Schur, Max. (1972). Freud: Living and dying. New York: International Universities Press.

Wiener Psychoanalystiche Verinigung. (1962-1975). Minutes 72, Scientific Meeting on March 10, 1909. In Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn (Eds.), Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Volume II: 1908-1910) (M. Nunberg, Trans.). New York: International Universities Press.

Further Reading

Karpman, B. (1948). Coprophilia: a collective review. Psychoanalytic Review, 35, 253-272.

Tarachow, Stanley. (1966). Coprophagia and allied phenomena. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 14, 685-699.

—DOMINIQUE J. ARNOUX

A preoccupation with feces.

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