Coprophilia and creativity

Coprophilia—the clinical term given to the pleasure of touching, looking at and eating faeces—was always a temptation for Daniel Defoe. Sometimes, ingeniously, he did find means of yielding to his desire in ways that did not invite disapprobation. His handling of clay, freeing it from excessive soil to manufacture bricks and pantiles in the works he established in Tilbury, no doubt, brought him displaced illicit pleasures as well as one of his rare commercial successes. But in The King of Pirates his coprophilia emerges unashamed. Many and various were the circumlocutions practised by Defoe, in defiance of the original imperious parental command, to regain the coprophiliac joys insensitively denied to him in infancy. By thus relating Defoe’s early coprophiliac yearnings to his works, we are following a well worn path. The enigmatic relationship between perversion and creativity has been continuously explored since S. Freud’s message: that, in effect, the artist and the pervert emerge from the self-same ecology.