ABSTRACT
Daniel Defoe was the presiding restless genius of young aggressive genre emerging in early eighteenth-century England which liberated biography, setting it free to tell a new kind of human story. Defoe conveying all his own excitement in the telling, and, throughout, ensuring every reader would enjoy the same fraught thrills as he and Sheppard experienced as the escape trembled on the edge of success or failure. Painful or traumatic events have to be endured by most over their life-cycle; these are the times when the primary anxiety of the birth trauma is ever evoked. Otto Rank, in his work The Trauma of Birth, claims that: Psychoanalysis has been able to show how, from the child’s game, the higher and the highest pleasure-giving unrealities, namely, fantasy and art, emerge. When, by writing his Sheppard and Wild books, Defoe turned aside from his engagement with his weighty literary novels, he was doing more than titillating a public appetite for tales of crime.
