Disgust

The Gatekeeper Emotion

Susan Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134910779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Susan Miller, author of two foundational works on shame ( The Shame Experience [TAP, 1985/1993pbk]; Shame in Context [TAP, 1996]), now turns to disgust, an intriguing emotion that has received little attention in the professional literature. For Miller, the psychological study of disgust revolves around boundary issues: We tend to feel disgusted about things (from bodily processes to decaying organic matter to ethnic attributes of "foreign" people) that lie on the border between our sense of self and nonself or between our sense of "good self" and "bad self." Miller's clinical and everyday examples of disgust lead her to explore the developmental grounding of the capacity to disgust, and this topic opens to consideration of the relation of the various sensory modalities to disgust reactions. Why, Miller asks, do we see disgusting images and smell disgusting smells but not hear disgusting sounds? And further, what makes sensory impressions or objects "disgusting" to certain people but not to others? Why do the images and smells of disease so frequently elicit disgust? And what is the relation of disgust to sex, procreation, and human intimacy? Laced with developmental insights and vivid illustrations of disgust-related syndromes, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion incorporates cultural analysis that links disgust to images of illness and health, to family life, to group identity, and to artistic and scientific creativity. For Miller, the central disgust dialectic - the self's need to safeguard itself against noxious intrusions from without and simultaneously to nourish itself through contact with "otherness" - obtains whether the discourse concerns nature, nations, or noses. With her typically graceful and gracious prose, Miller puts disgust on the psychological map and thereby adds a chapter to our understanding of the role of emotion in therapy and in everyday life.

Chapter 1

Entering the World of Disgust

Personal Helicon

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of

waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call

With a clean new music in it. And one

Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

–Seamus Heaney, for Michael Longley

It seats itself at the dinner table, slithers into the bathroom, cozies up to us in bed, and makes itself at home in family relations and national politics. As an emotion of our intimate lives, disgust has stirred the interest of psychologists, philosophers, novelists, poets, and anthropologists. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, disgust has been shunned as a subject of serious inquiry, no doubt in part because its unsociable stink threatens to transfer to those who study it. Important questions remain concerning the functions of disgust and how it gained its stature as one of the six basic emotions Darwin (1872) catalogued: Is disgust a remnant of our animal past or is it a uniquely human parsing of events? How does disgust show its face in the consulting room? Is it widely distributed clinically or allied primarily with particular syndromes? Is it pathognomonic for any single syndrome? And what variant forms or affective kin does disgust have? These questions and others will be considered as we examine disgust's place in diverse contexts ranging from the vegetative profusion and gaseous decay of the swamp, to the infected sneezes and festering wounds of the sickroom, to the ethnic slurs of the backroom and battleground, to the “you stink” salvos of brothers and sisters at home.

Many observers center their understanding of disgust in the body and its innate biology. Some see disgust as inextricable from the world of food and ingestion (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, 1999) or that of malodorous body waste (Angyal, 1941). Others understand the drive to flee from carriers of infection (Curtis and Biran, 2001) as the basis for an emotion that discriminates between unwholesome and benign contacts. Rozin and Fallon (1987) observed that disgust itself is contagious: whoever touches something disgusting becomes disgusting and untouchable. Hygiene researchers Curtis and Biran see this transmissibility of the fouled, disgusting state as advancing disgust's ability to protect us from physical infection. They refer to Pinker's (1988) concept of “intuitive microbiology” (p. 22) as an explanation for why we label as disgusting whoever or whatever comes into contact with something disgusting. They believe we understand instinctively that touch or proximity may communicate biological dangers.

Differences exist among the biological theories in that one person may emphasize protection from germs (whether these are transmitted through the air, the skin, or the mouth), while another focuses exclusively on oral intake, and a third focuses on the risk of contact with animal waste. In each of the biological theories, however, disgust operates as an instinctive response genetically maintained because of its protective value for the body: it makes us want to cease smelling, ingesting, or touching whatever substance arouses it. Biological theories also establish the protective value of one person's disgust being detectable to another. An adult wearing disgust on the face cautions others about the unhealthy contact that stimulated the emotional reaction. A feeding infant with what appears to be disgust tightening its face or food pushed from the mouth signals the parent to stop feeding the baby a displeasing substance. Interactions between babies and older people suggest some degree of innateness in food aversions, but also demonstrate transmission of disgust across generations as adults consciously and unconsciously model disgust for certain things put into the mouth. An adult may deliberately teach a child disgust over dirty coins while unwittingly modeling disgust for Brussels sprouts.

Curtis and Biran (2001) offer an interesting theory about the relative absence of disgust in the early months of life (pp. 27–28). They see disgust as unnecessary in infancy, a period during which the baby is protected from dangerous contacts by the attentive parent's disgust. Absence of disgust in infancy is viewed as offering developmental advantage because it promotes a baby's willingness to sample varied food offerings, which can result in good early nutrition and also in the biologically advantageous ability of the adult to recognize a great range of edible substances as acceptable. We also know that somewhat older children, now operating outside constant parental surveillance, can become extremely cautious about their food choices and subject to true disgust over many foods. One child becomes known in the family for eating only French fries, another for living on hamburger and bread. What happens then to the advantage conferred by the infant's comfort with varied foods? Is it lost altogether or does it impact later life food choices? These questions await research.

With the exception of the infancy hypothesis, the biological theories generally do a better job of explaining the evolution of disgust as a protective mechanism than of accounting for people who never experience disgust, are slow to arrive at disgust, or overcome disgust readily. The biological theories also have difficulty explaining adequately things that are disgusting due to context, meaning, and history. A friend recently showed her intuitive grasp of the contamination concept by commenting, “Some things are gross by association.” Interestingly, she meant mental association, not physical touch; therefore, her intuition did not seem rooted in “intuitive microbiology.” In fact, her comment was intended to explain why a perfectly clean, even sterile, object could be disgusting. She found her explanation in the associations linking the clean object to a disgusting one. Another friend wrote, “When I was a kid, both terrified and grossed out by insects, I was unable to touch the can of Raid my mother kept under the kitchen sink because it was associated with the disgusting bugs it was supposed to kill.”

A second group of theorists argues that an adequate depiction of disgust must go beyond the physical body to emphasize the self. It is the self, not the body per se, whose vulnerability to invasion and degradation is at issue when disgust arises. The self is vulnerable to agents as diverse as foodstuffs, feces, slimy messes that touch the skin, disturbing ideas and visions, immoral acts, and repellent people (see Miller, 1986, 1993). These theorists argue that, had nature cared only to equip us with an instinct to avoid rotten food or nonnutritious waste, simple distaste would have sufficed, as it likely does for dogs and cats; disgust would not be needed. According to these authors, the true defining characteristic of disgust is its protection of self boundaries, not body boundaries, whether represented by the shut mouth, the pinched nostrils, or the hastily wiped skin surface. Some writers and researchers (Rozin et al., 1999) see disgust as a response clearly evolved to reject bad food; they believe, however, that the disgust response has been exploited over time by our interpersonal and self-protective needs so that its functions have expanded greatly.

Although Freud could be single-mindedly focused on the libido as the primary mover of every human action, he did not reduce the libido to a purely biological drive but saw it operating within a complex psychological field that is rich in human meanings and motives. Similarly, disgust as he described it is a psychological force, not a manifestation of nature providing us defense against germs. This psychological perspective on disgust is conveyed well when–considering disgust over anal sex–Freud (1905) asserts that “people who try to account for this disgust by saying that the organ in question serves the function of excretion and comes in contact with excrement–a thing which is disgusting in itself–are not much more to the point than hysterical girls who account for their disgust at the male genital by saying that it serves to void urine” (p. 152). Freud also understands that oral revulsion has little to do with hygiene and much to do with context and meaning. He states that “the limits of such disgust [over “perverse” practices] are, however, often purely conventional; a man who will kiss a pretty girl's lips passionately, may perhaps be disgusted at the idea of using her tooth-brush, though there are no grounds for supposing that his own oral cavity, for which he feels no disgust, is any cleaner than the girl's” (pp. 17–18). Freud is attuned to the biological needs of the human organism; however, he does view disgust as managing defensive needs of the psychological self. He fits better with the self-oriented group within those considering disgust than with those whose emphasis is on biological dangers related to ingestion, inhalation, or touch.

My own thinking leads me to understand disgust as fundamentally about protecting and maintaining the self. One branch of its root system may have evolved for the purpose of avoiding or disgorging toxic organic substances, including waste and spoiled food. Its roots may also extend to the need to evade toxic skin contacts and bad air. However, these roots alone do not seem adequate to support the development of disgust. Other species share with us these biological needs, but not even monkeys, our close relatives, have developed disgust. Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley (2000) argue strongly that disgust is a food-directed response, but see disgust as forming fully only in childhood (between four and eight). They do not adequately explore why an emotion that has evolved to protect the body from noxious food would appear so late in a child's development. Even Curtis and Biran's hypothesis regarding maternal responsibility for infantile food choices would not obviously predict so late an appearance of disgust.

Food rejection occurs in various species and in human infants, either without emotional awareness or with simple distaste, but once we enter the world of fully formed disgust, we are dealing with a complex emotional commentary oriented toward promoting the safety of the uniquely human self. Even when operating to protect the body's health, disgust functions by way of the self, which mediates many contacts between person and environment. That mediation involves assigning significance to elements of the environment and deciding how to interact with them. The chapters to follow will show disgust fulfilling a variety of self-protecting functions and will also examine how disgust differs from horror–a neighboring emotion that is the subject of chapter 10–in its use of self-boundary reinforcement and good-bad division.

While protecting the self, disgust also operates to define individuals’ concepts of self and body and to establish relationships between the two conceptual realms. Variations exist across time and among individuals with regard to the sense of connection with the body self. One person may feel a sense of unity with his body, as if no duality or estrangement exists. Another person (or the same person, at another time) may experience her body as taking care of much of its own business, running its own shop, doing its own thing. She can go to sleep and the body carries on with its breathing, its chemistry, its circulation, its getting sick or getting well. It may be seen as having its own wisdom (e.g., about what foods it needs), its own motives (e.g., to trip us up, to make us slow our pace), its own culpability (e.g., in hosting cancer), or its own personality (e.g., persistent or accident-prone). A menopausal woman of Buddhist bent talked of conversing gently with her organs and getting to know how they were feeling and faring. She did not see herself as unusually alienated from her body. On the contrary, she felt able to achieve more feedback from these normally mute organs than most do. Another woman referred with disdain to her breast, which had twice been afflicted with cancer, and said it had “a mind of its own,” was unconcerned about her, and thus the surgeon “could have it.” An elderly man commented that, as far as he could see, his immune system “did nothing but sleep on the job,” whereas a younger, fit man said, “My T cells are world class … they're champions.”

Even the mind can feel apart from the “me,” subdivided so that a person can say, “part of my mind is gone on vacation today,” due to hormones or medicines or something outside awareness. Mental disturbance can have a not-me feel to it that can be unsettling or reassuring, as when someone concludes, “that's not me, that's the depression talking” or “I didn't choose to gamble away that money–my addiction took over.”

How does disgust impact these internal subdivisions, especially with respect to the self-body conundrum? Disgust promotes certain self-conceptions, certain illusions even. The idea, for example, of using disgust to protect my body by keeping certain things distant is in part a protective fantasy, because much of the time disgust is actually protecting my sense of security rather than any true physical security. Disgust does not consistently serve the microbiological security of the corporeal body, but it does consistently promote psychological security, a mission that includes security-seeking for the imagined body. Disgust asserts: “We have a well-coordinated system in place here in which the senses operate like sentries and give the self information about what to keep away from the body.” While much in this conception is largely nonsense, the reassurance it offers is part of the mind-set created by disgust. Moments of sharp disgust reinforce the sense of self-other boundary, of inside and outside, of body under the protective watch of consciousness. They also work to protect the spiritual integrity of the individual or the group, either of which can insist that something is morally, ethically, or aesthetically unacceptable.

As we develop beyond earliest infancy, the body in many ways becomes a symbol of the self. The body stands alongside other self-symbols, such as one's house, one's car, or one's wardrobe. Wrye and Welles (1998) capture this symbolism in describing the skin–a physical organ–as something that “denotes the boundary between the psychic outside and inside and is also the symbol of containment” (p. 97, italics added). As explored further in chapter 11, adult concerns about the body, and the role of disgust in protecting the body, are complex amalgams of intuitive and learned health consciousness relating to the actual body together with reactions to perceived threats to the symbolic body.

What we experience as worries “about the body” may actually concern our feelings about self-security masquerading as interest in bodily safety. For example, when an effluvium of body odor offends my nose, one must ask if it is in fact the nose twitching in disgust that has initiated the response, or is it my class sense, which detects beggary in what it smells. If we do not want our skin to touch something slimy, our concern may be less about skin infection than about associating the self with such a mess. In the evolutionary background of fearing to touch or otherwise contact a “mess” may be the intuitive microbiology Pinker discusses, which may shape our ideas of what constitutes mess.

Many disgust experiences arise in response to sensory input. This pattern does not, however, belie the selfs position at the center of disgust. The self begins its development with body experience and such experience comes to signify much about the state of the self. We will also see, in chapter 2, that the senses all generate disgust according to the meaning of the stimulus that provides the sensory information. Among the senses, smell, taste, and touch associate most strongly with disgust. Vision is less critical and hearing least of all. The senses most liable to carry information that provokes disgust are those associated with close contact between the body and the outside. The idea of something very close to the body or touching it conveys risk that puts disgust on alert.

Because the experience of tasting signifies something soon to become part of the body, the sense of taste is keenly attuned to the need to reject what is foul, an observation that may suggest biological roots for disgust but may also signify the self in action protecting both bodily and psychic integrity. Smells enter the body imperceptibly through the air, making them potent invaders; they also activate ingestion impulses and that capability gives them disgust power. Things that touch the skin are close at hand and have potential to penetrate the skin surface, sometimes through dangerously imperceptible absorption, a process so incremental and undetectable that it creates unsettling doubt about the very concept of a firm body-environment boundary.

Texture deserves special attention as an important source of disgust. Unnerving textures (sliminess, for example, or gumminess) stimulate disgust whether on the body surface or on the mucosal surface of the mouth. Since many food aversions are responsive to texture even more than to taste or smell, one can regard them as expressions of the sense of touch. They differ somewhat from disgust over substances on other skin surfaces because our fantasy is of swallowing whatever is in the mouth, not absorbing it or sticking to it, surface-to-surface. As texturally disturbing foods are chewed, they become a familiar, generic mush, now hard to discriminate from other foods and less disgusting. Unfamiliarity, which connotes danger, is often a factor in heightening sensitivity to texture.

Tactile characteristics of disgusting skin contacts may differ for oral and nonoral skin surfaces. In the mouth, substances that contain lumps or seeds–especially slippery seeds–sometimes disgust. These substances have nonuniform texture; they contain objects of hard consistency within a softer substance. The hard substan...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Entering the World of Disgust
• Chapter 2 The Body and Mind of Disgust
• Chapter 3 Nature and Its Excesses
• Chapter 4 Varieties of Disgust
• Chapter 5 Disgust Syndromes
• Chapter 6 Sex, Procreation, and Human Intimacy
• Chapter 7 Disgust Within Family Groups
• Chapter 8 The Artistically or Scientifically Creative Individual and Freedom from Disgust
• Chapter 9 Group Identities and Hostility Across Borders: Affairs of Ethnicities, Classes, and Sects
• Chapter 10 Disgust and Horror
• Chapter 11 Concepts of Disease and Health
• Chapter 12 Final Comments
• References
• Index