Freud and Disgust
Jean Luc Monnier
Speaking in 1977 on the subject of disgust, Lacan states: “(sexuality) is abnormal in the way that I have defined: there is no sexual rapport. Freud had the merit of realizing that a case of neurosis was not structurally obsessive, but that it was hysterical at its core. That is, it is linked to the fact that there is no sexual rapport, that there are people who are disgusted by it. It is nevertheless a sign, a positive sign – it makes them throw up.”[1]
Freud immediately recognizes in Dora the importance of disgust in a situation that should rather have “provoked”, he says, “a definite sensation of sexual arousal.” Dora defends herself from a jouissance whose appeal she acknowledges, and disgust comes in place of sexual satisfaction.
It wasn’t until “Civilization and its Discontents” that Freud “raised” this disgust to the dignity of the human condition. “Sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the function itself [sexual life] which denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths.”[2] He explains the reasons for this in the footnote on the same page: “with the assumption of an erect posture by man and with the depreciation of his sense of smell, it was not only his anal erotism which threatened to fall a victim to organic repression, but the whole of his sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance which cannot further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete satisfaction and forces it away from the sexual aim into sublimations and libidinal displacement.”[3] In the translation of this work into French, the word “Widerstreben” is given as “résistance,” which is confusing. It is better to read “repugnance” (as in the English translation) or “aversion,” which would be more in keeping with the spirit of Freud’s text here.
Disgust then appears as the mark of the a-version of language to welcome jouissance as sexual, and the hysterical subject becomes the living witness to this.
Translation: Janet Haney
References
[1] Lacan, J., Seminar XXIV, L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile à mourre, lesson of 19 April 1977, unpublished (citation taken from the bibliography of PIPOL 8: A Non-Standard Clinical Practice, 2017.)
[2] Freud, S., “Civilization and its Discontents”, SE 21, pp. 105-6.
[3] “Am tiefsten reicht aber die Vermutung […] daß mit der Aufrichtung des Menschen und der Entwertung des Geruchssinnes die gesamte Sexualität, nicht nur die Analerotik, ein Opfer der organischen Verdrängung zu werden drohte, so daß seither die sexuelle Funktion von einem weiter nicht zu begründenden Widerstreben begleitet wird, das eine volle Befriedigung verhindert und vom Sexualziel wegdrängt zu Sublimierungen und Libidoverschiebungen.” Freud, S. (1930). “Das Unbehagen In Der Kultur”, Gesammelte Werke XIV, pp. 464-5.