Disgust: (Part 1)

From Darwin to Mid-Century Thought

Disgust is among the most viscerally felt emotions. It can wrinkle a nose, turn a stomach, and demand avoidance. Yet it is also layered, reaching from the sensory and bodily into the cultural and moral. Modern psychology often traces the study of disgust to Charles Darwin, but the story begins earlier, with language itself shaping how the emotion has been understood.

Language, Origins, and Darwin’s Prototype

The English disgust derives from the Latin gustus—taste—already directing our attention to ingestion and food rejection. By contrast, the German Ekel lacks this oral anchoring, a divergence that arguably helped theorists such as Freud connect disgust as much with sexual and excretory themes as with food.

Darwin (1872) located disgust firmly in the senses of taste and smell, defining it as “something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste” (in his brilliantly considered The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals). He offered the soup-on-beard example: “A smear of soup on a man’s beard looks disgusting, though there is of course nothing disgusting in the soup itself.” This captures disgust’s contextual nature: it is not the object in isolation but its proximity to ingestion and its placement that trigger revulsion.

Darwin also connected disgust to food rejection and contamination anxieties—linking it to the preservation of health through avoidance of putrid or spoiled matter. His observations anticipated both later cognitive theories of contagion and the more expansive cultural treatments that followed.

Disgust Beyond Food: Anthropological Insights

Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) reframed disgust not simply as a matter of toxicity or sensory aversion, but as boundary maintenance. Her celebrated thesis – ‘dirt is matter out of place’ – suggests that pollution fears track violations of cultural categories.

In this light, a hair in soup is disgusting not for its chemical properties but for its displacement across boundaries (head to bowl).

Douglas’s framework laid the groundwork for later treatments of disgust as a regulator of social and moral order.

Freud and the Psychoanalytic Legacy

Though Freud wrote sparingly on disgust, he placed it alongside shame and modesty as reaction formations against forbidden desires. Disgust was a key affect in the repression of impulses tied not only to the mouth but also to the anal and sexual zones. In his framing, disgust diverted desire into culturally acceptable channels while guarding against contamination by the body’s products and taboos.

This psychoanalytic perspective reflected a broader shift: disgust was no longer only about food, but also about sexuality, excreta, and the self’s boundaries. The linguistic breadth of Ekel in German perhaps facilitated this widening of scope.

Angyal and the Social-Cognitive Turn

A pivotal but often overlooked contribution came from András Angyal’s 1941 paper Disgust and Related Aversions. Angyal argued that disgust protects us not because certain objects are chemically toxic, but because they symbolise degradation and lowness. Human and animal wastes, for example, evoke revulsion due to what they represent socially and symbolically, not simply due to their physical properties.

In Angyal’s formulation, disgust is richly cognitive and social—a matter of meaning as much as matter.

This was an early articulation of what later theorists would stress: disgust is about what substances and actions signify in relation to the body, society, and identity.

From Reflex to Culture-Bound Emotion

By the mid-20th century, disgust had evolved in academic thought from a reflex-like food rejection (Darwin) to a culturally charged, symbol-laden emotion (Douglas, Angyal, Freud). The stage was set for later psychologists, especially Paul Rozin, to chart disgust’s cognitive rules, developmental trajectory, and moral extensions.

Conclusion

By the mid-20th century, disgust had moved from Darwin’s sensory-based account of food rejection into a more layered concept bound up with culture, symbolism, and the self. Douglas reframed it as “matter out of place,” Freud linked it to sexuality and repression, and Angyal emphasised its cognitive and social meanings. What began as a reflexive defence of the mouth had become a complex guardian of boundaries—bodily, social, and moral. This trajectory set the stage for Rozin and others to develop disgust into a research programme that would reveal its rules, expansions, and moral reach.

In my post Disgust (Part 2) we’ll see how in the latter half of the 20th century, Rozin and colleagues would pick up these threads—anchoring disgust in food and contamination, but showing how its logic of contagion, similarity, and animal-reminder cues extend far beyond the kitchen into sex, death, morality, and even the boundaries of the self.

References (Part 1)

• Angyal, A. (1941). Disgust and related aversions. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 36, 393–412.

• Darwin, C. (1872/1874). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray.

• Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

• Freud, S. (1905/1953). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7). London: Hogarth Press.

• [Etymology discussion.] See books.openedition.org.