Disgust and Preoedipal Fixation

Abstract

Psychoanalytic theory posits that as development proceeds through various psychosexual stages, early desires may turned into revulsion, in order that one may meet the demands of the ~xternal world and the superego (Greenson, 196i, p. 371). In his early work, Freud (1897) anticipated this notion by equating the unpleasure experienced from the memory-excitation of abandoned sexual zones with the feeling of disgust. It follows that the degree of disgust one experiences in a preoedipal area is a function of its abandonment by the ego as a primary source of pleasure and thus negatively related to fixation. To test the complementariry of fixation and disgust, 19 male and 61 female college sophomores were first given the group Rorschach and then asked to rank order a deck of 12 disgusting activities. The deck contained three each of oral, sadistic, and anal cards, as well as three non-related fillers. The disgust score was computed for each content by summing the rank values of the respective cards for each fixation area. Juni and Frenz (1981) review the experimental literature on the use of Rorschach content scoring to yield precise fixational data on these three preoedipal areas. Since rank ordering is mutually exclusive, the Rorschach scores were similarly treated by dividing each score by the tocal of the three scores. The magnitude of each fixation score is relative to the others rather than absoluce, Results were similar for men and women, and are therefore presented together. Pearson product-moment correlations between Rorschach ratio scores and disgust indices show that the oral fixation score was negatively related to the oral disgust score ( r = -.20, p = .04), the sadistic fixation score was negatively related to the sadistic disgust score ( r = -.21, p = .03), and the anal fixation score was nor related to the anal disgust score ( r = .14, p = .11). The weak, but significant correlations for oralicy and sadism typify empirical/statistical analyses of psychoanaiytic hypotheses. The lack of a significant relationship for analiry may be due to the increased likelihood of reaction formation in anal characters which would obfuscate the expcted pattern. These results confirm the potential for experimental validation of implications of psychosexual development theory.