“There is a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in”. Maintaining hygiene and striving for purity: An interdisciplinary study

Abstract

ContextThe concept of hygiene plays a significant role in human life, dividing spaces into opposing categories (clean vs. dirty, pure vs. taboo, familiar and uncanny, etc.) in the pursuit of a long and meaningful life. Across multiple disciplines, hygiene encompasses both physical-material and also mental-spiritual-abstract dimensions, and is studied through various lenses—medicine, religious and cultural studies, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, philosophy and more. ObjectivesThe article aims to describe and critically analyze the pattern that defines hygiene maintenance mechanisms in multiple spheres of human activity. The analysis include physical and cultural hygiene in external aspects of our lives, as well as mental-spiritual hygiene in the internal spheres. The investigation explores how the mechanism of pursuing the hygiene works to preserve the “clean” or the “pure” by preventing the intrusion of the “dirty” and “polluting” and examines the implications of strict hygiene practices on life and vitality. MethodThis is a theoretical study drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, including medical research on the formation of the concept of hygiene, leading to the presentation of the “hygiene hypothesis”, religious and cultural analysis of concepts of purity and pollution, as explored by Mary Douglas, and Freud's psychoanalytic theory with focus on the concept of the uncanny (unheimlich) as a sphere of life that seems to “pollute” our inner world. The implications of Freud's ideas are further examined in the works of Winnicott and others. ResultsThe study reveals that the strict enforcement of hygiene mechanisms, while aiming to eliminate the polluting element entirely, can paradoxically threaten the very vitality it seeks to protect. This paradox appears in different ways but follows a common pattern: the excessive pursuit of cleanliness may inadvertently harm the source of life that hygiene is intended to safeguard. InterpretationsThe article interprets the findings within a broader theoretical framework, and poses questions regarding the balance between the aspiration for purity and the preservation of life's essential vitality. Theoretical implications suggest a need for caution in how hygiene is approached in health policy, and also in contexts like psychology or psychoanalysis. Future research should explore how this balance can be maintained across other fields, such as ethics, media policy in consumer-driven society or education.