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William Ian Miller's latest book is not a psychoanalytic study of disgust. Although Miller is responsive to Freud's work, he tends to dismiss what he calls “depth psychology,” distancing his approach from psychoanalytic accounts of aversion, antipathy, and disgust. Such distancing is notable, and I'll comment on it here, but a review of Miller's book belongs in this journal because his interest in people's recoil from others—specifically, other people's bodies—has profound repercussions for a “psychoanalysis of culture and society.”
If we seek only to enhance our understanding of intimacy and group bonds, The Anatomy of Disgust will disappoint us. Discussing our recoil from such diverse phenomena as moldy food and used diapers, bad breath and earwax, Miller seems to be pushing chiefly for greater tolerance of the body's various secretions and smells. But The Anatomy of Disgust also reflects on our aversion to others' excessive proximity. Partly defeating the ameliorative aims of his prologue and opening chapter, Miller, in a later chapter on “Mutual Contempt and Democracy,” traces our structural inability to tolerate the most noxious aspects of living with other people.
Since Miller avows, in his preface, that his “general suspiciousness of and hostility to the reductionism of depth psychology threatened to obscure [his] better judgment” (xv), The Anatomy of Disgust avoids crudely assessing Freud's work. Miller's reading of Freud is generally fair, providing we pause when reading, “What is psychoanalysis, after all, but an attempt to make the journey inside us reduplicate the horrors and disgusts of an anthropological expedition into the heart of darkness?” (22).
That we seek to reduplicate various “horrors and disgusts” is a phenomenon worthy of study, signaling in part “the allure of the disgusting” (108), so it's a pity Miller does not clarify this “reduplication.” “There are ontological problems regarding the emotions,” he admits, “that I do not wish to discuss in