This essay asks how psychoanalysis can help explain and understand the etiology and phenomenology of disgust. It claims that disgust can be thought of in topographical terms: on the higher psychic levels, it has the potential to serve as a reaction-formation mechanism against repressed sexual drives, while on the archaic levels, disgust has the potential to serve as an attempt to defend against psychotic anxieties. The first part of the essay centers on the etiology of disgust and the connection proposed by Freud between disgust and sexual drive. It is further argued that the connection between disgust and sexuality makes it possible to explain the polymorphic and liminal structure of disgust and the ways (and reasons) disgust can arouse contradictory sensations. In the second part of the essay, two examples from David Lynch’s film Eraserhead are presented to illustrate how feelings of disgust can extend “beyond the pleasure principle” and express the crisis that occurs in the integration of the psyche-soma system.