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If Freud's theories are followed to their logical conclusions, it will be seen that the horror of the putrefaction of the body is obliquely derived from sexual repression. The body is reviled because its impulses are disgusting, immoral, and threaten to overwhelm the child striving for bodily mastery and independence. The child also seeks acceptance from the parents and society who will abandon or punish the narcissistic child who does not conform. Sexuality and desire are repressed, inhibited, and condemned, while the body becomes a source of pollution and corruption. There is subsequentiy a connection between bodily disgust, repression, and the attempt to escape body meanings through idealization of the mind and soul. That which is noble, clean, nonthreatening, and controllable becomes the desideratum, which generates that emblematically Western conception of man as both disgustingly sinful when sexual and sublimely noble when divorced from physicality.
Sexuality has been considered a source of sin and impurity, at least since the appearance of Greek philosophies that emphasized transcendence of the body, and since the inception of Christianity, whose history is replete with revulsion for sex and the body (Barrett, 1958; Brown, 1959, pp. 179-307; duBois, 1988). It is this very derogation of sexuality and the body that Freud considered symptoms of neurosis.
All transcendental illusions have at their source the desire to deny the corporeal nature of man. … (Hoffman, 1958, cited in Feifel, 1959, p. 136)