Psychoanalysis and the Eew Factor

Curious about ambivalences and how we might attend to what we would rather not know, the late psychoanalyst Muriel Dimen took an interest in what she called the “eew! factor,” the visceral reaction of disgust and revulsion that is usually far more ambivalent than we like to think. Laced with attraction and excitement, relegated often to the unconscious, the “eew! factor” will provide us a lens for thinking with psychoanalysis about desires, bodies, social and moral boundaries, power, violence, ethics, and their ambivalences. Conceptions of purity and pollution, taboo and transgression work to establish norms and boundaries, while also rendering the forbidden exceptional, threatening, alluring, and powerful. We will attend to the dynamics of transference and countertransference to think through the ambivalences of attraction, pleasure, embarrassment, revulsion, and shame that surround investments in and rejections of queerness, racialization, religion, and institutions. We will examine how value and power do and don’t accrue around taboos and transgressions and to secrecy and revelations. In light of the affective intensities of the “eew! factor” that seems never far in our everyday negotiations of social, moral, and bodily boundaries, we will also ask what ordinariness and a lack of exceptionality in relation to the “eew!” might look like, if it is even possible.