ABSTRACT

This chapter presents a series of interventions aimed at reducing reactivity to a specific emotion, disgust, particularly intense and frequent at least among one segment of obsessive patients. It explains the analysis of the emotion and its function in the genesis and maintenance of obsessive disorders, before taking up the merits of interventions for change. Deontological guilt and disgust are emotions that evoke similar mental scenarios, particularly the threatened diminishment of one’s own moral worthiness. In some cultures, the overlay between dignity and protection of the body from disgusting substances is codified. Anti-disgust interventions focus on aspects of magical thinking that feed the perception of contamination, aiming to replace the representation ‘contamination versus purity’ with the representation ‘dirty versus clean’. When one feels contaminated, emotional reasoning, or confusion between an emotion or sensation and the reality of an external cause for that sensation, is strong.