Sublimation (psychology)
"[2] It occurs when displacement involves "the transformation of sexual or aggressive energies into culturally acceptable, even admirable, behaviors,"[3] and "serves a higher cultural or socially useful purpose, as in the creation of art or inventions"[4] In the opening section of Human, All Too Human entitled "Of first and last things", Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:[5] There is, strictly speaking, neither unselfish conduct, nor a wholly disinterested point of view.
All that we need and that could possibly be given us in the present state of development of the sciences, is a chemistry of the moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and feeling, as well as of those emotions which we experience in the affairs, great and small, of society and civilization, and which we are sensible of even in solitude.
[6] In Freud's psychoanalytical theory, erotic energy is allowed a limited amount of expression, owing to the constraints of human society and civilization itself.
[7] Sublimation (German: Sublimierung) is the process of transforming libido into "socially useful" achievements, including artistic, cultural, and intellectual pursuits.
Freud considered this psychical operation to be fairly salutary compared to the others that he identified, such as repression, displacement, denial, reaction formation, intellectualisation, and projection.
In an action performed many times throughout one's life, which firstly appears sadistic, thought is ultimately refined into an activity which is of benefit to mankind.
[14] The concept is superficially evident, and anecdotal examples abound across time, occupation, and culture of origin (e.g. Renoir "painting with his cock", Wayland Young stating that "love's loss is empire's gain", Lawrence Stone's view that Western civilization has achieved so much because of sublimation, and the claims by biographers of many people from Higgins on Rider Haggard to Sinclair on George Grey[13]).
The concept also underpinned Freud's psychoanalytical theories, which showed the human psyche at the mercy of conflicting impulses (such as the super-ego and the id).
It is not a voluntary and forcible channeling of instinct into a spurious field of application, but an alchymical transformation for which fire and prima materia are needed.
[16]The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's exposition of sublimation is framed within a discussion about the relationship of psychoanalysis and ethics within the seventh book of his seminars.
"[22] Furthermore, man is the "artisan of his support system",[22] in other words, he creates or finds the signifiers which delude him into believing he has overcome the emptiness of Das Ding.
Lacan also considers sublimation to be a process of creation ex nihilo (creating out of nothing),[23] whereby an object, human or manufactured, comes to be defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding.
Lacan's prime example of this is the courtly love of the troubadours and Minnesänger[21] who dedicated their poetic verse to a love-object which was not only unreachable (and therefore experienced as something missing) but whose existence and desirability also centered around a hole (the vagina).
[26] If we consider again the definition of Das Ding, it is dependent precisely on the expectation of the subject to re-find the lost object in the mistaken belief that it will continue to satisfy him (or her).
In regard to religion, Lacan refers the reader to Freud, stating that much obsessional religious behavior can be attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness of Das Ding or in the respecting of it.
[32] As espoused in its foundational text,[33] the Tanya, the Chabad Lubavitcher sect of Judaism views sublimation of the animal soul as an essential task in life, wherein the goal is to transform animalistic and earthy cravings for physical pleasure into holy desires to connect with God.
