Sublimation (psychology)

In the opening section of Human, All Too Human entitled 'Of first and last things', Nietzsche wrote:[3]

There is, strictly speaking, neither unselfish conduct, nor a wholly disinterested point of view. Both are simply sublimations in which the basic element seems almost evaporated and betrays its presence only to the keenest observation. 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. But what if this chemistry established the fact that, even in its domain, the most magnificent results were attained with the basest and most despised ingredients? Would many feel disposed to continue such investigations? Mankind loves to put by the questions of its origin and beginning: must one not be almost inhuman in order to follow the opposite course?[4]

In Freud's psychoanalytical theory, erotic energy is allowed a limited amount of expression, owing to the constraints of human society and civilization itself. It therefore requires other outlets, especially if an individual is to remain psychologically balanced. The ego must act as a mediator between the moral norms of the superego, the realistic expectations of reality, and the basic Id's. One method by which the ego lessens the stress that unacceptably strong urges or emotions can cause is through sublimation. Sublimation transforms undesirable impulses into desirable and acceptable behaviors.[5]

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 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), his daughter, Anna, classed sublimation as one of the major 'defence mechanisms' of the psyche.[6]

Freud got the idea of sublimation while reading The Harz Journey by Heinrich Heine. The story is about Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach who cut off the tails of dogs he encountered in childhood and later became a surgeon. Freud concluded that sublimation could be a conflict between the need for satisfaction and the need for security without perturbation of awareness. 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.[7]

Projection is a mental process also introduced by Freud in which people attribute to others what is on their mind. An example of this would be if an individual is frustrated and angry and assume that other people are feeling that type of way towards them as well. This defense mechanism was introduced to Freud from whom he borrowed the term projection from neurology to refer to the intrinsic ability of neurons to transmit one stimuli of the nervous system to the next.

Seeing oneself in another is still considered to be the meaning of the phrase in modern psychological science. Positive and negative repercussions can result from this seemingly universal human social animal inclination. Projection can be the root of both compassion and cold nature, depending on the traits that are projected and if they are denied in the self.[8]

Sexual sublimation was according to Freud a deflection of sexual instincts into non-sexual activity, based upon a principle akin to the conservation of energy in physics.[9] There is a finite amount of activity, and it is converted, in a mechanistic fashion like a mechanical engine, from sexual activity to non-sexual.[9] One such example is the case of Wolf Man, a case in which a young boy's sexual attraction to his father was redirected towards Christianity and eventually led the boy to obsessional neurosis in the form of uncontrollable sacrilegious reverence.[10] Freud travelled to Clark University to speak about instances of sexual sublimation, but he was not wholly convinced of his own theories.[11] 20th century psychological thought by the likes of Melanie Klein has largely relegated the idea and replaced it with subtler ideas.[12] One such idea is that the sexual desires are not made totally non-sexual, but rather transformed into a more appropriate desire.[13]

Although superficially valid, with anecdotal examples from non-psychologists of civilizations at large and specific great achievers repressing sexual urges (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[12]), it is ill-defined[12] and comes with the caveats that it rarely happens in practice, that many things attributed to it are actually the results of something else, and that it is most definitely not some quasi-physical transfer of some sort of "sexual energy" in the modern psychoanalytical view but rather an internal thought process.[12]

C. G. Jung argued that Freud's opinion:

...can only be based on the totally erroneous supposition that the unconscious is a monster. It is a view that springs from fear of nature and the realities of life. Freud invented the idea of sublimation to save us from the imaginary claws of the unconscious. But what is real, what actually exists, cannot be alchemically sublimated, and if anything is apparently sublimated it never was what a false interpretation took it to be.[18]

In the same article, Jung went on to suggest that unconscious processes became dangerous only to the extent that people repress them. The more people come to assimilate and recognize the unconscious, the less of a danger it becomes. In this view sublimation requires not repression of drives through will, but acknowledgement of the creativity of unconscious processes and a learning of how to work with them.

This differs fundamentally from Freud's view of the concept. For Freud, sublimation helped explain the plasticity of the sexual instincts (and their convertibility to non-sexual ends) - see libido. 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). In his private letters, Jung criticized Freud for obscuring the alchemical origins of sublimation and for attempting instead to make the concept appear scientifically credible:

Sublimation is part of the royal art where the true gold is made. Of this Freud knows nothing; worse still, he barricades all the paths that could lead to true sublimation. This is just about the opposite of what Freud understands by sublimation. 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. Sublimation is a great mystery. Freud has appropriated this concept and usurped it for the sphere of the will and the bourgeois, rationalistic ethos.[19]

A study by Kim, Zeppenfeld, and Cohen studied sublimation by empirical methods.[34] These investigators view their research, published 2013 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, as providing "possibly the first experimental evidence for sublimation and [suggesting] a cultural psychological approach to defense mechanisms."[34]^: 639

• One of the best-known examples in Western literature is in Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice, where the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous writer, sublimates his desire for an adolescent boy into writing poetry.[35][36]
• In Alberto Moravia's novel, Io e lui (Him and Me, 1971), the protagonist is in a constant unsuccessful quest to overcome the power of his large penis, so he sublimates into a serious film director.
• In Psychological Science: Mind, Brain and Behavior, by Michael Gazzaniga and Todd F. Heatherton, a more sinister example is given in which a sadist becomes a surgeon or a dentist. A direct example of this is in the musical and movie Little Shop of Horrors characterized in the descriptively sadistic character of Orin Scrivello who follows his mother's advice to become a dentist, quoting her "You'll find a way/to make your natural tendencies pay ... Son, be a dentist/People will pay you to be inhumane."
• Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None features a villain whose line of work as a judge, dealing out harsh sentences to guilty criminals, had previously permitted him to sublimate his homicidal urges.
• Sexual transmutation was quoted in Napoleon Hill's book Think and Grow Rich (1937) and was illustrated as a principle of success.
• In the Criminal Minds episode "The Bittersweet Science", it's mentioned that children with a violent past grow up to be police officers or soldiers, not necessarily boxers.
• In The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, sublimation is presented as the source of the Neo-Victorians' dominance: "...it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the Nipponese."

• Meltzer, Donald (2021). "Work, play, and sublimation". In Harris Williams, Meg (ed.). Selected Papers of Donald Meltzer. Vol. 1: Personality and Family Structure. ISD LLC. ISBN 9781912567850.