Concept
Sublimation
Redirecting a drive toward socially valued aims.
Development
1905
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the Three Essays Freud names sublimation as the diversion of sexual drive energy from sexual aims to other, culturally valued ones. It begins in the latency period, and Freud makes it a source of artistic activity and of character.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
1955
reworked by Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann recasts sublimation in the terms of ego psychology. It becomes a change in the mode of drive energy, from instinctual to non-instinctual, which supplies the ego with energy for its functions. He folds it into a wider neutralization that works on aggression as well as on libido and comes in degrees.
In Notes on the Theory of Sublimation (1955)
1960
reworked by Jacques Lacan
In the seminar of 1959–1960 Lacan moves sublimation away from a change of the drive's aim toward the place of the object. Sublimation raises an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing, the lost and inaccessible das Ding, and art is organised around the void the Thing leaves.
In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986)
Relations
- 1905 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the Three Essays Freud names sublimation as the diversion of sexual drive energy from sexual aims to other, culturally valued ones. It begins in the latency period, and Freud makes it a source of artistic activity and of character.
- 1914 diverges from Idealization
Freud separates the two: sublimation turns the drive toward a non-sexual aim, while idealization exalts the object without changing it. The ego ideal demands sublimation but cannot enforce it, so a lofty ideal is no proof that sublimation has succeeded.
- 1955 gave rise to Neutralization
In "Notes on the Theory of Sublimation" (1955) Hartmann recast Freud's sublimation as one case of a more general neutralization of drive energy, covering aggression as well as libido.
- 1955 reworked by Heinz Hartmann
Hartmann recasts sublimation in the terms of ego psychology. It becomes a change in the mode of drive energy, from instinctual to non-instinctual, which supplies the ego with energy for its functions. He folds it into a wider neutralization that works on aggression as well as on libido and comes in degrees.
- 1960 reworked by Jacques Lacan
In the seminar of 1959–1960 Lacan moves sublimation away from a change of the drive's aim toward the place of the object. Sublimation raises an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing, the lost and inaccessible das Ding, and art is organised around the void the Thing leaves.
Works
- 1905
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freud's three essays, published by Deuticke in 1905, deal with the sexual aberrations, with infantile sexuality and with the transformations of puberty. Together they argue that the sexual drive is present from infancy, that it is made up of component drives bound to erotogenic zones, and that it reaches its adult genital form only through a course of development. Later editions added an account of the pregenital organisations of the libido.
- 1914
On Narcissism: An Introduction
Freud's 1914 essay, published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, treats narcissism as a normal state of the libido. It sets the libido invested in the ego against the libido invested in objects, and primary narcissism against secondary narcissism. It contrasts two types of object-choice, the anaclitic and the narcissistic, introduces the concept of the ego ideal, and separates sublimation, which concerns the drive, from idealization, which concerns the object.
- 1955
Notes on the Theory of Sublimation
This paper began as Heinz Hartmann's introduction to the Panel on Sublimation at the Midwinter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York on 4 December 1954. It was published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child in 1955 (vol. 10, pp. 9–29) and reprinted in his Essays on Ego Psychology (1964). In it Hartmann recasts Freud's concept of sublimation in the terms of ego psychology. At its centre is neutralization, which he defines as the change of both libidinal and aggressive energy away from the instinctual and toward a non-instinctual mode, and which he takes to be essential to what is usually called sublimation. Freud had held that the ego works with desexualized energy. Hartmann extends this to aggression and holds that neutralized energy may come from both drives, and probably from the ego as well. The term sublimation may be kept for the neutralization of libido, as Freud used it, or widened into a synonym for neutralization. Neutralization comes in many shades, along a continuum from fully instinctual to fully neutralized energy, and the capacity to neutralize varies from person to person. Neutralization offers an alternative to turning aggression either outward or against the self, and self-preservation, as a function of the ego, depends on it. Hartmann refuses to define sublimation by normality, but he allows that the capacity for sublimation is correlated with health and illness. He ties neutralization to the secondary autonomy of ego functions. Later critics questioned the transformations of psychic energy that the theory assumes.
- 1986
Lacan's seminar of 1959–1960, established by Jacques-Alain Miller and published by Éditions du Seuil in 1986 as Book VII of Le Séminaire. Lacan takes up Freud's das Ding as the lost and inaccessible Thing around which desire is organised, and on that basis redefines sublimation: no longer a change in the drive's aim, but the raising of an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing. Art, in this account, is organised around the void that the Thing leaves. Through a reading of Antigone, the seminar asks what an ethics of desire would be for psychoanalysis. Commentators often read it as the point at which Lacan's teaching turns toward the Real, although whether there was such a turn is disputed.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Notes on the Theory of Sublimation1955Evidence for a relation
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality1905Evidence for a relation
- The Ethics of Psychoanalysis1986Evidence for a relation
- On Narcissism: An Introduction1914Evidence for a relation