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.