J. David Miller, MD
“Non-clinical domains.” That covers a lot of territory. But Freud not only explored the vast universe within our minds, he also explored the route from that inner universe to those outer, non-clinical domains. He explored the psychological process called sublimation. The term refers to the way our unconscious wishes, fantasies, and conflicts, not only impact the real world, but shape whatever we create, for better or worse, in that world…relationships, works of art, scientific ideas, political systems, religions, or ideologies.
Freud first sketched out this concept over 100 years ago. In a 1905 paper, he calls sublimation simply a “diversion of sexual instinctual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones” (p. 178). But at this stage the concept is so broad that it functions mostly as a place holder. In the same paper he also calls sublimation “one of the origins of artistic activity,” and he uses the term to account for reaction formation and to explain how “a person’s ‘character’ is built up” (p. 238).
However, five years later, in his 1910 paper on Leonardo, Freud has worked out the concept of sublimation much more fully. He writes about how Leonardo sublimated his sexual desire for his mother. He says the artist re-directed and transformed his desire to have her into a desire just to look, and then more broadly, into an “urge to know” (p. 132), into curiosity, sexual and scientific. But Freud also says that a portion of Leonardo’s libido was left unsublimated, remaining “fixated” on his mother, Caterina: “the blissful memories of his relations with her continued to be preserved in the unconscious.” He says these memories “remained in an inactive state,” but later resurfaced in his art: “what an artist creates provides at the same time an outlet for his sexual desire.”
Leonardo found “an outlet for his sexual desire” toward his mother by painting not only the Mona Lisa, but also the “series of mysterious pictures which are characterized by the enigmatic smile,” according to Freud. He says that through sublimation Leonardo created a displaced, symbolic representation of his earliest object: “the smiling women are nothing other than repetitions of his mother Caterina” (p. 111). In creating a portrait, Leonardo projected onto the canvas an image of his mother, in fantasy and then in paint. If he could not have her in real life, unconsciously he would have her in paint. I read somewhere that this portrait, rolled up, went with Leonardo everywhere.
So this is how, with sublimation, Freud leads psychoanalysis into the non-clinical domain of art. Even if, to be whimsical, we define those domains concretely, as physical places, sublimation leads us, through the Mona Lisa, to the Louvre. But not all sublimation is so ennobling. It also leads us from the Louvre, to The Da Vinci Code, and then on to the domain of Barnes and Noble and the multiplex. These all reflect somebody’s sublimation.
Nearly 80 years after Freud’s Leonardo paper, Hans Loewald published a slim monograph, called Sublimation, with a somewhat different view of the process. For Freud, Leonardo’s aim was literally to recapture a visual image, of his mother, alone. For Loewald, the aim of sublimation is to recapture the subjective experience of the self in relationship to the mother. In a way Loewald describes a two person concept of sublimation.
Freud, as we all know, anticipated many psychoanalytic concepts that he did not live long enough to develop. I think he anticipated Loewald’s expansion of his theory of sublimation. In The Ego and The Id, written 12 years after his Leonardo essay, Freud suggests that the ego “begins by changing sexual object-libido into narcissistic libido and then, perhaps goes on to give it another aim” (p. 30). In other words, Leonardo painted portraits that mirrored not only his mother, but a two person experience, his internalized experience of being loved by her.
In his monograph on Sublimation, written shortly before he died, Loewald, like Freud, touches on aspects he never had time to explore. For example, he mentions the fate of the aggressive drives in sublimation, and its connection with “guilt, expiation, and atonement” (p. 82). I believe these aspects still remain to be fully explored.
And so, 100 years later, Freud’s idea of sublimation not only remains useful, but continues to give rise to questions for further study. For those of us who are interested in the application of psychoanalysis to non-clinical domains, Freud is still very much with us.
But my impression is that sublimation has not had the prominence it deserves in analytic scholarship. It has not become a concept of “ill repute,” like the death instinct, and more recently the transference neurosis. But it seems to have slipped into the realm of concepts that are taken for granted, without finding much application. Until recent research in neuroscience, perhaps that was becoming true even for the concept of the unconscious, itself. However, I believe the neglect of sublimation has to do with our tending to stick with Freud’s earliest formulation of it.
Finally, to return to Freud’s discovery of sublimation, and to the fate of his idea, I recommend two comprehensive reviews, one by Heinz Hartmann, of 1955, and another, by Daniel Boesky, written about 30 years later. A few years after Boesky’s review, in 1988,
This view draws a lot on Winnicott’s work on what he calls “the location of cultural experience” in the transitional space where mother and infant play.