Redirection or Highest Fulfilment?
In the passage just quoted from Freud we find the term 'sublimation'. In many readings of Freud, sublimation tends to be taken as virtually a form of psychopathology for reasons touched on above. However, the basic meaning of the term is the deployment of something, in this case psychic energy, toward a goal more sublime than its original purpose or primitive form. Freud writes: “Observation of men's daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly and which· are not sexual." (Freud 1985, p.167).
Now, if we remove ourselves slightly from Freud's concern with the primacy as he saw it of bodily functions (after all, he was a doctor) we can say instead that the love instinct is capable of diverse and extensive forms· of sublimation since love can be expressed in many ways and the carrying out of a professional activity can readily be one of these. Indeed, we do not need to think of such expression as a distortion at all. We simply need to acknowledge that love has a variety of expressions some of which are more sublime than others. Sublimated activity may not be a weak substitute, but actually constitute a more satisfying fulfilment.
Sublimation in esteem theory terms, therefore, becomes a matter of finding a more rather than a less sublime method of finding fulfilment of the need to love. An artist provides a paradigmatic case of a person who takes material that may not be sublime in origin and makes it so or that may have been at a lower level of sublimity and raises it to a higher one. The artist who paints a portrait does not seek to do what a camera does. The artist is not merely a replicator. The artist attempts in one way or another to render the subject's image more sublime by bringing out an aspect that others had not, perhaps, heretofore acknowledged or noticed. Much of the theory and criticism (in the best sense) of art is concerned at least implicitly with the question of what constitutes sublimity and how it is to be, or how it has been rendered. Since the aim of art is to increase sublimity, not usually in a simplistic way, it is inherent in the artistic task that the artist address him or herself to subject matter and make use of materials that are not already intrinsically sublime. Art thus involves a kind of alchemy of transforming base material into gold. Whether the artist has been successful in doing so, often in an unprecedented manner, is the question before anyone who attempts to appreciate a work of art. In this context, we can see that an industrial wasteland might sometimes be a more attractive subject for an artist than a sunset or waterfall. We photograph sunsets in order to try to hang on to the sublimity that they already have, but an artist paints a wasteland and enables us to see it afresh.
Nonetheless, it is important to reiterate that for the other centred approach the problems that Freud found himself in, having to defend his theory from vociferous and indignant attack on grounds that his ideas approached obscenity, do not arise, despite the fact that there are some strong parallels between the two lines of argument. This is due to the differing valuation placed upon sex and upon love. If we say that culture is due to a sublimation of sexual drive it sounds quite different from saying that culture arises as an expression of the need to love. This is because we all already recognise love ·as sublime. Sublimation of love simply means to raise love to its highest and find for it its most properly consummate object. It does not mean to detach its energy from its original purpose and redeploy it in some alien (to it) fashion, but to fulfil its original purpose in the highest manner. All theory is rhetoric in some degree. The choice that we make of language is ·consequential. An other centred approach suggests that it is natural and indeed basic to our nature to esteem the objects of our world and that this process of esteeming constitutes love and that such love can be raised to higher and higher, that is, more sublime, levels. This is a theory that unites the goals of psychotherapy, art, culture, and indeed history.
Defeat and the Fulness of Love
Esteem theory suggests that sublimation may have been the most important of the many ideas that Freud put forward and that if is therefore unfortunate that he never fully developed the idea and tended to present it as little more than a form of benign repression. Sublimation is the manner in which those who make the most of life do so: by bringing love to its most full development. Sublimation can mean to esteem that which is most worthy, most sublime, and to esteem that, the esteeming of which is itself conducive to the purest love. That a person pours their love into the activities that build an art, a religion, a civilisation, or one of its component parts such as a science or profession should in no way be regarded as pathological. Freud suggested that all the high cultural consructions such as religion and literature were diversions of primary life energy which he, wanting a biological footing, labelled sexual. Most of what he says is not wrong, but the suggestion that these things are themselves, somehow wrong or perverse is unnecessary. Other centred thinkers will say that high culture is created by the application of love struggling to find a worthy outlet even after many defeats since it is love that endlessly seeks to make heaven on earth, impossibly to realise paradise here.
We may even suggest that this is what Freud himself did. Freud was a talented man who, in the grip of his basic drive to love, did what society wanted of him by establishing a family and a career as a doctor (the most respected profession). His love then encountered defeat in the form of anti-Semitic prejudice which blocked his path in his chosen profession. This disappointment and rebuff redoubled his energy and this had several consequences. The first was that he threw himself into the solution of new problems, problems that his society faced, but which, with very few exceptions, nobody was giving attention to. The second was that he was angry. How are we to explain. his anger in esteem terms? The anger is the expression of his frustrated love and it is that excess of energy that he pours into his work. Sometimes it has an edge of 'I’ll show them' resentment about it. He hopes that his book on the 'fathoming of dreams’ will shock. He aims to shock because he wants the whole structure of complacent smugness that he has run into to collapse. That wish may be angry in form, but it is not difficult to also see its core of love. He wants society to improve. All social reforms involve anger, but are fundamentally driven by love. We do not need to see this wish as a purely selfish thing. He has suffered as a member of a persecuted minority. He wants such persecution to end. There is nothing selfish at the core of such a wish even though it may emerge in personalised anger or gloating sometimes. I am, therefore, inclined to see the individual in terms of larger scale processes. Due to perennial frustration, we are imperfect. Even a great saint feels some personal satisfaction when a reform that he introduced prevails and chagrin when it fails. This does not mean that the reform has to be seen as primarily an outflow of selfishness or egotism: there is a strong force and a weak force, the latter will always colour the former, but it is a mistake to then conclude that the former is nothing but the latter. From an other centred perspective one is, therefore, inclined to put sublimation centre stage and not regard it as an epiphenomenon of repression.
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