Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. What is Sublimation? Duty and Beast

1. 00:00 Okay, this has been the part for the popular uh for for the public. Now I’m going to talk to clinicians and scholars. So the second part of this video is aimed at people with previous acquaintance with psychoanalytic theory and training um and scholarship. Some coffee to lubricate
2. 00:30 what’s left of my windpipe and we proceed. Sublimation relies on a mechanism known as aim inhibition. An instinct according to Ziggman Freud is as he has he put it the measure of the demand upon the mind in consequence of its connection with the body.
3. 00:54 Contrary to what people would have you believe, Freud was very much into the body. Freud was a neurologist. He believed that his theory psychoanalysis is not so much about the mind but about the body, the energies of the body, the pathways of the body, how the body
4. 01:14 interact, body systems or subsystems interact with each other. He was a physiologist much more than a psychologist. And so he believed that instincts are energetic discharges in the body. And he said that aim inhibition uh that I’m sorry that
5. 01:34 instincts have four aspects. The source of the instinct, the impetus of the instinct or thrust the thrust of the instinct, the aim of the instinct and the object of the instinct. The aim of the instinct is the specific action which discharges energy and excitement and brings about
6. 01:56 satisfaction. And so when we say aim inhibition, it’s an intracychic situation whereby an instinct rather than accomplishing total discharge seems content with what Freud called certain approximations to satisfaction. It’s like compromising like saying I cannot gratify the
7. 02:21 instinct fully. I cannot satisfy the demands and expectations of the instinct, fantasies and dreams of the instinct, the urge you know fully. But I can that’s the best I can do. That’s an approximation. So um for example uh when you’re taunted or
8. 02:41 provoked you could choose to react with violence which would gratify the instinct maximally or you could choose to react with sarcasm or mockery which is an approximation of the gratification of the instinct. Okay. So this is aim inhibition and it
9. 03:03 is intimately linked to sublimation because sublimation uses among other mechanisms uses aim inhibition. Now sublimation like everything else was a term introduced by Ziggman Freud in 1908 and at the time initially uh sublimation had to do with a sex
10. 03:27 right. Freud was obsessed with sexuality and uh everything was sex you know everything was connected to sex especially childhood sexuality and so initially he suggested that sublimation is the capacity of the sexual instinct to change to alter its original aim into
11. 03:47 a nonsexual aim that yields socially valued socially approbated and socially accepted activities. So you want to have sex, you repress the sex drive, you don’t have sex because I don’t know it’s socially unacceptable or the target that the the person you want to have sex with
12. 04:06 is is a forbidden target or whatever the reason may be you cannot have sex and instead of having sex you make a video lecture on YouTube. That is an example of sublimation. Freud especially referred to intellectual and artistic pursuits as products of sublimation.
13. 04:28 And Freud was just the first in a long line of scholars like Bernfeld, Bernfeld and Fenicle and Hartman and QB and and many many others. And finally they all settled on several dimension or several features of of sublimation. Number one, the activities resulting from
14. 04:49 sublimation are always egoonic. They don’t create discomfort. You feel good with your choices and actions. Your ego symptomic. Number two, exactly like aim inhibition, sublimation involves a change in the instinctual aim in the aim of the instinct. In other words, aim
15. 05:14 inhibition is about a change in the method of targeting of the attaining the target or attaining the goal and so is sublimation. But aim inhibition results in partial discharge of instinctual tension this energy whereas sublimation results in full discharge.
16. 05:36 So you could say that sublimation is a kind of much more efficient aim inhibition. You could safely say this. The third feature of sublimation according to all these scholars is that sublimation uh causes behavior. It it is you could even say that sublimation is a motivational
17. 05:58 attitudinal framework because it leads to behavior. It has behavioral outcomes. But the behaviors that are caused by sublimation lack rigidity. They’re not rigid. They’re flexible. You have other defense mechanisms such as, for example, reaction formation
18. 06:17 where uh the result is behavior, but the behavior triggered or elicited by reaction formation is always very rigid, therefore very predictable. Whereas in sublimation, the resulting behavior is unpredictable. It’s very very proteen. It’s very difficult to to to tell what
19. 06:42 course of action the individual would choose in order to channel the forbidden energy of the underlying instinct. So for example, um I could sublimate by making uh videos on psychology. You could sublimate by writing poetry and some someone else can sublimate by cooking.
20. 07:03 So these are all sublimatory solutions. Sublimation contributes to but is not exclusively responsible for social and creative achievements. So we should not confuse the fact that instincts and the energy attendant upon instincts are discharged via sublimation in socially
21. 07:25 acceptable ways. We should not confuse this and the total the totality of artistic and creative accomplishments. It’s not in other words it’s not that every work of art and every creative accomp accomplishment attainment are driven by sublimation. That is not true.
22. 07:46 That is completely untrue. Additionally, sublimation involves the exercise of autonomous ego functions, inborn talents, and healthy identifications with creative family members, mentors, role models. All these contribute to artistic and literary achievements. So
23. 08:08 uh what sublimation is one pathway to art and creativity but art and creativity could be yielded by talent by identification by ego functions and so on. Okay. Another dimension or aspect of sublimation is that it is intimately linked with what we perceive to be socially valuable.
24. 08:35 Social value is at the center of the definition of sublimation. So sublimation is highly culturbound. It’s culturally specific. What would constitute sublimation in aan would not constitute sublimation in Australia and what would constitute sublimation in Israel would not
25. 08:58 constitute sublimation in for example Russia. And finally, the original def definition of sublimation referred only to the transformations of sexual instincts or the sexual instinct. But of course, sublimation has to do with everything that society could potentially frown
26. 09:21 upon and punish. Sex is one thing that society very often condemns and very often punishes. But the same goes for example uh for aggression. Aggression is also some kind of drive, some kind of instinct, some kind of urge that society uh disagrees with that society punishes.
27. 09:45 So you could sublimate aggression. You could sublimate alterations of aggressive aims. when you become I don’t know a sculptor, a carpenter, a surgeon, a soldier, a football player, rugby player, I mean these are all transformations of aggression. These are all sublimatory
28. 10:06 transformations. So the energy of the instinct uh is reflective of the underlying uh the energy of the sublimation, I’m sorry, is reflective of the underlying instinct. An aggressive instinct would give rise to an aggressive sublimation. The surgeon, a medical surgeon in a
29. 10:30 hospital, he cuts people open with a knife. That’s very aggressive. So, but it is a sublimation because if you were to cut someone with a knife outside the hospital, you are likely to spend the rest of your life in prison. But if you go into the hospital and cut
30. 10:48 someone with a knife and you are qualified to do this, you are likely to be admired as a surgeon. That’s an example of sublimation. Sublimation is therefore a developmental process by which instinctual energies are discharged in non-instinctual forms of behavior.
31. 11:09 And the process of sublimation of course involve involves displacement. The original energy which was attendant upon or stored in or whatever you want to call it correlated with the instinct. This instinctual energy is displaced from activities and objects of primary
32. 11:30 biological interest to objects and activities of lesser instinctual interest. When you’re aggressive, it’s a biological reaction. When you’re sexual, it’s a physiological reaction. So there’s a transition from the body to the mind, from the instinct to society
33. 11:52 or I would say from the instinct to the individual who is interacting with society. The transformation of the quality of the emotion accompanying the activity um is also very marked and very interesting because the instinct is defanged. For example, the sexual instinct is
34. 12:15 desexualized. The aggressive instinct is deagressified. The emotion is taken out. The the instinct is rendered impotent because the emotion has been isolated or suppressed or take or somehow um um gotten rid of. One could therefore say that sublimation is the denudement
35. 12:46 is the elimination of emotion in the body in the instinctual part
36. 12:55 and it involves a liberation of the activity from the dictates of instinctual tension energy and so on. You could conceive of sublimation as a form of abreaction, automatic abreaction, physiological, physiological, psychological pathways of abre reaction not triggered by therapy.
37. 13:21 Now sublimation always includes, as I said, social values, a social element. True sublimations are socially acceptable. If you you could in principle sublimate your instincts in socially unacceptable ways. For example, you have an aggressive instinct and you
38. 13:43 sublimate it by going to the Lou and pouring paint over the monol. This act of vandalism and savagery is a sublimation but it is not socially acceptable. So this is in principle possible. However, statistically speaking, people usually sublimate in socially acceptable
39. 14:08 ways because they want to avoid the punishment. That’s the aim of sublimation to start with. All sublimations therefore invol involve planning, forecasting, imagining, daydreaming. In short, fantasy. Freud got it right the first time. Lam got it right. Sublimation is about
40. 14:31 fantasy. You want to do something, then you stop and you fantasize about what else you could do to gratify and satisfy yourself. You want to have sex with someone. If you do, it would be considered rape. So, you don’t you don’t and instead you imagine what you could
41. 14:52 do with this energy and then you carry out the plan. in some cases sublimatory channel or sublimatory action. And because sublimation is so intricately and intimately intertwined with fantasy, all ego development and the development of the self depend on sublimation
42. 15:14 because they involve reality testing. The ego or the or the self later on they incorporate reality, they interact with reality. They take into account society and reality, the world, the universe. And they can’t do that without sublimation. Think of sublimation as the
43. 15:35 channel to reality. If you want to talk to reality, interact with reality, gather information from reality, fantasize about reality, imagine reality, study reality, investigate it, interrogate it, whatever you want to do with reality. that to talk the entire
44. 15:52 interface there’s only one way to do this. You have to sublimate. Most accounts of sublimation assert that the instincts available for sublimation are the pregenital component instincts um not the adult instincts or at least not the adult sexual instincts. In other
45. 16:13 words, the concept of sublimation is developmental and evolutionary. I completely disagree with this. Not only I but there are other scholars who completely disagree with this. Sublimation is any situation where an instinct verbal or preverbal genital or
46. 16:33 pregenital sexual or nonsexual an instinct an amalgamation of energy um like aggression cannot be expressed in a way which would avoid adverse consequences to the individual. period. Sublimations comes to the rescue. Anna Freud in 1937 listed sublimation as a defense,
47. 17:00 but she said that it’s a defense that as as she and I quote her, it’s a defense which pertains rather to the study of the normal than to that of neurosis. And I fully agree with her. Sublimation is the normal way of relating to the world. But sublimation has to be
48. 17:23 exercised by a central executive authority, the ego or the self. When sublimation becomes the self, when sublimation substitutes for reality, then we have the false self. False self is sublimation raified. And Freud, Anna Freud, who was a great child
49. 17:50 psychologist by the way, she said that sublimation provides a progressive solution of infantile conflicts which might might otherwise lead to neurosis. And I think what happens in narcissism is a disruption in this process which results in what was known at the time as
50. 18:10 a narcissistic neurosis and today we call it a personality disorder. Sublimation is a process that diverts the flow of instinctual energy from immediate aims which could be sexual, could be aggressive, could be negative effects and so on from immediate aims
51. 18:29 subverts it, diverts it to cultural endeavors. It’s a it’s it’s a transition from primitive bestial animal organism to an organism which is aware of its environment and takes into account the constraints, restraints and outcomes of of this environment. The idea of
52. 18:56 sublimation is not new. I mentioned alchemy, the transmutation of base metal to gold. But we find also the idea of sublimation in aesthetics. Um in the ancient world we had Longgininus who discussed um sublimation. In romanticism we had Girth Gera discussed sublimation in in many
53. 19:21 ways. Gera considered the sublime as the transcendence of the individual’s limitations and the connection the bridge between the individual and the world. And it’s a great way of visualizing sublimation. And in Freud’s work, sublimation evolves from the idea
54. 19:38 of the enobblement or the embellishment of fantasy, which I mentioned earlier, to a genuine intrain instinctual process. The transformation of object libido into narcissistic or ego libido before it could assume new aims. It’s uh Freud perceived sublimation later on in
55. 19:57 his work in the 1920s. He perceives sublimation as interference like running interference like the the the instinct is looking for an aim and before the instinct makes a mistake and finds an aim which is wrong and could result in a disaster for the individual.
56. 20:18 The ego runs interference and uses sublimation by converting the object libido, the libido that is directed outwards into narcissistic ego libido that is direct directed inwards. It the the ego denudes the instinct from energy. Takes away the instincts energy takes away the
57. 20:41 instincts emotion. The emotions are the energy of the instincts. So the the ego takes them away and then reshapes them, remolds them and redirects them into much more innocuous and less threatening options. Sublimation is a very special vicissitude of the instinct.
58. 21:04 The diversion of libidinal energy um is a kind of harnessing or channeling of energy of instinctual impulses in a way that is congenial is acceptable to the super ego the representative of society in the mind you know by the way sublimation is not a one-way
59. 21:24 street it could be reversed but I will not talk about all this right now this is a process known as retransformation Okay. So we mentioned the sublimation involves the taking away the absconding with uh the denial of emotional energy to the instincts like you leave the instincts
60. 21:48 disempowered. They don’t have power. It’s a bit like unplugging a device from the wall socket you know. So there’s no electricity. There’s no device. This is sublimation. But this alone cannot define the process of sublimation completely because this is very reminiscent of
61. 22:11 inhibition or even reaction formation. It this process of de deenergization, deemotionalization for example desexualization, deagressification. This process is of course foundational fundamental in sublimation. I’m not saying otherwise. But uh there is another process at work
62. 22:37 and it is the process of substituting one aim for another what Freud called the psychical parent and the psychical child. And this is where Freud conflicts with Lan. Lan says it’s not that suppleation changes one aim for another. It’s that suppleation redefineses the aim within a
63. 23:01 new fantasy or new narrative. And this is much closer to my own work by the way. And you as an intimate partner of a narcissist, you’re exactly one such aim. The narcissist’s energy, instinctual energy, drives, urges are directed at you, but not really at you. They are
64. 23:23 directed at you, the intimate partner, as a newly defined element embedded in a new fantasy or a new narrative. So what the narcissist does in his mind, the narcissist reshapes you, rewrites you, remolds you, changes you. And this is the process known as idealization.
65. 23:48 And then you become a totally new aim, totally new target. In the narcissist’s mind, you’re no longer the original target. And yet because you’re embedded in a fantasy or a narrative, the narcissist feels free and egoonic when he direct redirects his
66. 24:09 instinctual energy at you. Let me put it another way using Freud’s framework. When the narcissist comes across you as a potential target, the narcissist wants you. The narcissist wants you sexually. The narcissist wants to own you and to possess you. The narcissist wants to use
67. 24:30 you and abuse you. Narcissist wants you. Okay? He just wants you. You become the aim or the target of the of the um instinct. But the narcissist needs to do this. He needs to acquire you in a way which would not elicit or provoke adverse consequences. In short,
68. 24:55 the narcissist doesn’t want to pay a high price for taking over you, for controlling you, for owning you, for subsuming you. He doesn’t want to pay a huge social price. He doesn’t want to be punished. He doesn’t want to end up in prison. I don’t know. He doesn’t want
69. 25:10 any of this. So, what he does, he incorporates you in a narrative. Incorporates you in a fantasy. And then he changes you within the fantasy. within the narrative so that you become a socially legitimate target, a socially legitimate aim. And he continues to
70. 25:33 interact with you only in the fantasy and only in your new shape, in your new form as a socially acceptable target. And this is sublimation. And this is the main function, the main activity of the false self. The effect of sublimation on the object um seems to valorize uh
71. 26:07 society and to valorize the individual who conforms to society. Um in other words, sublimation is perceived by everyone involved. The object of the sublimation, the originator of the sublimation and society itself. Sublimation is perceived as a great thing.
72. 26:32 It it elevates everyone. It makes everyone better. Society tells you that’s the right right way to do it. you’re a good person. And Freud was against this. He said we need to discourage any risk of of confusion between sublimation and idealization. He says idealization
73. 26:55 is the overestimation of the supposedly sublime object. In other words, what Freud was trying to say is that uh the fantasy or the narrative
74. 27:13 involve the idealization of an object. They are part of the narrative, part of the fantasy. And then the sublimation is the mechanical process. It’s the machinery. And he said we should not confuse the machinery with a story, the machinery with the fantasy, the
75. 27:35 machinery with the narrative. The fantasy and the narrative are triggered by the machinery. Sometimes they are the outcome of the machinery. Sometimes they are the precondition for the machinery to work. But confusing the machinery which is sublimation with a fantasy
76. 27:53 which involves idealization is like confusing fuel with the engine. The engine needs fuel but the engine is not the fuel. The development of the ability to sublimate is related to the individual’s body according to Freud constitutional uh disposition. So for example, how
77. 28:16 strong your sex drive is, how aggressive, how constitutionally predisposed you are to aggression. Some of these things are hereditary. They are hereditary traits. All traits are hereditary. And at the same time, said Freud, we should not ignore the events
78. 28:34 of childhood trauma, the intensity of infantile curiosity even. And so um the way the world reacts to who we are very often pushes us to sublimate. The process contributes to the formation of character traits. The component instincts are very
79. 28:58 significant here. So for example, if you have an instinct to see to observe uh this could be sub sublimated into art. If you use the instinct to see in an unbridled uncontrolled manner, you would end up in prison because you you would become a voyer. You would spy on people
80. 29:21 in the shower. You know, instead you paint. It’s a sublimation of the instinct to see, the instinct to know, the instinct to aggress or to attack people. aggression. They all can and do manifest in creative and innovative activities and ways. Sublimation
81. 29:43 in Freud’s work is a process in which the libido is channeled into apparently noninstinctual activities such as artistic creation, intellectual work and so on and so forth. And it’s therefore sublimation functions as a socially acceptable escape or steam valve. You
82. 30:03 know there is excess energy in us. We’re excessively sexual excessively aggressive excessively something maybe even excessively effective too emotional emotionally disregulated. And so sublimations comes to the rescue. Uh if we didn’t have sublimation, these
83. 30:23 energies would be discharged in socially unacceptable ways in perverse behavior, antisocial behavior, neurotic symptoms, you name it. And so if you take this adabsorum, if you push it, push it to the end, it seems that complete sublimation would mean the end of all perversion,
84. 30:47 all crime, all neurosis, you know, all good. If everyone would be able to sublimate 100% of the time, all the 100% of the energy, they would be non- negative social phenomena. theoretically but Freud himself always emphasized that there is a huge risk associated
85. 31:10 in sublimating the instinct to the end. He said if you sublimate at the expense of the instinct you deprive the subject the the individual of immediate gratification immediate satisfaction. And he said sometimes we need immediate satisfaction.
86. 31:31 It’s it’s necessary. It’s a good thing and so we should never sublimate 100%. Much much later in 1959 and 1960 Lan gave up his famous seminars and Lakan agreed with Freud. He emphasized that the element of social recognition is central to the concept of sublimation.
87. 31:55 It is as he said only in so far as the drives are diverted towards socially valued objects that they can be said to be sublimated. It is this dimension of shared social values which allows to tie in the concept of sublimation with ethics. But Lan’s account of sublimation
88. 32:16 has some major differences. I mentioned one of them where Lakhan regards the fantasy and the narrative as the most important thing not the aim of the instinctual dry or the instinctual energy where I agree with Lakan not with Freud. There are other differences
89. 32:32 between Lakan and Freud. Freud implied that perverse sexuality, sexual deviance is a form of direct satisfaction of the drive and that sublimation is only necessary because society prohibits it. In other words, if society were to accept sexual deviance and sexual
90. 32:52 perversion, people would engage in it. They wouldn’t need to sublimate. Lan rejects this. He says there’s no such thing as zero degree of satisfaction. and Jijie much later elaborated on it. Slavoij he said there’s no such thing as zero degree of satisfaction. He said
91. 33:11 that perversion is not simply a brutish behavior the natural means of discharging the libido. He said perversion is a highly structured relation to the drives and this already in itself is linguistic. It’s a kind of fantasy. It’s a kind of narrative. Yes, it’s a
92. 33:30 narrative that involves biological forces and biolog and manifestations of these forces in physical physiological ways, but it’s embedded in a story. It’s embedded in the language. Perversion is a is a language. It’s a relationship with the drives. It’s not the drives
93. 33:49 themselves. Interesting approach. Freud believed that complete sublimation might be possible for particularly you know elevated refined and cultured people probably like Freud. Lan argued that complete sublimation to quote him is not possible for the individual. Lan
94. 34:08 followed Freud in linking sublimation with creativity and art. But he also linked it to the death drive. Again I will not go into it. It’s a highly complicated and fascinating topic with contributions by by others and maybe some other day. Um the concept of of death drive is in
95. 34:28 itself um uh Lakan said that the concept of death drive the death drive in itself as a kind of sublimation because we’re unable to confront death face to face. Uh and he said that Freud himself sublimated and created the death drive to account for his own sublimation.
96. 34:46 Never mind. It’s an ongoing lovehate relationship ambivalence between Freud and Lan. Okay. Uh the death drive however leads to an interesting um insight. The death drive appears to be on the surface destructive like I’m going to destroy everything including myself you
97. 35:14 know but it also gives the chance to start from zero there is creative destru destruction or creative disruption to use Schumacer’s um phrase and so the death drive involves also the wish to be reborn the wish to create from zero in the language of laka
98. 35:35 So you could therefore perceive the death drive as sublimatory. It’s a form of sublimation. Sublime object by being elevated to the dignity of the thing. You remember what Lakan said exerts the power of fascination which ultimately leads to death and
99. 35:54 destruction. It’s a very pessimistic view of the inevitability of of decomposition and demise and decay and decadence in the cultural sense. I would like to read to you a segment from the Freud encyclopedia magis magisterial uh book on Freud. Uh a few sections about sublimation.
100. 36:17 Sublimation is the cathartic transformation of an impulse that causes an intracychic conflict into socially uh acceptable and productive activity. This indirect cathosis allows the ego to defend against the impulse without directly experiencing the adverse
101. 36:34 consequences associated with direct impulse expression. Sublimation is one of the few defense mechanisms that Freud specifically indicated could lead to healthy outcomes, although neurotic outcomes could still result. And by the way, Freud mentioned this in 1905 before
102. 36:52 he he even conceptualized sublimation completely. Sublimation was considered a mechanism by which the ego could transform instincts into noble virtues. And they quote from this 1905 essay by Freud. Sublimation says Freud enables excessively strong excitation from
103. 37:14 particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and use in other fields so that a not inconsiderable increase in physical efficiency results. The multifarious perverse sexual disposition of childhood can accordingly be regarded as a source of a number of our virtues.
104. 37:32 And just to remind you this was 1905 much later we added that all the instincts including aggression and other instincts to the picture and sublimation now is simply the way to express innate energies which society might might find unacceptable in socially acceptable
105. 37:52 ways. So this was the part for the clinician uh with a much deeper picture of sublimation. The false self is a sublimation in effect. It’s a way for the narcissist to survive in reality and in society without the ability to gauge or evaluate reality or society
106. 38:14 appropriately. We could therefore speculate that sublimation would tend to be very common in autism spectrum disorders. Sublimation is very useful in pathological narcissism because it allows the narcissist to act more or less normally to adopt goals which are sanctioned by
107. 38:36 society, goals which are perceived by society to be acceptable and even commendable. Sublimation allows the narcissist to uh put aside his or her grandiosity, fantastic self-concept, inflated self-perception, antagonism, uh defiance. Put aside all these things
108. 39:03 in order to pursue a course of action which would result in social rewards such as sex or money or power. In other words, sublimation transforms a narcissist from potentially psychopathic and antisocial to way more pro-social than the classical psychopath.
109. 39:30 Maybe the psychopath lacks sublimation, just an afterthought.