Freud And Nietzsche On Sublimation

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Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation KEN GEMES ABSTRACT: The notion of sublimation is essential to Nietzsche and Freud. However, Freud’s writings fail to provide a persuasive notion of sublimation. In particular, Freud’s writings are confused on the distinction between pathological symptoms and sublimation and on the relation between sublimation and repression. After rehearsing these problems in some detail, it is proposed that a return to Nietzsche allows for a more coherent account of sublimation, its difference from pathological symptoms, and its relation to repression. In summary, on Nietzsche’s account, while repression and pathological symptoms involve a disintegration (of the self), sublimation involves integration. The article concludes with a brief consideration of some post-Freudian accounts of sublimation that represent a return to a more Nietzschean approach. 1. Introduction T he penultimate sentence in the entry on sublimation in Laplanche and Pontalis’s seminal The Language of Psychoanalysis reads: “In the psychoanalytic literature the concept of sublimation is frequently called upon; the idea answers to a basic need of the Freudian doctrine and it is hard to see how it could be dispensed with” (1973, 433). One reason that sublimation is a key notion in psychoanalysis is that from a therapeutic point of view, successful psychoanalytic treatment ideally aims at sublimation, inasmuch as sublimation is seen as a necessary condition for full psychic health. By bringing to conscious light hitherto repressed drives, desires, and wishes, energy that has previously displayed itself in unpleasurable symptoms may be harnessed and directed to more productive and felicitous ends. And indeed, at first glance, sublimation might seem a clear enough concept. It involves the redirecting of a repressed sexual drive toward a nonsexual aim.1 As Freud puts it in his
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