Sublimation and Symbolization

Abstract

While sublimation is not the first word in psychoanalysis, it nevertheless constitutes the final aim of psychoanalytic thought in both its clinical and theoretical orientations. Indeed, if psychoanalysis is primarily a practice whose aim is to alleviate a patient’s sufferings, and if these sufferings are largely the result of a conflict between the exigencies of an individual’s drives and the necessities of a civilized social life, then effective therapeutic action presupposes some knowledge of the way in which such a conflict might be resolved. Yet the concept of sublimation not only exhibits the ultimate horizon, the aim or even the ethical norm of therapeutic action, it also provides a striking outline of the conception which psychoanalytic theory has of the human being. Sublimation cannot be understood without a previous understanding of such key psychoanalytic concepts as the unconscious, drive and desire, sexuality and pleasure, dream and reality. Tying together the ultimate ends of psychoanalytic therapy with the first principles of ‘Freudian metapsychology’, a study of the notion of sublimation invites us not only to take an overall view of psychoanalytic theory, but also to test its coherence. It would not, then, be an exaggeration to say that the value of psychoanalysis as theory and as practice depends essentially on its ability to think sublimation and, more specifically, to think the relation between the economy of a singular libidinal body and the demands of a cultural life accomplished within a symbolic field transcending the individual. Antoine Vergote’s book on sublimation deserves praise for never shrinking from these fundamental questions at the junction of theory and practice, philosophy and psychoanalysis, a science of culture and ethics. The author is to be congratulated for his courage in not succumbing to any psychoanalytic orthodoxy and in unhesitatingly pointing out the deficiencies of the Freudian, Jungian and Lacanian conceptions of sublimation. It is not surprising then that this book is inspired by the perhaps inordinate ambition of entirely recasting psychoanalytic theory. Such a project is not lacking in risk, and one can easily predict that some critics will accuse the author of having sacrificed the essence of psychoanalysis in attempting to give it theoretical underpinnings appropriate to its civilizing aims. One might also say that, because of his insistence on the necessity of a symbolic structuring of the drive, on the narcissistic transformation of the libidinal body in view of the constitution of a strong ego, and on the gratuitousness of play and creation in human existence, the author replaces psychoanalysis by something else, something one might call, with varying degrees of ferocity, an optimistic Aristotelianism, a spiritualistic humanism, a voluntaristic subjectivism, or even an impersonal universal symbolism. Even if each of these criticisms possesses a grain of truth, one cannot hide the fact that they also reveal a certain ‘malaise’ in psychoanalysis. Any balanced judgement of this book will have to take into account the current crisis of psychoanalysis in its relations with the sciences and with philosophical thought, and especially in its confrontation with a civilization whose major weakness is no longer the repression of sexuality, but rather the dehumanization of the symbolic relations between its members. In putting psychoanalysis to the test of sublimation, Vergote avoids falling into an external, cognitivistic or ideological critique of psychoanalytic theory. Starting from the (decidedly surpris-