Wrong Life Lived Rightly: Sublimation, Identification, and the Restoration of Subjectivity

Abstract

Critical theory’s effort to restore subjectivity and resist domination rightly leads to the search for and rejection of all tendencies that cause the subject to introject and reproduce his own domination. Because psychoanalysis focuses in large part on the developmental path by which the subject is transformed into a social being accepting of the reality principle, many Freudian categories (and ultimately, psychoanalysis itself) are consequently called into deep question by critical theory. Sublimation and identification, the two mechanisms with which the maturing subject most clearly meets the challenge of the reality principle, are seen as particularly suspect and thus remain undertheorized by critical theorists.