On sublimation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9056376 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Giuseppe Civitarese (0000-0002-3466-4329, Via Teodorico 8, 27100, Pavia, Italy, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1369-1392 |
| Publication date | 2016-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7578 • E-ISSN: 1745-8315 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1745-8315.12530 |
| PMID | 27490824 |
| OpenAlex | W4252413708 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 12 |
Although it encapsulates the Freudian theory of art, the theory of sublimation has become outmoded. What is more, since its inception there has always been something ill-defined about it. Does it use sexualized or de-sexualized drive energy? Is it a defence or an alternative to defence? Does it serve Eros or Thanatos? Is it useful in clinical work or is it unusable? The only, albeit uncertain, aid to a definition relies on the extrinsic criterion of concrete artistic realization. My aim here to revisit and possibly 'reinvent' sublimation in the light of certain principles of the pre-Romantic aesthetics of the sublime. Both are theories of spiritual elevation, in other words, elevation that moves towards abstract thinking, and of man's 'moral' achievement; and both attempt to explain the mystery of aesthetic experience. On the one hand, the aesthetics of the sublime offers a modern myth that helps us articulate a series of factors occasionally referred to by various authors as constitutive of sublimation but which have not been incorporated into a single organic framework: loss and early mourning work; the earlier existence of a catastrophic factor - to be regarded, depending on the situation, as either traumatic or simply 'negative'; the correspondence with a process of somatopsychic categorization which coincides with subjectivity. On the other hand, it also helps us grasp the experience of negative pleasure empathically, living it 'from the inside'
Aesthetics · Beauty · Categorization · Contradiction · Epistemology · Freudian slip · Freudian theory · Instinct · Pleasure · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Psychotherapist · Romance · Subjectivity · Sublimation (psychology) · Sublime · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.89 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |