The Failure and Reality of Sublimation: Psychoanalytic Ontology and Revolution

Freud's writings are remarkably preoccupied with the question of the realization of desire and the consequences of its failure. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905b), for example, Freud roots neurosis in the refusal to be perverse (p. 165)—i.e., in the desire to pass for normal and abide by the realities of social life, which represses the reality of sexual desire. In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905a), he posits “the possibility of a hysteria [a form of neurosis] being cured by marriage and normal sexual intercourse”—i.e., the reconciliation of sexual desire with social demand as a remedy for neurosis, which will return, he warns, once normal channels are no longer sufficient for sexual release (p. 79). Exploring yet another route in “On Narcissism” (1914), he explains that “a strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love” (p. 85). Against libidinal frustration and social prohibition—i.e., the failure to attain or lack of prospect for happiness by normal means—certain subjects, he suggests, end up “seeking themselves as a love-object,” their desire rendered perverse by narcissistic defense (p. 88). Leading to social withdrawal, hence to the state that induces narcissism in the first place, this libidinal investment of the subject in the self is ironically prone to being transferred to an other, a loved object that becomes overvalued because mis/identified as the self in “a state suggestive of a neurotic compulsion” (p. 88). Against these texts' charting of the untenable, indeed roundabout, resolution of neurosis, in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) Freud finds a means of fulfillment that retains the perversity of sexual desire, bears no trace of neurosis, and is accorded social value. This solution is none other than sublimation,