Lacan's View of Sublimation

In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), Freud defines sublimation as follows: “A certain kind of modification of the aim and change of the object, in which our social valuation is taken into account, is described by us as ‘sublimation’” (p. 97). In “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis” (1959-60), Lacan defines sublimation as the process that “elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing” (Vol. I, p. 149).1 “The thing” is “la chose” in French and “das Ding” in German. The term has a long philosophical history from Aristotle to Heidegger2 and is the term highlighted in Kant's “das Ding an sich,” “the thing in itself,” which lies beyond phenomenal appearances and is unknowable in itself. Now all of this would remain merely an academic exercise except that Lacan is struck by Freud's use of the term in describing the origin of object relations; and also that according to Laplanche and Pontalis (1967, p. 433), “the lack of a coherent theory of sublimation remains one of the lacunae in psycho-analytic thought.”

Freud writes of das Ding in his essay “Negation” in a very specific manner. In the fifth paragraph he elaborates that function of judgment which affirms or disaffirms the possession by a Thing of a particular attribute, where “a Thing” in German is “einem Ding,” and the attribute in question is the primordial “good” or “bad” which determines whether one takes it in or spits it out. In paragraph six Freud moves to the judgment of existence which is concerned with the real existence of something of which there isa presentation, the German for which is “eines vorgestellten Dinges.” Here at issue is not whether what has been perceived (a Thing) [“ein Ding”] shall be taken into the ego or not, but whether something available in representation can be refound in perception. This primordial level of judgment eventually leads to the development (“Entwicklung”) in which experience (“Erfahrung”) has taught that existence must also be considered, and not just the a