Sublimation1

An attempt to reformulate the problem of sublimation in terms of more recent advances in psychoanalytic theory, especially ego psychology, constituted the main endeavor of this panel.

In his introductory paper, the chairman of the panel, Heinz Hartmann, reviewed the history of the concept of sublimation. Originally, it was devised as a conceptual tool in a specific frame of reference, namely, conflict over the discharge of sexual drives. In time, the term, sublimation, acquired new and broader meanings in different contexts in psychoanalytic theory. As a result, present-day usage of the term is often confusing and ambiguous. In the beginning, Freud defined sublimation as a means of achieving instinctual libidinal discharge, and, at the same time, avoiding the necessity for repression through a displacement of the aim and/or the object of the drives onto activities of significant cultural value. Objections to this definition have come from many quarters, and, according to Hartmann, these objections may be subsumed under four general headings.

• 1First, clinical analytic material seems to indicate that it is not completely true that sublimation involves exclusively a substitution of the aims and the objects of the sexual drives.

• 2Those definitions of sublimation which stress the displacement of the sexual drives from manifestly instinctual aims to aims of a higher order of social estimation obviously introduce an element of value judgment. Such valuation is a highly questionable procedure in a scientific investigation of mental processes; it is certainly logically untenable in the elucidation of such problems as the relationship between sublimation and the development or creation of value systems.

• 3A definition of sublimation, moreover, should consider the element of stability of ego functions, i.e., the resistance of certain functions of the ego to regressive transformation and sexualization. Resistance