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In her opening remarks Jacqueline Amati-Mehler commented that although the Freudian definition of sublimation seemed quite straightforward, from a dynamic viewpoint it was one of the most obscure concepts. She also noted that a paper on sublimation was one of the three Freudian essays that were lost. The three papers by Campos, Jacobs and Danckwardt made use of the term sublimation, but applied it in different ways. Campos's interest is in sublimation as a ‘creative process’; Jacobs considers the importance of play as a sublimatory activity for a person's sexuality; whilst Danckwardt understands sublimation to be the development of thought through the movement between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and as an ‘intersubjective’ process.
In the discussions a number of questions were asked by the panellists and the audience about the relationship between on the one hand play, symbolisation, creativity and the development of thought and on the other hand sublimation. Is sublimation a term that can be used interchangeably with the others, is it redundant, or is there something specific about it as a process? Whilst no shared understanding of sublimation was arrived at explicitly by the work of the panel, Amati-Mehler pointed out that there was an interesting area of convergence between the papers in the recurring theme of the element of surprise.
Campos referred in his paper ‘The erotic life of the great creators’ to Freud's 1919 paper on ‘The uncanny’ and Reik's paper on ‘Surprise’. Campos stated that for Freud the ‘uncanny’ was ‘the expected-unexpected end, full of profound and revealing contents’. Under the name of ‘The uncanny’ and ‘Surprise’, Campos argued, Freud and Reik attempt to describe one's feelings when meeting the unconscious. In his paper ‘How does sublimation work?—Sublimation as an intersubjective process-object’, Danckwardt postulated a change in Freud from his being identified with his parents in their admiration of ‘Sigi the wonde