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This paper is an expanded version of Paula Heimann’s membership paper which she read to the British Psycho- Analytical Society in July 1939. It was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis13(1) , and was her first psychoanalytic publication.
In this paper my aim is to point out and discuss certain aspects of the sublimatory processes which in my opinion have not so far been investigated or perhaps sufficiently described. They involve consideration of unconscious phantasies related to internalized objects.
I am taking the artistic productivity of a painter as an example, although I am well aware that in this type of sublimation there are some specific factors operating which are still obscure. I do not aim at dealing exhaustively with the vast subject of sublimation, and the material will illustrate only those important aspects to which I wish to draw attention.
I start from the psychoanalytical conception that sublimation is a form of discharge of the instinctual drive to creation (procreation). I will recall Freud’s original concept of sublimation as an activity in which the sexual impulse is deflected from its direct aim but does not succumb to repression, which leads to achievements serving a social or higher interest and involves an adaptation to reality, that is, the progress from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Gratification on the part of the ego is also an essential element in sublimation; since the ego does not have recourse to repression, it is not restricted and impoverished but enriched by the sublimatory activity. This last point, the conscious gratification, bound up with the experience of expansion and development of ego, seems to me an important indication that a sublimatory activity is successful, although it may be of short duration only and give way to various forms of discontent, or even to depression and despair. Complete absence of it, however, would suggest to me that there is some serious disturbance in the subl