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This is the third in a series of studies by Harry B. Levey on the problem of sublimation. The first paper, Poetry Production as a Supplemental Emergency Defense Against Anxiety, was published in This QUARTERLY (VII, 1938, pp. 232–242). The second paper, A Critique of the Theory of Sublimation, appeared in Psychiatry (II, 1939, pp. 239–271).
After summarizing philosophical and other speculative explanations of art creation, the theory of art creation as transformed sexual instinct energy is discussed.
'The artist's "sublimation" does not idealize the flesh; it materializes the spirit. It is not an anchorite's mummification of the sexual instinct, nor yet his confession of guilt over unconscious incestuous fantasies; it is the artist's vis medicatrix naturæ, compounded of synergistic and serial unconscious mental processes through which he transcends the miseries of recurrent mobile depressions. Then transfigured, and at one with his conscience and impulses, the artist steps from his world of forms to the world of human relationship where he can experiment anew with bending love and hate among these according to his needs. The artist's creativeness is a station in his excursion from a faulty sense of reality to a reality of the same kind; for the artist has not changed himself in any fundamental way through creating. He has only healed, with the balm of creating beauty as an æsthetic salvation, that excess guilt, dread of the loss of love, and anxiety over generative integrity which resulted from his latest explosion. As soon as he again considers his defense needs sufficiently threatened with thwarting, he will react with rage; and, cloistered once more in the grip of a mobile depression, he will deliver himself from it eventually by moving through the cycle of suffering, free artistic invention, and the harmonious reclamation of human ties.'
It is to be hoped that the contributions of the author, so important for psychoanalytic theory of creation in arts, may be