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For all the originality of his monograph on Sublimation, Loewald downplays the differences between himself and other theoretical psychoanalysts. He prefers, instead, to draw many views toward a common ground—to a sort of reunion. Since Sublimation integrates Loewald's ideas with those of his psychoanalytic “mothers and fathers,” the book itself embodies his definition of sublimation: “a celebration of oneness regained” (p. 81). Yet in creating a synthesis that is unique, he departs from his intellectual forbears, thereby demonstrating the second aspect of his definition: “mourning of lost original oneness” (p. 81).
Loewald's developmental approach to sublimation draws heavily on Freud's descriptive terminology: a diversion of instinctual energy toward an aim-inhibited, culturally superior goal. But to explain the motive for this process he draws equally on later object relations theory. Like Freud, he begins with the infant in a primary, undifferentiated state. But, unlike Freud and like Winnicott (or Kohut), he views the newborn not as a container of primal instinct seeking its object, but as part of a primal oneness with “mother,” a mother-infant matrix.
To Loewald, sublimation does not develop merely as a socially acceptable compromise, a substitute for tension discharge through an object, a particular type of defense with culturally redeeming features. Nor does he accept Hartmann's elaboration of Freud, in which sublimation is accomplished by the ego with its own “neutralized” instinctual energy; he finds this lifeless and unnecessarily dichotomizing (p. 21). Rather, Loewald's view is that sublimation is a way of handling instinctual tension in which the self (id-ego) seeks to recreate the experience of primal oneness, a “reconciliation” (p. 33). This process involves not object libido, but narcissistic libido, and leads not to release and quiescence, the