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Volney P. Gay, Professor of Religion, Psychiatry and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and author of other books on Freud, psychology, and religion, has written a challenging text with both clarity and deep feeling. Most of the book concentrates on examining Freud's core concept of sublimation before moving on to suggest how, in the light of contemporary views of the self, it might be usefully revised to contribute to psychoanalytic aesthetics.
The introduction sets forth the contrasting philosophical assumptions underlying Gay's and Freud's approaches. The basic argument is for the objective existence of values—neither private and subjective, as in Freud, nor in an intermediate area of illusions, as in Winnicott. The author believes that an infant is, from the beginning, bound in a relationship to a loving God and that “a divine exemplar” (p. 9) is reflected in an ordered, coherent, harmonious reality, discoverable, at least partially, by the human mind.
For Freud, on the other hand, “the real, external world was one of the bare ‘quantities’ set in perpetual motion, obeying the immutable laws of the physical universe” (p. 80) and providing objective scientific facts; the conscious experience of “qualities” is the