Chapter 17. Work, Play and Sublimation

As it was Freud's method to advance and retreat in his special capacity for deductive and inductive operation and also to hold on to terms and give them new meanings, the teaching of psycho-analysis always poses a problem in semantics which only an historical approach can resolve. Surely much of the schismatic trend within psycho-analytic circles is based on poor scholarship, one might say, in regard to notation. Another aspect of the problem is that terms, hallowed by antiquity, in our restricted sense, take on a life of their own and refuse to lie down and be buried in history once their usefulness has passed.

This Chapter is largely elegiac in regard to the honoured term “sublimation”. Although it was used poetically in Draft L (“phantasies serve the purpose of refining the memories, of sublimating them”), it takes place as a technical term beginning with “A Case of Hysteria” . “The perversions are neither bestial nor degenerate in the emotional sense of the word. They are a development of germs all of which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the child, and which, by being suppressed or by being diverted to higher, asexual aims—by being sublimated—are destined to provide the energy for a great number of our cultural achievements.”

It is clear that Freud is here concerned with social value judgements (“bestial”, “higher”), with energy concepts and the hydrostatic view of the mental apparatus (“energy”, “diverted”) and with a biological view of development (“germs”, “undifferentiated”) which had not as yet found a basis for distinguishing between body—neurophysiology—and mind—psychology—as the field of psycho-analytic study. In this cleft stick as both biologist and sociologist, Freud ends by begging the question, pleading that perversions are not “bestial in the emotional sense” since they have an honourable origin in infantile sexuality, while, thanks to the power of sublimation, they may be “diverted to higher, asexual aims” and “cultural