How To Distinguish A Valid Sublimation From A Morbid Sexualization
| This section may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve this section to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. The talk page may contain suggestions. |
The psyohotherapist, for instance, has to know the difference between genuinely warm acceptance of his patient and a counter-transference clothing covert erotic need. Spiritual directors also, have had to tell genuine spirituality from the languors of "sensible consolations" and hysterica religiosity.The hardheaded (who like to call themselves "tough- minded") deny the worth of sublimation, and of course deride all religious or creative feeling as a disguised search for sex. But there is a real distinction between an enjoyment (say of a love- fetish or a perversion) distorted by a disguised impulse, and an enjoyment deriving from a transformed and freed impulse.This process of freeing has been called by one analyst "neutralization." It involves the changing of energy away from the instinctual toward a noninstinctual mode. He reminds us that "there exists a continuum of gradations of energy, from the fully instinctual to the fully neutralized mode.
Thus there are steps along the road of sublimation, and these are built of symbols--a gradus ad Parnassum like Plato's "true order of going"in the Symposium:" ... from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty...." An article by Charles Rycroft on symbolism shows how the psychoanalyst views the role of symbols in sublimation. They are formed by the displacement of emotional investment from the object of primary instinctual interest to one of less instinctual interest which resembles it in some way, or is part of it, or associated with it. Symbols can be used neurotically to provide fetishes or wishful fantasies, but when used in the search for reality, the chain of symbolization can lead to a widening of the individual's outer world, and to his being able to find satisfaction in objects and activities increasingly remote from his primary instinctual interests. Civilization itself has been described by Ernest Jones as a never-ending series of symbolic substitutions.
Read more about this topic: Sublimation (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the words distinguish, valid and/or morbid:
“Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world—and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish—she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“... many American Jews have a morbid tendency to exaggerate their handicaps and difficulties. ... There is no doubt that the Jew ... has to be twice as good as the average non- Jew to succeed in many a field of endeavor. But to dwell upon these injustices to the point of self-pity is to weaken the personality unnecessarily. Every human being has handicaps of one sort or another. The brave individual accepts them and by accepting conquers them.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)