Sublimation (psychology) - How To Distinguish A Valid Sublimation From A Morbid Sexualization

How To Distinguish A Valid Sublimation From A Morbid Sexualization

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.