In Fiction
- One of the best known examples in Western literature is in Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice, where the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous writer, sublimates his desire for an adolescent boy into writing poetry.
- In Psychological Science: Mind, Brain and Behavior, by Michael Gazzaniga and Todd F. Heatherton, a more sinister example is given in which a sadist becomes a surgeon or a dentist - A direct example of this is in the musical and movie Little Shop of Horrors characterized in the descriptively sadist character of Orin Scrivello who follows his mother's advice to become a dentist, quoting her "You'll find a way/to make your natural tendencies pay (...) Son, be a dentist/People will pay you to be inhumane."
- Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None features a villain whose line of work as a judge, dealing out harsh sentences to guilty criminals, had previously permitted him to sublimate his homicidal urges.
Sexual transmutation was quoted on Napoleon Hill book " Think and Grow Rich " and is illustrated as a principle of success.
Read more about this topic: Sublimation (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)