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:
“My mother ... believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: “Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.””
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.”
—J.G. (James Graham)