Sublimation (psychology) - Sublimation According To Jung

Sublimation According To Jung

C. G. Jung believed sublimation to be mystical in nature, thus differing fundamentally from Freud's view of the concept. For Freud, sublimation helped explain the plasticity of the sexual instincts (and their convertibility to non-sexual ends). The concept also underpinned his psychoanalytical theories which showed the human psyche at the mercy of conflicting impulses (such as the super-ego and the id). Jung criticized Freud for obscuring the alchemical origins of sublimation and for attempting instead to make the concept appear scientifically credible:

Sublimatio is part of the royal art where the true gold is made. Of this Freud knows nothing, worse still, he barricades all the paths that could lead to true sublimatio. This is just about the opposite of what Freud understands by sublimation. It is not a voluntary and forcible channeling of instinct into a spurious field of application, but an alchymical transformation for which fire and prima materia are needed. Sublimatio is a great mystery. Freud has appropriated this concept and usurped it for the sphere of the will and the bourgeois, rationalistic ethos.

This criticism extends from the private sphere of his correspondence (as above) to specific papers he published on psychoanalysis:

Freud invented the idea of sublimation to save us from the imaginary claws of the unconscious. But what is real, what actually exists, cannot be alchemically sublimated, and if anything is apparently sublimated it never was what a false interpretation took it to be.