Sublimation
One of the more famous but abstract concepts that Freud explained was that of sublimation. This is the ability to take the sexual libido, or craving, and to direct it towards socially acceptable projects and goals. Freud briefly outlines this process, which begins with childhood researches on how sex works and is then interrupted by “a wave of energetic sexual repression” from family and culture. There are three avenues for this energy to move, usually to intellectual research. If the repression doesn’t lead to intellectual endeavours then it can lead to “neurotic inhibition [and to] the outbreak of neurotic illness.” In the second type of sublimation it involves “compulsive brooding, naturally in a distorted and unfree form…Here investigation becomes a sexual activity, often the exclusive one, and the feeling that comes from settling things in one’s mind and explaining them replaces sexual satisfaction; but the interminable character of the child’s researches is also repeated in the fact that this brooding never ends and that the intellectual feeling, so much desired, of having found a solution recedes more and more into the distance.” In the third form of sublimation, “the rarest and most perfect…the libido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for research as a reinforcement…Sexual repression, which has made the instinct so strong through the addition to it of sublimated libido, is still taken into account by the instinct, in that it avoids any concern with sexual themes.”
The key to sublimation to go in this direction is having a strong enough repression, from either disgust or shame, that the projects of research and understanding replace sexual release. For example, if I research something I don’t understand about a Freudian concept, it can be a setup that requires a payoff, like the stress of dating and then sex. Then when a profound intellectual understanding is achieved it’s like an intellectual orgasm. To see micro versions of sublimations in your life you have to meditate and see the tension in your wishes/desires and then notice the release when satisfying them. As described in prior videos, libido is like a craving. You have a craving that arises with the daydream or wish. These are often culturally provided for us, and then a tension or frustration arises related to the lack of satisfaction because there is a distance between ourselves and the object of desire. It motivates action to close the gap, and then there’s relief when the desire is achieved. Cravings for food and sex are felt in the body, but there is emotional craving that can go anywhere. In some ways the tension and release can involve things like cleaning a room and getting satisfaction from it. Buying interesting things, exercising, enjoying non-sexual pleasures, creating art, and educating oneself.
Liszt – Harmonies du Soir – Boris Berezovsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOZSUdhrQo0
All these goals and achievements can be thought of as unconscious ways to make oneself more interesting, economically effective, sexually attractive and desirable, leading right back to sex. The more one is concentrating and enjoying the non-sexual activity, so that sex is not on one’s mind, the more sublimated the result. The more pleasurable and satisfying the achievement is, the more successful it replaces sexuality as an aim. Yet unconsciously, these achievements make us more likely to attract sexual partners, leading ultimately to the unconscious goal of finding a mate.
Freud controversially psychoanalyzed Leonardo Da Vinci from his notebooks and found evidence of artistic sublimation. Leonardo at one point in his notebooks said “intellectual passion drives out sensuality.” For Freud, Leonardo’s intense curiosity was a complete sublimation of his sexual drive leading to no need for sexual relationships with others. Freud saw a lot in Leonardo’s paintings, maybe too much for most modern critics who felt that Freud both over-analyzed and under-analyzed him. When you have never met the subject you are more likely to miss the mark. But like a “bull in a China shop”, Freud found clues to homosexuality related to an undying allegiance to his mother. The Mona Lisa Smile in the famous painting and the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, represent an ideal memory of his mother. The smile, being a symbol of happiness that Leonardo could recreate in many paintings, was a way to preserve that memory. This is a more direct way of enjoying alternative pleasures, but there is also a vicarious way of sublimating.
Catharsis
Freud and Breuer emphasized the value of releasing emotions related to unconscious memories in, Studies in Hysteria. [See: Studies in Hysteria: https://rumble.com/v1gtdvl-studies-in-hysteria-sigmund-freud-and-josef-breuer.html] A famous precursor to their method is that of an audience watching performing arts as Aristotle explained, and that the purpose “is to excite pity and fear, and thus bring about a ‘catharsis of the emotions.'” With the ability to imitate and identify, the audience begins developing cravings related to the actions of the characters on a stage or in a book. We rate which characters we think act and choose like we do, or especially how we want to be, and emotionally invest in them. As the characters move through the plot our emotions move with them, and their emotional releases can be ours as well.
All of us have the ability to imitate and it happens naturally like we see in watching movies or plays. It can allow us to vicariously live another character’s life. Freud says, “certainly the release of the subject’s own affects must here be given first place, and the enjoyment resulting there from corresponds on the one hand to the relief produced by their free discharge, and on the other, very likely, to the concomitant sexual stimulation which, one may suppose, occurs as a by-product of every emotional excitation and supplies the subject with that feeling of a heightening of his psychic level which he so greatly prizes. The sympathetic witnessing of a dramatic performance fulfills the same function for the adult as does play for the child, whose besetting hope of being able to do what the adult does, it gratifies.”
Yet this vicarious pleasure has a safety net. “The spectator at the play experiences too little…he wants to feel, to act, to mold the world in the light of his desire-in short, to be a hero. And the playwright-actors make all this possible for him by giving him the opportunity to identify himself with a hero. But they thus spare him something also; for the spectator is well aware that taking over the hero’s role in his own person would involve such griefs, such sufferings and such frightful terrors as would almost nullify the pleasure therein; and he knows too that he has but a single life to live, and might perhaps perish in a single one of the hero’s many battles with the Fates. Hence his enjoyment presupposes an illusion; it presupposes an attenuation of his suffering through the certainty that in the first place it is another than himself who acts and suffers upon the stage, and that in the second place it is only a play, whence no threat to his personal security can ever arise. It is under such circumstances that he may indulge in the luxury of being a hero; he may give way unashamedly to suppressed impulses such as the need for freedom in religious, political, social or sexual respects, and may let himself go in all directions in each and every grand scene of the life enacted upon the stage.”
How to gain Flow in 7 steps – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
How to appreciate art – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvlhb-how-to-appreciate-art-psychology-of-things-22.html
Like most drama teachers and screenwriters will tell their students, there has to be conflict in order to keep the film or play interesting. That tension or frustration followed by a payoff. A lot of pleasure is in fact a reduction of stress. Stress has to be created first, with a difficult problem or obstacle that increases painful mental processing, and then it must be alleviated to get the proper effect. Mundane areas of life do not have enough drama or conflict, “the action must contain within itself a striving of the will and some opposition thereto.”
Along with external conflict, there is also internal conflict that characters experience. Social institutions forbid the acting on every impulse moving the external struggle to an internal struggle. “For it is within the soul of the hero himself that there takes place an anguished struggle between various impulses-a struggle which must end, not with the downfall of the hero, but with that of one of the contending impulses, in other words, with a renunciation. Every combination of this situation with that in the earlier type of drama, that is the social and the character drama, is of course possible in so far as social institutions evoke just such an inner conflict, and so on. It is here that the love drama belongs, in so far as the suppressing of love-whether on the score of the mores, the conventions or the conflict, familiar from opera, between ‘love and duty’-forms the starting point for an almost endless variety of conflictual situations, as infinite in their variety as the erotic daydreams of mankind. The possibilities multiply still further, however, and the psychological drama becomes the psychopathological, when the source of the suffering which we are to share and from which we are to derive pleasure is no longer a conflict between two almost equally conscious motivations, but one between conscious and repressed ones.”
Here we can see identification as a form of imitation. If the spectator has internal struggles like that of the characters in the play, the potential for emotional release increases. It’s like when audience members criticize a movie because they don’t identify with a character. It means that they would not do what the hero does. Yet the more characters behave congruently, like what the audience wants in their fantasies, the more success the artwork will receive.
Avengers: Endgame Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcMBFSGVi1c
Now we are free – Gladiator soundtrack – Hans Zimmer & Czarina Russell
Lisa Gerrard’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/LisaGerrardChannel
Hans Zimmer’s Masterclass on Film Scoring: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/hans-zimmer-teaches-film-scoring/chapters/working-with-musicians-the-orchestra-part-1#
Escaping the real
For Freud, he connects fantasies with play, by how the fantasies can be reenacted with real objects. “Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying’.”
Yet the sense that play has an element of safety is that it allows us to go into dangerous scenarios that would be too frightening if they were real. We can think about imaginary problems and think about solutions and gain pleasure from the tension and release. These rules are very apparent for creative writers. They have to contrive just those kind of scenarios that setup tension and provide release so that the audience will actually like their work, but reality doesn’t always provide that. This is why many artworks can appear like an escape from reality. “The unreality of the writer’s imaginative world, however, has very important consequences for the technique of his art; for many things which, if they were real, could give no enjoyment, can do so in the play of phantasy, and many excitements which, in themselves, are actually distressing, can become a source of pleasure for the hearers and spectators at the performance of a writer’s work.”
The demarcation between childhood play and being a grownup doesn’t really exist for Freud. It just moves into things like sports, or stays in the imagination as daydreaming. “As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams.”
Daydreaming
Freud elegantly describes how daydreams are generated. “Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From there it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfilment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.”
For Freud, he sees daydreams as simply a continuation of dreams we have at night. “I cannot pass over the relation of phantasies to dreams. Our dreams at night are nothing else than phantasies like these…”
Play has an important role for children in that it allows them to think about the adult world and how they can imitate characteristics of their adult role models, and this can be seen with wild animals and their play. “A child’s play is determined by wishes: in point of fact by a single wish-one that helps in his upbringing-the wish to be big and grown up. He is always playing at being ‘grown up’, and in his games he imitates what he knows about the lives of his elders. He has no reason to conceal this wish.”
The tension that people feel seems to be a requirement for future happiness, and we often create this drama, challenge, or conflict. When we are satisfied there is less motivation to take action in the world. Freud says “a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality…They are either ambitious wishes, which serve to elevate the subject’s personality; or they are erotic ones.”
In a movie or play, fantasy can be quite different from reality and provide entertainment, but if daydreams mimic unreality and are projected onto the world, a potential for anxiety is created. “If phantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis or psychosis. Phantasies, moreover, are the immediate mental precursors of the distressing symptoms complained of by our patients. Here a broad by-path branches off into pathology.”
Dreams by Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html
The Micro and Macrocosm of wishes
Deeper than identifying with the hero’s struggle, is to finally see the struggle within, and the temptation to make the art autobiographic or self-indulgent. “It has struck me that in many of what are known as ‘psychological’ novels only one person-once again the hero-is described from within. The author sits inside his mind, as it were, and looks at the other characters from outside. The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes…A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work. The work itself exhibits elements of the recent provoking occasion as well as of the old memory…You will not forget that the stress it lays on childhood memories in the writer’s life-a stress which may perhaps seem puzzling-is ultimately derived from the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood…”
When an artist’s work resonates with a large section of a culture, it telegraphs the culture’s wishes. “In so far as the material is already at hand, it is derived from the popular treasure-house of myths, legends and fairy tales. The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity.” To avoid embarrassment or shame for these unrealistic dreams, the audience is enabled by the writer “to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame.” In a suspense of disbelief, the audience can follow along with the plot, however fantastical, and if they identify with the writer and their intent with the hero, they can enjoy what the author creates, even if those ideas in the cold light of day would repel them.
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (Strachey Translation) – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393001495/
Psychopathic Characters on the Stage Freud Standard Edition: v.7 by Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426585/
Creative Writers and Day-dreaming by Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855757547/
Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781501139178/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/