Freud on Sublimation

Book excerpt: This book is the only full-length treatment of the relationship between aesthetic truths and psychoanalytic discoveries—of art, artists, and a new concept of sublimation. It provides a radical and unique study of the concept of sublimation and proposes a modest replacement for it. In the first third of the book the author reviews critically the psychoanalytic sources of the concept of sublimation. In the second third he shows how the concept developed from Freud's nineteenth-century notions of perception. In the last third he revises a concept of sublimation using a contemporary theory of perception. In the final chapter he examines four works of literature: short stories of John Cheever, a Japanese novel, portions of Hamlet, and sublimation and perversion in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.