Abstract

While sublimation is not the first word in psychoanalysis, it nevertheless constitutes the final aim of psychoanalytic thought in both its clinical and theoretical orientations. Indeed, if psychoanalysis is primarily a practice whose aim is to alleviate a patient’s sufferings, and if these sufferings are largely the result of a conflict between the exigencies of an individual’s drives and the necessities of a civilized social life, then effective therapeutic action presupposes some knowledge of the way in which such a conflict might be resolved.Yet the concept of sublimation not only exhibits the ultimate horizon, the aim or even the ethical norm of therapeutic action, it also provides a striking outline of the conception which psychoanalytic theory has of the human being. Sublimation cannot be understood without a previous understanding of such key psychoanalytic concepts as the unconscious, drive and desire, sexuality and pleasure, dream and reality. Tying together the ultimate ends of psychoanalytic therapy with the first principles of ‘Freudian metapsychology’, a study of the notion of sublimation invites us not only to take an overall view of psychoanalytic theory, but also to test its coherence.It would not, then, be an exaggeration to say that the value of psychoanalysis as theory and as practice depends essentially on its ability to think sublimation and, more specifically, to think the relation between the economy of a singular libidinal body and the demands of a cultural life accomplished within a symbolic field transcending the individual.