THE “DARK” FACE OF SUBLIMATION – ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NEUROTIC DIMENSION

Abstract

Abstract. The article analyzes the process of sublimation in terms of its complexity, multilevelness, and relations with other mental processes and structures. In particular, the author focuses on the “dark side” of sublimation – its connection with death drives and playing on the side of death, which includes a series of destructive events and consequences in the inner mental and social life of a person. The logic of the article allows us to reveal the concept of sublimation in the service of Thanatos in the views of S. Freud and its development by a number of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, in particular Andre Green. The article describes in detail the double face of sublimation as a constructive, symbolic process that promotes psychic development and as a mechanism that causes disobjectalisation, unbinding of drives, automatism of repetition, “narcissistic enslavement”, mental rigidity, and impoverishment of social and sexual life, which corresponds to the picture of non-neurotic functioning. However, sublimation itself does not look like a criminal, but rather like a hostage to other related processes that determine the existence of a non-neurotic logic of survival. The development of views on sublimation by representatives of the school of object relations, including M. Klein, D. Winnicott, H. Segal, J. McDougall, C. Bollas and others, allows Freud’s movement of sublimation from object libido to narcissistic libido to be turned in a diametrically opposite direction and to see and emphasize the role of objects in the process of sublimation, to reveal more about the formation and fate of objects of sublimation. One of the interesting questions discussed in the article is the possibility of sublimation’s existence outside the dimension of neurotic functioning: is it a real sublimation, is it a driver of the creative process, what is its role, place, destiny in it, what is the nature of the author’s relationship with his or her own works? In our practical work, we often observe that sublimation is a companion of the artist’s pronounced perverse tendencies, and it has many similarities with perversion: connection with partial drives, idealization and avoidance of repression, elements of transgression, the presence of active actions and search, etc. However, external similarities sometimes mask significant differences. The clinical material demonstrates where genuine sublimation can be found, sometimes in unexpected places, and where we are dealing with megalomaniacal imitation with a destructive flavor.