Narziss

I’d like to discuss the excellent essay by Ken Gemes titled, “Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation”.  This essay attempts to describe what “sublimation” means to Nietzsche and how he offers a criteria for the term that is purely psychological, self-contained, and free from cultural norms.  The essay essentially uses Nietzsche to clarify a term in Freud, to define “sublimation” on a purely psychological basis.  I will try to give a summary of the main ideas, interspersed with a few of my own extensions.

According to Freud, when a repression occurs, two components of a drive are repressed: the ideational component and the energetic component.

The first component is the ideational component, which includes the aim and object of the drive.  For example, a sex drive may produce an image of a naked person in your mind; it may also make you direct your attention toward glancing at human bodies in a particular way.  When the ideational component is repressed, no such images appear in your mind, and your attention is no longer guided in this way.  

The second component that is repressed is the energetic component or the force that pushes you to pursue the aim of the drive.  For example, in fully repressing the sex drive, not only are sexual images (the ideational component) kept from rising to consciousness, but also, the force or energy of the sex drive (the energetic component) is kept from expressing itself.  

In repression, both the ideational component and the energetic component are inhibited:

Sublimation is the goal of psychoanalysis; hence, getting this concept straight is vital to understanding psychoanalysis.  The term is important because “sublimation” is the means by which an individual is cured of his neurosis.  

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