COMPOSING ONE'S LIFE: SIGMUND FREUD AND SUBLIMATION

 

In 1929  Sigmund Freud wrote  Civilization and its Discontents. I first read this book in 1953.  It was the last work I read aloud to my blind high school teacher, Mr. Cohen.  It shaped my life in three ways.  Freud begins with his criticism of organized religions.  He feels religion is a transfer of a child’s fears allayed by a strong father as protector to a non-existent invented god who plays that role and to whom we can petition our desires for help by prayer. He said that his friend, Nobel laureate novelist Romain Rolland, chided him by saying surely he must have felt an “oceanic feeling” looking at the vastness of the universe which conveys a Creator’s presence.  Sorry, Freud replied, he had no such feeling so it clearly wasn’t universal. I was struck by Freud’s integrity and I resonated to his claim because I had never experienced either such an oceanic feeling about the presence of some supernatural being.  The second thing I was struck by, was Freud’s effort to understand why so many sexual themes occupied our lives.  These can appear in doodles, in sudden thoughts that pop into our heads at inappropriate times, in Freudian slips, and in our responses to seeing other people (such as arousal).  Freud was my introduction to the scientific effort to understand human sexuality.  It was an interest that years later resulted in my book The 7 Sexes (2013) which is a history of how our ideas on sexuality --  anatomical,  physiological, and behavioral, arose.   

               The third aspect was Freud’s introduction of the idea of sublimation.  He argued that some people take the tensions brewing in their minds and use it in destructive ways—acting defensively, having paranoid-like interpretations of others, striking out in destructive or aggressive ways.  If such feelings are sublimated in this way by national leaders it can lead to wars.  But others who are psychologically struggling with their problems of insecurity, disappointment, or anger may sublimate their feelings into creative work.  They may write books, compose music, paint masterpieces, designing magnificent architecture, carry out brilliant experimental or theoretical scientific work.  In short—Freud argued that civilization which we admire is an outcome of the same psychic energy that drives us to self destructive or externally destructive activity.  Freud felt a second world war was imminent and that the technology it would introduce could lead to mass destruction of humanity.  His book is a plea for those studying human behavior to find the switches that can shunt discontents into that productive life-enriching direction of civilization instead of the destructive energies that we pour into destroying our enemies, real or imagined.  I consider the book a masterpiece in the study of the human condition although I have doubts about the triune mind of ego, superego, and id that he proposed for our minds or about the Oedipal theory he proposed as a type of Lamarckian acquired characteristic from a primal horde of sons murdering their fathers. I benefitted from reading this work because I have found that switch in my head to turn disappointments into creative activity – teaching, writing, and pursuing scholarly activities.  Instead of feeling “there but for the grace of God go I,” my response has always been, “thank you, Freud, for giving me the insight to sublimate defeat and failure into works that endure and contribute to our understanding of science”.  

 

Life Lines 90

REINTERPRETING THE PAST: A NEVER ENDING ACTIVITY


Each generation has its own music, art, literature, and other ways of seeing and interpreting the universe. We seek nevertheless universal truths that are fixed and that will serve us a guide through life. For most of humanity it is found in a religion, one of several hundred contradictory religions, some believing in the existence one god, some in many gods, and some in no gods. The difficulty with these religious guidelines is their ease of reinterpretation. Each generation is selective in what it considers important to its own values. “Thou shalt not kill” has a myriad of exceptions for those who justify capital punishment, collateral deaths in bombings, or the vaporization of non-combatant men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the past the justified killings included counterfeiting, blasphemy, atheism, pick pocketing, mutiny, and heresies of innumerable kinds. Falling asleep while on sentry duty was punishable by death.

It is not just commandments that we violate and justify; we reinterpret everything, all the time, because each generation has a different universe to live in. Old values are stretched to accommodate new priorities. In the 1940s I listened to radioevangelists condemning the sin of Mammon worship (materialistic wealth). Today televangelists praise the acquisition of wealth and no longer ask their wealthy donors to struggle about squeezing through a needle’s eye. We don’t condemn keeping up with the Joneses; we convince ourselves that we want the best for our children or our families.

Science also reinterprets the past. It does so with a different motivation in mind. It seeks to understand the physical universe of atoms and their activities from the subatomic to the galaxies of the universe including life on earth. Since modern science began with Galileo’s use of the telescope to examine the sun, moon, and planets we have had an unending series of understandings of how the physical laws of the universe work, how molecules are formed from atoms, how heredity works, how infectious diseases arise from germs, and how a fertilized egg eventually becomes an adult being. The applications of science necessarily involve values; and science is often abused by making weapons of mass destruction, by pollution from its by-products, and by inadequate regulation. Here the failings of applied science are no different from the failings of humanity more familiar to the past – bribery, influence peddling, nepotism, cronyism, greed, theft, and betrayal. Whoever harms another person, intentionally or not, justifies that behavior as being done for a higher cause. That higher cause can be religion, patriotism, one’s family, or a political ideology. It is not a question of reason being better or worse than religious faith. What is at fault is our use of higher causes to justify the harms done by our actions.

Science, religion, and the liberal arts have failed us because our capacity for empathy is weak compared to our capacity for self-serving. Freud understood this problem in his Civilization and its Discontents, but his solution, sublimation of the harmful tensions within us by making civilization’s greatest contributions, is not easy to do. Without effective regulation of our motives, we are limited to repeating (and justifying) our mistakes every generation.