GeistHaus

Defenses

Sublimation

Sublimation is turning a feeling or urge that could cause trouble into something worthwhile: anger into hard play on a court, longing or grief into a song, restlessness into work. The feeling isn’t denied or bottled up. It gets an outlet, often a creative one, that other people can accept and sometimes admire.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by channeling rather than inhibiting potentially maladaptive feelings or impulses into socially acceptable behavior” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Its classic examples are “sports and games used to channel angry impulses, or artistic creation that expresses conflicted feelings.” Raters score it only when “a strong functional relationship” can be shown between the feelings and the activity.

Sublimation lets out feelings that would cause social trouble if expressed directly, without wasting them. Along the way, their original aims are “often modified considerably,” and the result is often a creative activity or product. What it gains is twofold: the feelings get some expression, and the activity may also bring “some positive social approval or reward.”

Where It Sits

Sublimation belongs to Level 7, the High-Adaptive Defense Level, within the Mature Defensive Category. At this level, stressors are “fully perceived without distortion,” and the person takes responsibility for adapting to them. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places sublimation at the same high adaptive level, alongside affiliation, altruism, anticipation, humor, self-assertion, self-observation, and suppression.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify sublimation:

Examples

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

In 1802, as his hearing failed, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a letter to his brothers, now known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. He described withdrawing from company because he could not bring himself to tell people “speak louder, shout, for I am deaf,” and being brought “to the verge of despair.” Two decades later, by then in George Vaillant’s words “totally deaf,” he set Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in the finale of his Ninth Symphony. Over one of his sketches for the passage leading into it, he wrote: “No, these ... remind (us) of our despair.” Vaillant used Beethoven’s Ninth as an example of sublimation. “Throughout everything, he had remained conscious of his pain,” he wrote, and “Beethoven could speak from both sides of his heart at the same time.”

George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego (1993); Alexander Wheelock Thayer, The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven (1921), vol. 1, and vol. 3, p. 149

Mr. Lion and Mr. Lamb

The Grant Study followed a group of Harvard men from college into later life. In reporting on it, Vaillant contrasted two of them. Frederick Lion, a New York magazine editor, was a man “who used anger creatively”; as an adult he “played golf for friendship and tennis for competition,” and he raised a successful family. Horace Lamb, a retired diplomat who never married, “was always afraid to tell people what he really thought.” Vaillant summed up the difference: “Under stress, Mr. Lion used sublimation, and Mr. Lamb employed its primitive ancestor, fantasy.” He added that Lion “had not been born able to sublimate”; the capacity had to develop.

George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (1977), ch. 4

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Displacement
Kicking the dog instead of the boss moves the anger to a safer target, but it is still anger aimed at someone. Sublimation changes what the feeling does: the same anger might go into a hard game of tennis, where it hurts no one and may even be enjoyed.
Reaction formation
Freud himself thought it “necessary to separate from each other sublimation and reaction formation as two diverse processes.” Reaction formation replaces a feeling with its opposite. Sublimation lets the feeling through in a changed form.
Venting
Blowing off steam is not the same thing. In one experiment, angry people who hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who had angered them became angrier and more aggressive. “Doing nothing at all was more effective than venting anger” (Bushman, 2002). Venting rehearses the feeling. Sublimation turns it toward a new aim.
Altruism
Both put difficult feelings to good use. Altruism channels them into meeting other people’s needs, gratifying the self partly through others. Sublimation channels them into an activity or product, such as a game, a piece of work, or a work of art.

In Personality Styles

The personality style pages describe sublimation as a strength or a healthier expression in the obsessive–compulsive, schizoid, and sadistic styles.

History

“Sublimation” is a word borrowed from chemistry. Friedrich Nietzsche used it in Human, All Too Human (1878), in a passage on the “chemistry” of ideas and feelings, suggesting that unselfish conduct and disinterested views are “simply sublimations in which the basic element seems almost evaporated.”

Sigmund Freud made it a psychoanalytic concept. In his 1905 essays on sexual theory (translated by A. A. Brill as Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex), he described the turning of sexual energies away from sexual aims toward new ones, “a process which merits the name of sublimation,” and agreed with historians of civilization that it had furnished “powerful components for all cultural accomplishments.” In a 1910 study of Leonardo da Vinci, he proposed that Leonardo had turned his childhood curiosity into a lifelong drive to investigate, though he admitted that “the proof of this conception is not easy to produce.”

Freud tied sublimation to sexual drives. Later definitions widened it. George Vaillant’s Grant Study research, reported in Adaptation to Life (1977), treated sublimation as one of the most adaptive mechanisms. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) placed it at the high adaptive level, and J. Christopher Perry’s DMRS applies it to any “potentially maladaptive feelings or impulses,” such as anger channeled into sport.

Sublimation has long been hard to test. Kim, Zeppenfeld, and Cohen (2013) offered what they called “possibly the first experimental evidence for sublimation.” In their studies, Protestant participants in particular produced more creative work, such as sculptures, poems, and collages, when made to feel unacceptable desires or to suppress their anger. Simply stirring up anger or attraction was not enough: “it was the forbidden or suppressed nature of the emotion that gave the emotion its creative power.”

Sources