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THE PROBLEM OF SUBLIMATION
tion and custom. He can relieve the tension by directing his
energies into new channels of creative activity.
Clearly Hollington is thinking less of sexuality than of
instinctual energy in general. Clearly, too, the word sublimation
has become for him a collective term, the contents of which are
determined by pedagogic rather then psycho-therapeutic
principles.
In fact Freud himself makes a rather moderate claim for the
therapeutic value of sublimation. He says that the ‘plasticity’ or
‘mobility’ of the libido may often be very restricted and that
sublimation can only provide partial release for libidinous
energy.
We would go further and claim that sublimation does not
really occur. The theory resultsfrom a mis-reading ofthe situation.
There is no specific psycho-sexual energy. Psychic energy itself
is diffuse. It has no precise quality that can be defined as ‘sexual’.
When a person gains a new attitude to life he is seized by new
interests. As these engage him he employs his psychic energy in
pursuit of them. This has nothing to do with a transportation of
sexual energy on to new levels or its transformation into
something else. A chemical analogy is appropriate here. The term
sublimation is used in chemistry to denote a process whereby
matter that has been made gaseous by heating is directly
converted into a crystalline form when it cools, without passing
first through a fluid stage. But this direct transformation does
not occur. It appears to only because the state of fluidity is so
quickly passed through that it cannot be directly observed. Thus
sublimation describes an appearance, not a reality, in chemical
process. So it does also when used in psychology.
There are practical as well as theoretical risks in applying the
theory of sublimation to the care of souls. It easily leads to
sexuality being regarded as something ugly and distasteful which
should not rise to expression; and to a similar devaluation of the
whole of the ‘natural’ aspect of human life.
Moreover, from a Christian point of view a harmoniously
balanced person is something more than a well-regulated system
of instincts and energies. The spiritual counsellor’s concern is
not the re-direction of particular urges. He is striving for the
‘sublimation’ of the whole being into an order of life and
experience which is never a product of the development of
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