Sublimation and Superego

Psychoanalysis Between Two Deaths

Jared Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032153803
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000488234
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Critical Theory
• Index: Psychology

This book integrates thinking about dilemmas faced in the context of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis today, with contemporary social and political concerns specific to the age of the global consumer marketplace.

Beginning with an analysis of the fate of the concept of sublimation in Freud's work, and its relationship to the elaboration of the concept of the superego in 1923, Jared Russell examines how these concepts provide a lever for integrating psychoanalytic thinking with topics of urgent social concern, beyond the critique of ideology. Taking up topics such as the experience of time, addiction to consumption, and the general consequences of the insinuation of digital technologies at increasingly earlier stages in human development—and thinking these through the lens of what the clinical practice of psychoanalysis teaches us about intimate human relatedness—the book addresses how a philosophically oriented approach to psychoanalysis can illuminate our response to the problems of everyday life under conditions of late capitalism. Drawing on a diverse range of authors such as Freud, Heidegger, Hans Loewald, Christopher Bollas, Lacan, Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler, it is argued that the concepts of sublimation and of the superego must be reinvented with regard to both clinical and critical discourse today if psychoanalysis is to remain relevant to the major issues we face, both individually and collectively, in the twenty-first century.

Sublimation and Superego: Psychoanalysis Between Two Deaths stages a unique encounter between philosophy, critical theory and clinical practice that will be of interest to psychoanalysts, scholars of twentieth-century continental philosophy, critical social theorists and mental health practitioners.

1 Freud—sublimation and superego

DOI: 10.4324/9781003243878-1

The aim of this chapter is to provide a close, somewhat speculative (reconstructive) reading of a series of Freud’s texts that traces a particular trajectory of the concept of sublimation in Freud’s work, one that ultimately culminates in the appearance of the concept of the superego with the advent of the structural model in 1923. My effort is not to rehearse every instance of the appearance of the term over the course of Freud’s career, nor is it to tend exclusively to the contradictions inherent to Freud’s use of the concept, which so many previous authors have already pointed out (for an overview, see Gemes 2009). Nor is my effort to attempt to resolve these contradictions. Rather, I will attempt to demonstrate that if we pay close attention to the way in which Freud meditates on this concept over the course of a series of coordinated texts at crucial moments in his career, we can appreciate how central the concept of sublimation would become in the development of certain more advanced aspects of his thinking. This will require revaluation of certain other basic Freudian concepts.

The reading I will propose will likely be unwelcome by contemporary orthodox psychoanalytic traditions, both Freudian and anti-Freudian. To be clear, I am not proposing the “correct” way of reading Freud, but a particular way of reading him, through the evolution of a series of particular concepts. That is, I am proposing a creative way of reading Freud on the topic of sublimation, which is to say, a way of sublimating the concept of sublimation in the context of a theoretical scene that has all but dismissed the topic entirely. Reinventing the concept of sublimation—and with it, the concept of the superego, with which it is irreducibly intertwined—today requires a creative, affirmative approach to the inheritance of conceptual and practical traditions. As I will argue, this gesture seems precisely what Freud’s conclusions regarding the topic of sublimation prescribe.

The drive and the instinct

Kaplan (1992) offers a thoughtful, comprehensive consideration of the difficulties attending to the concept of sublimation in the history of psychoanalysis, but in the course of his contribution, never does he answer the question posed by the essay’s title: “What is sublimated in sublimation?” The answer to this question is, in fact, remarkably simple: the drive.

In Freud’s work, there is never any question that what is sublimated in sublimation is the drive. The reason this has been such a difficult thought for analysts since Freud is that, beginning in 1923 with the introduction of the structural model, and specifically with the introduction of the concept of the id, the concept of the drive has been confused with the concept of the biological instinct.¹ An adequate post-Freudian theory of sublimation has suffered from this confusion because an instinct is precisely something that cannot be sublimated, whereas a drive is to be distinguished from a biological instinct based on the fact that it is essentially marked by its capacity for sublimation as one of its possible vicissitudes.

As Laplanche (1976) argues, an appreciation of the differences between the Freudian drive and the biological instinct is essential to grasping all of Freud’s major insights in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and why he was to insist on the centrality of the subject’s sexual determination up through the posthumously published An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. The first Essay is organized around Freud’s effort to explain the nature of homosexuality (“inversion”) and by extension all “perversions,” by demonstrating that the ubiquitousness of perverse behavior is what allows us to derive a concept of a drive as an impulse that has no intrinsic or fixed object. This absence of any fixed object which defines the concept of the drive is in contradistinction to the biological notion of an instinct: Genetically programmed, an instinct never deviates from either its object or its aim. Hunger, for example, can never be satisfied by anything but food, and it cannot be diverted from the satisfaction of nourishment. A drive, however, is defined by Freud precisely in terms of its lacking a pre-programmed object, and by the fact that its aim and its object can change over time.

Homosexuality, for Freud, is therefore neither a biological condition nor a conscious choice. The general field of sexuality, broadly conceived, which is to say beyond the privilege accorded to reproduction demonstrates that a framework which thinks only in terms of these opposed possibilities is thoroughly inadequate: “The nature of inversion is explained neither by the hypothesis that it is innate nor by the alternative hypothesis that it is acquired” (Freud 1905, p. 140). That is, in terms of the field of critical investigation that Freud is attempting to delimit, sexuality is neither a question of conscious choice nor are we “born this way,” as virtually all contemporary discourse on sexuality, having become thoroughly politicized after Freud, would have us choose. It is on the basis of the inadequacy of this opposition that Freud will open up an investigation into the dimension of the drive as something that implicates both mind and body. The Freudian concept of the unconscious issues from this insight into a dimension of experience that has neither to do with conscious choice nor with biological determinism. To posit an unconscious is to say that we are driven.

In a well-known passage added in 1915 to the section on the “component instincts [Triebe]”—which, Freud says, are “not of a primary nature” (p. 168), which is to say, are not biological, and therefore not instincts but something else—Freud writes,

By ‘instinct’ [Trieb] is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus,’ which is set up by single excitations coming from without. The concept of instinct [Trieb] is thus one of those lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical. The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of instincts would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and, so far as mental life is concerned, is only a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work. (p. 168; emphases in original)

The contradictions contained in this passage, which anticipates the turn to biological reductionism inherent to the structural model’s concept of the id, issue from Freud’s assertion that drives are to be situated on the frontier between the mental and the physical, yet at the same time that they are the psychical representations of the physical. The appeal to representation, which inherently opposes the psychological and biological domains to one another, undermines the insight that there is a space between these two domains to which the concept of the drive provides us access. In one and the same gesture, Freud both indicates a passage beyond and reasserts the primacy of a classical mind/body dualism. The concept of the drive intends to overcome any opposition between body and mind, but in attempting to describe this interstitial divide, Freud appeals to the concept of representation, which reinforces this opposition by thinking in terms of a simple transposition of one domain to another. In North America, this gesture will provide support for the confused and obfuscatory term “instinctual drive” (Brenner 1973).

In saying that a drive is by definition “without quality,” which is to indicate its essentially objectless nature, which is in no way the same as denying the essential domain of what are called object relations, Freud is attempting to establish the reality of a “frontier” that is a between of mind and body—a domain that both links and separates these classically opposed domains. What defines a drive, and again in contradistinction to biological instincts, is its capacity for diversion or deviation with respect to any object. Instincts are genetically programmed to seek after specific objects. Drives have no such orientation and are subject to aleatory diversions and deviations. To emphasize object relatedness and to say that we are inherently driven to seek after objects is not to revise Freudian theory, but to misrecognize the purpose of the concept of the drive.

The drive as a “demand made upon the mind for work” is typically rendered as an account of what sets the “psychic apparatus” in motion. But we should not be so quick to reduce what Freud means by “work” here to some form of automatic functioning. “Work” here can also be read as a demand for critical judgment, as an openness to an experience of the world. As a demand made upon the mind for work, the concept of the drive attempts to demarcate a frontier that is at once a kind of openness. That is, to be driven is precisely not to be biologically pre-programmed, but to be able to encounter the world as an opportunity for difference, novelty and change. The variability of the drive reflects an originary openness of mind and world, such that to be driven is to be capable of working both on the world and on oneself, and in such a way that to work on the world is to work on oneself, and equally the reverse. As I am driven to write at this moment, for instance, I am attempting to contribute something to the world, and in such a way that I transform myself in the process. Writing is not a transposition of something that preexists inside me onto a scene that can be objectively accessed by others. In writing, I am working at the frontier that both separates and connects mind and world, and in a way that disproves all efforts to figure their relation in terms of some absolute opposition. Setting the mind to work means setting the mind to work on a world that it internalizes and that it externalizes itself upon in turn.

This was already presupposed in the very concept of sublimation, which had preceded and conditioned the emergence of the psychoanalytic project, most essentially in the work of Goethe, and then in the work of Nietzsche, who gave the concept its contemporary determination as having to do with the body and with sexuality (Kaufman 2013, pp. 218–223). In a certain sense, the very concept of the drive as something other than a biological instinct is a response to the question as to what is sublimated in sublimation. With the concept of the drive, Freud had attempted to provide a scientific basis for answering this question. Without the concept of sublimation as it was already circulating prior to Freud’s efforts, Freud might not have even been led to posit the concept of the drive as a means of resisting all classical oppositions of mind and body. The concept of sublimation precedes and determines all of Freud’s contributions where the investigation and the expansion of our understanding of sexuality is concerned.

The drive and the dream

As Laplanche (1976) further demonstrates, Freud’s argument in the Three Essays concerns the way in which the drive is derived from the genetically programmed biological instinct in having originally been “propped up” on instinctual experience in a relation of “leaning” (Anlehnung). Operating mechanically according to feeding mechanisms, the infant eventually discovers not only the pleasures involved in stimulating its mouth while suckling at the breast but also its capacity to provide itself with those pleasures even in the absence of the breast. The erotic stimulation intrinsic to the mechanical feed becomes the basis upon which the infant discovers a capacity to give itself a pleasure that is supplementary to, and in excess of, the experience of feeding. Putting its thumb in its mouth, the hungry baby discovers a capacity to provide for itself oral stimulation, and in this way, it discovers a nascent sense of itself as an active agency for the very first time.

The repetitive nature of the feed is the condition of possibility of the discovery of the self as what can give itself the pleasure that the feed supplementarily provides. This primitive emergence of the agency of the self is an act of discovery according to which the self in this way gives itself to itself from out of the repetition of need (hunger) to which it is irreducibly subjected. At these moments, the drive begins to drift from instinctually programmed patterns and to constitute new opportunities for what will eventually emerge as capacities for self-care. The emergence of auto-erotism from out of a primitive, biologically pre-determined integration of mind and environment describes the constitution of the drive as something other than a mere instinct. In portraying the derivation of the drive from the instinct in this way, Freud prefigures what Mahler et al. (1975) would later describe as the psychological birth of the human infant.

Freud’s effort in demonstrating the emergence of the drive from the biological instinct is thus not to derive the mind from the body, but to open a field of investigation in which the relations of mind and body can be scientifically sketched out in a way that does not from the outset proceed from a classical framework that assumes mind and body stand formally opposed. This is how Freud distinguishes his approach to mind as a concept distinct from the concept of the soul in order to retain a properly scientific orientation. In positing the concept of the drive, Freud’s project is to undermine any such opposition in its having becoming naturalized even within a scientific framework that professes to reject the concept of the soul and of any approach to the mind based on such a concept. In continuing to oppose mind and body, while regretting that contemporary science has yet to have “solved” this problem as to their intrinsic connection, the contemporary sciences of mind fail to appreciate Freud’s appeal to a science of sexuality as a “solution” to the intransigent problems of classical mind/body dualism.

A thinking about the drive as belonging to a third area was always an attempt to think a relation of mind and body, as well as a relation of mind-body and world, in terms other than that of an opposition. The Freudian articulation of the essentially objectless nature of the drive, or rather, its aleatory constitution with regard to object relations, which are otherwise obvious and undeniable, was an attempt to define a domain of experience in which the biological instincts’ inherent relatedness to objects capable of providing satisfaction for uncircumventible need was intrinsically surmounted and overcome by biological necessity itself. Drives are by definition in excess of biological need; this is why they are essentially and originally chaotic in nature.

This is also what, as Freud will state categorically in the short but extremely sophisticated 1911 paper on “The Two Principles of the Mental Functioning,” determines the drive as the catalyst in the constitution of the dimension of fantasy. It is the capacity for fantasy that will distinguish the human from the animal, as an excessive articulation of the human being’s capacity for memory, which the animal does not possess to any comparably sophisticated degree. For Freud, what defines human being is not sexuality but memory, of which sexuality is a particular and decisive articulation. This is expressed in the Freudian concept of the drive as again distinct from the biological instinct: Without a predetermined or programmed object, the drive animates the domain of fantasy as a form of memory that projects a future of possibility that might be realized (or not). Fantasy is originally a way of experiencing the past as if it were the present—a form of memory. This is what the infant is doing when it hallucinates the presence of the breast while giving itself the pleasure of thumbsucking. Gradually—which is to say, according to a process of development, which is never simply given internally but environmentally determined—this constitutes the capacity to project a future in which fantasies can be realized as realities, through which desires can come to fruition. This is the “work” that the drive initially and essentially sets upon the mind. And this is the basis of the possibility of what will become sublimation. The concept of sublimation is implicitly central to Freud’s thinking about the concept of the drive in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sexuality will remain a lifelong preoccupation for Freud precisely because it demonstrates that domain in which oppositions between mind and body are no longer tenable.

Having established the central role of fantasy in human life—a role that distinguishes, again for Freud, the human from the animal, for which memory does not play such an essential and constitutive role—Freud will spend years not ignoring the centrality of object relations in human life, but insistently arguing for the importance of fantasy, which is rooted in the hallucinatory capacity of the hungry baby, based on its capacity for memorization, and which will constitute its capacity to project a future, which will...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Freud—sublimation and superego
• 2 Hans Loewald—between Freud and Heidegger
• 3 The fundamental ontology of Christopher Bollas
• 4 Antigone—sublimation as transgressive autonomy
• 5 Weapons
• Index