User:Ashleyphill/Sublimation (psychology)

Sexual sublimation
Sexual sublimation was according to Freud a deflection of sexual instincts into non-sexual activity, based upon a principle akin to the conservation of energy in physics. There is a finite amount of activity, and it is converted, in a mechanistic fashion like a mechanical engine, from sexual activity to non-sexual. '''One such example is the case of Wolf Man, a case in which a young boy's sexual attraction to his father was redirected towards Christianity and eventually led the boy to obsessional neurosis in the form of uncontrollable sacrilegious reverence. Freud travelled to Clark University to speak about instances of sexual sublimation, but he was not wholly convinced of his own theories. **''' Later, 20th century psychological thought by the likes of Melanie Klein has largely relegated the idea and replaced it with subtler ideas. '''One such idea is that the sexual desires are not made totally non-sexual, but rather transformed into a more appropriate desire. '''

Although superficially valid, with anecdotal examples from non-psychologists of civilizations at large and specific great achievers repressing sexual urges (e.g. Renoir "painting with his cock", Wayland Young stating that "love's loss is empire's gain", Lawrence Stone's view that Western civilization has achieved so much because of sublimation, and the claims by biographers of many people from Higgins on Rider Haggard to Sinclair on George Grey), it is ill-defined and comes with the caveats that it rarely happens in practice, that many things attributed to it are actually the results of something else, and that it is most definitely not some quasi-physical transfer of some sort of "sexual energy" in the modern psychoanalytical view but rather an internal thought process.

** I'll add exiting ref 8 to this sentence when transferred to Wikipedia.