Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel (review)

Eckhart Goebel offers lucid and illuminating explorations of the concept of sublimation in Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, important influences on Sigmund Freud’s thinking, as well as chapters on Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Lacan, each responding to Freud. The theory of sublimation informs much of the modern discourse on the nature of civilization and art, raising questions about the tensions between the individual and culture, the repression of instinctual drives, the limits of language, along with consequent problems of discontent, pessimism, and the meaning of happiness. Much of this discourse draws on Freud. That said, Freud’s own views on sublimation are unsettled and fragmentary, scattered throughout his works. Sometimes he treats it as a creative substitution, as in the cases of Goethe and Leonardo; sometimes it is a forced renunciation, a struggle to transcend natural drives. At other times Freud treats it dialectically as the history of the individual’s object-choices. Taking up Freud’s admonition that “it would be wiser to reflect upon this [sublimation] a little longer” (ix), Goebel shows that the notion of sublimation is not so much a single doctrine as a continuing debate on the relationship between the self and nature, the individual and civilization.

While a notion of the sublime can be traced back to Plato’s Symposium, Goebel begins fruitfully with Goethe’s struggle with the tension between passion and artistry as both paradigm and provocation. He focuses on a close reading of the so-called Trilogie der Leidenschaft—“An Werther,” “Die Marienbader Elegie,” and “Reconciliation”—finding in them a pattern that begins with resignation but is then reconceived in terms of the sublime. Unbearable and even destructive desires are resigned to artistic expression; yet in signifying them, the experience of the unspeakable sublime is made possible, and in this lies a source of happiness.

Schopenhauer’s notion of sublimation grows out of the metaphysical coexistence between our drives and our representations of the world and ourselves. Anticipating Freud, he argues that our sublimated desires are never truly forgotten, merely repressed in an attempt at ascetic mortification. We are left with the consolation of momentarily losing the self in music. Nietzsche shifts the focus to the psychological, distinguishing a “false” sublimation predicated on ascetic renunciation from a “good” version aimed at a transformation and intensification of life.

Versions of sublimation are central to Nietzsche’s ideas on genealogy and metamorphosis. Goebel distinguishes three domains. In the realm of culture, sublimation is the accompaniment of civilization; the Apollonian acts as the sublimation of the Dionysian. In the realm of psychology, it opens the concept of genealogy and the “unmasking” of the layers of desire sublimated in our morality, revealing for Nietzsche the “spirituality of cruelty” (64). Finally, in the realm of philosophy, sublimation is about overcoming the dualism between reason and body in a more intensified experience. Focusing on Morgenröthe, Goebel discusses Nietzsche’s attempt to integrate the spiritual with the drives in a way that goes beyond discontent to an idea of happiness.

The chapter devoted to Freud traces his shifting but finally unresolved views on sublimation. In one use of the concept, sublimation emerges as a response to the tensions between the pleasure and reality principles, the need to repress natural drives and protect the ego without falling into neurosis and narcissism. In other cases it suggests a transcendence of natural drives into a realm of disinterested action, as in the creativity of Goethe or Leonardo or in the dispassionate science of Freud himself. In either case sublimation is about repressing nature. Here Goebel excavates Freud’s profound and explicit debt to Thomas Hobbes.

Sublimation is central to Thomas Mann’s art. On one level, for instance, Aschenbach’s aesthetic response to Tadzio’s smile in A Death in Venice can be read as a creative sublimation; on another, it is a narcissistic response to a narcissistic smile. Unlike Freud, however, Mann seeks not to transcend...