Understanding Sublimation in Freudian Theory and Modernist Writing

In Understanding Sublimation in Freudian Theory and Modernist Writing, Luke Thurston challenges prevailing scholarly interpretations of May Sinclair's and David Jones's conceptions of sublimation. In psychoanalytic terms, sublimation is commonly understood as either the Freudian process in which a subject converts sexual or socially unacceptable impulses into an acceptable action such as artistic production or as the Lacanian elevation of an ordinary object to a higher level. Yet, contrary to the views of critics and Sinclair's and Jones's theoretical studies and letters, Thurston argues that Sinclair's and Jones's literary works present sublimation not as a method of idealization or a defense against problematic psychic material, but as a process in which unassimilable psychic content is projected into the ego at the risk of undoing the ego's very structure. As a whole, Thurston's discussion of the literary texts, the writers’ intellectual backgrounds, and the relevant psychoanalytic theory is dense and conceptually rigorous. Indeed, his readings of Sinclair and Jones are particularly noteworthy for the way he connects Sinclair's ambivalence toward feminist politics, Jones's Catholic theology, and both writers’ experience with the First World War, to Jean Laplanche's models of sublimation and the ego. Nonetheless, Thurston's firm dismissal of Lacanian sublimation overlooks the conceptual similarities between Lacan and Laplanche's accounts, and his insistence on reading Sinclair and Jones through Laplanche risks interpreting the texts in an insufficiently narrow way to reach a predetermined theoretical conclusion. As a result, Thurston misses an opportunity to engage with Sinclair and Jones through multiple theories and to allow the writers’ own ideas to challenge the theoretical assumptions they confront. Even so, Thurston's decision to connect the idea of a vortex and a “heterogeneous” ego in Sinclair's and Jones's writing to modernist sociocultural disruptions lays the foundation for a new theoretical understanding of modernism in terms of “elevating” change that paradoxically risks personal or social destabilization.In the first part of his book, Thurston grounds his literary analysis in the intricacies of psychoanalytic theory by tracing the conceptual evolution of sublimation from its original but equivocal formulation by Sigmund Freud, to its dramatic reinvention (and misconstruction) by Jacques Lacan, and finally to its reinterpretation by Jean Laplanche, who returns sublimation to its original Freudian context while clarifying Freud's theoretical ambiguities. In the chapter “Freud: The Cleavage of Sense and Horror,” Thurston traces the evolution of Freud's idea of sublimation through his early texts and especially Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910). He concludes that while Freud never resolved his inconsistent (in Thurston's view) definition of sublimation as both a defense against the sexual drive and a destination for this drive, Thurston draws from Freud's theory of narcissism to offer a new conception of sublimation that he believes is more consistent with the larger body of Freud's work. Contrary to many scholars, Thurston argues that sublimation does not act as an impenetrable repression-oriented defense against the release of libido nor extend the ego's control over unconscious sexuality. Rather, Thurston holds that while sublimation may involve a secondary and partial defense mechanism to stabilize the ego, sublimation mainly “smuggl[es] the enigmatic otherness” of sexual psychic content “back into the supposedly self-identical” and nonsexual “site of the ego” (59). This conclusion, which closely resembles Laplanche's models of sublimation and the ego, leads into Thurston's claim that Laplanche resolves issues with Freud's definition without straying away from the essence of Freudian theory.While based on thorough close reading of Freud's texts, Thurston's discussion of Freudian sublimation raises the critical theoretical question of whether Freud's conception of sublimation is actually inconsistent. Since the general idea of sublimation is that the psyche converts sexual, violent, trauma-induced, or other socially unacceptable drives or compulsions into socially acceptable (and thus nonsexual, in light of Victorian social values) actions, one could argue that sublimation does act as a defense against these drives by directing them to socially acceptable drive destinations. And if subjects are not consciously aware that their actions stem from these socially unacceptable drives, such drives (and, in some cases, the memories of the life experiences that cause them) could still be considered repressed, similar to the uninterpreted symptom in Lacanian theory. Thurston's admission that sublimation might be a secondary defense mechanism seems to acknowledge this possibility. For me, Thurston's argument would be more persuasive if instead of trying to make Freudian sublimation Laplanchean, he acknowledged Laplanchean sublimation's grounding in Freudian narcissism, but identified it as a third, distinct model that serves as the best explanation for sublimation in Sinclair's and Jones's work.Thurston's chapter “Sublimation and the Ethical” challenges Lacan's “attempt to re-found sublimation” (93) in Seminar VII (1959–60) as the raising of an object to the level of its most ideal form. Emphasizing Freud's distinction between sublimation and idealization, a distinction that separates sublimation from the Kantian idea of the sublime or the Hegelian idea of Aufhebung (sublation), Thurston holds that Lacan's view of sublimation as idealization overlooks sublimation's actual identity as a “transformation of the aim of the drive” (96). Instead, Lacan classifies sublimation as “linked to [the drive's] object.” While Freudian sublimation involves elevating the aim for sexual satisfaction to a nonsexual or cultural aim such as artistic creation, Lacanian sublimation improperly elevates an actual physical object to an idealistic level (das Ding, the Thing).Yet Thurston argues that contrary to Lacan's notable reinvention of Freud's ideas, Laplanche not only resituates sublimation firmly in a Freudian framework but also provides the term with the conceptual clarity it had been lacking. In “Sublimation and Anti-Hermeneutics,” Thurston draws on Laplanche's theory of primal seduction in Problématiques III (1980) and other texts to explain that although the sexual drive diverges from the self-preservative instinct during the development of the infantile psyche, sublimation causes the sexual drive to eventually resume its biological and instinctual character, thereby transforming “instinctual self-preservation into a libidinal activity” (153). In this way, sublimation projects unconscious libido (which Laplanche and Thurston insist is necessarily “other”) into the self-preservation-oriented ego but keeps this libido distinct and nonassimilated into the structure of the ego itself. Through this argument and its strong grounding in Laplanchean theory, Thurston posits a critical challenge to the common “Ptolemiac” model where the ego is conceptualized as “hermeneutic” or as a fully unified, coherent whole that is completely separated from unconscious sexual psychic content.After this extensive theoretical background, the second part of Thurston's book analyzes Sinclair's The Tree of Heaven (1917) and Jones's In Parenthesis (1937) in terms of this Laplanchean understanding of sublimation, which he applies not just to individual subjects but to social contexts as well. Thurston's argument here focuses on the vortex motif in both writers’ works, which he claims presents how war, sexual liberalism, political movements, and Vorticist art insert an unassimilable “otherness” into the subject's ego and the broader social order. Central to this analysis, Thurston explains, is Sinclair's and Jones's shared interest in the years around the First World War—a period of “great historical and cultural schism” in which “the ordinary rules of reality” including “nineteenth-century behavioral and discursive codes” (160) broke down in the face of conflict and urbanization. For Thurston, the sociopolitical changes of this period introduce a social or cultural modern “otherness” into Victorian society that pushes this social order to the brink of collapse, paralleling the way sublimation inserts a sexual “otherness” into the ego and threatens to dissolve it.Thurston analyzes this idea of Laplanchean sublimation as both an individual-psychoanalytic and a collective-social process in Sinclair's work. Thurston first focuses on Sinclair's A Journal of Impressions of Belgium (1915), her involvement in founding psychoanalytic clinics in Britain during the war, and her theoretical essays on sublimation to establish her explicit interest in the topic. These works present Sinclair's conscious view—and the prevailing opinion among Sinclair scholars—that sublimation is a “golden bridge” that can transform unwanted psychic material (such as sexual drive or war trauma) into redemptive activity. However, Thurston's account of The Tree of Heaven asserts that Sinclair's literature actually supports the much more pessimistic view that such unwanted material is merely inserted into the ego at the risk of the ego's destabilization, without any potential for actual “social communion and higher moral endeavor” (Sinclair quoted on p. 189). Thurston ties the role of sexuality and war trauma in this model of sublimation to Sinclair and her novel's ambivalent repulsion from and attraction to the women's suffrage campaign and other feminist politics. Noting that The Tree of Heaven presents Victorian women as socially confined and modern women as lacking a stable psychological structure, Thurston claims that, for Sinclair, feminist movements—in the same manner as war and sexual liberalism—insert into the Victorian subject's ego “an intoxicating, hypnotic enjoyment that threatens to obliterate the ego's imaginary coherence” (183). For this subject, such an alluring yet horrifying “otherness” causes one's conception of a “Victorian world [to] collapse” and its inhabitants to become “no longer recognizable [as] human beings” (189).Thurston's final chapter describes the role of individual and social Laplanchean sublimation in Jones's In Parenthesis, drawing particular attention to sublimation's applications to theology. Thurston's reading of Jones challenges two prevailing scholarly opinions: first, the idea that Jones's work presents a religious transformation of the sexual drive into redemptive art; and, second, the idea that the real meaning of Jones's art lies merely on the surface, at the level of the sign. Contrary to both of these ideas, Thurston uses Jones's Marianist theological views and close readings of the vortex motif in key passages of In Parenthesis to argue that Jones's long poem actually portrays the entrance of the unconscious sexual drive (beneath the surface level of the sign) into the ego and the “sign world” (the social order) through sublimation, thus “reject[ing] the notion of a world made meaningful wholly by the ego” (214). In this way, Jones formulates the postsublimation ego and the modern social order as heterogeneous mixtures in which a normal, nonsexual ego or Victorian social order has now been interwoven with sexual drive. Drawing on Jones's distinction between the Victorian “patriarchal stigmatization of femininity as useless signifying excess” and a “‘feminine’ symbolic agency” threatened by “modern technocracy” (201), Thurston concludes that Jones rejects both the socially oppressive conceptions of the ego and the social order from the Victorian era (deprived of all sexual content) and techno-modernity (sexually abusive and forcibly homogeneous). While Sinclair is more ambivalent about the loss of the Victorian social order than Jones, In Parenthesis, like The Tree of Heaven, uses Laplanchean sublimation—with its emphasis on “the divine or infernal root of human subjectivity in the encounter with the other” (227)—as a way to conceptualize the collapse of the Victorian era and the formation of modernist subjecthood and society.Thurston's readings of the psychoanalysts, Sinclair, and Jones are, in general, persuasive. However, his decision to privilege Laplanche's account of sublimation does raise several questions in terms of Lacanian and Žižekian theory and his interpretive methodology. First, Thurston seems to miss the role of desire in Lacan's theory of sublimation. In Seminar VII, Lacan notably argues that Antigone, his figure of sublimation par excellence, “reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire” (247). Moreover, Lacan often associates das Ding—the idealistic level to which the ordinary object is raised—with the mother, the original and most fundamental object-cause of desire (Lacan 1992: 67). Thus, Lacanian sublimation does not reconceptualize Freudian sublimation—however one wishes to define it—as an idealization of the object of the drive (a “circling around” the object), but as an elevation of an ordinary physical entity to the object-cause of desire (a constant, unfulfillable “chasing after” the object-cause). Hence, Lacanian sublimation is much more than mere idealization. Thurston's overlooking of desire in Lacanian sublimation makes me wonder if there are areas in his analysis of Sinclair and Jones where sexual content is less indicative of the entrance of the drive's nonegoic sexual “otherness” and more indicative of the object-cause of desire.Despite referencing Slavoj Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Thurston also misses the potential conceptual similarities between his and Laplanche's idea of “otherness” in the ego and the social order and Žižek's idea of the postsymbolic Real, an unsymbolizable entity located in the symbolic order (everything in the subject's psyche and external reality that is determined by language). While the two concepts may not be the same, they do both involve a strange “other” entity commonly associated with the sexual that is located in the individual-subjective and collective realms; Žižek's descriptions of the postsymbolic Real as a crack and a surplus resembles, for example, Thurston's descriptions of sexual “otherness” as a vortex and a surplus in Sinclair's and Jones's writing. For these reasons, it would be conceptually helpful and interesting for psychoanalytic criticism if Thurston reconciled or distinguished Laplanchean “otherness” and the Žižekian postsymbolic Real.Finally, Thurston strikes me as a bit too committed to Laplanche's theory of sublimation. While Thurston presents a strong case for locating Laplanchean sublimation in Sinclair's and Jones's works, one might find it hard to believe that The Tree of Heaven and In Parenthesis (which precede Laplanche) would be completely harmonious with Laplanchean sublimation and not raise notable challenges to any of the theory's central tenets. As such, Thurston's readings present the need for him—or perhaps other scholars of Sinclair and Jones—to closely reevaluate the proposed Laplanchean sublimation in these authors’ work to decide if—but most likely where—they challenge Laplanche's fundamental assumptions. This future scholarship would yield a more refined understanding of the concept as well as of Sinclair's and Jones's writing.Despite these lingering Lacanian and Žižekian theoretical questions and my interest in a more skeptical approach to Laplanche, Understanding Sublimation presents an intriguing and novel analysis of Sinclair and Jones with theoretical rigor, detailed accounts of the relevant aspects of the authors’ backgrounds, and attentive close readings. Thurston's project is helpful not only for readers of British modernism who are interested in an approach to Sinclair and Jones that pushes firmly against previous critics, but also for psychoanalytic readers who are interested in the debate concerning Freudian and Lacanian theories of sublimation and perhaps may not even have heard of the lesser-known Laplanchean model that Thurston defends. Still, perhaps Thurston's greatest contribution in this book is its potential to initiate new dialogues on modernism's conceptual grounding. While modernism, especially in its theoretical sense, is commonly associated with alienation, destruction, loss, and void, Thurston's orientation of it around the image of a vortex and a heterogeneous ego that is satiated with “otherness”—an otherness that is not a nothingness, but simply something other than the ego—casts modernism in a different light. Rather than focusing on an isolated subject or a pure nothingness, Thurston's conception of modernism involves a radical coming together of previously distinct components—a “vertiginous disappearance of the restrictive borderlines” (226). While this heterogeneous ego and its social parallels in urbanized crowds, war, progressive political movements, and liberal eroticism may threaten the stability of the ego and the social order, these personal or multipersonal “vortices” do not reach the complete dissolution theorized by the void—they merely hover on the edge of collapse while “seeming to raise [one's] world to a higher, perilous level.” In this way, Thurston opens the door for future scholarship to conceptualize modernism not as the exploration of isolated subjects’ relation to the fundamental void or nothingness, but as subjects whose infusion with sexual otherness in their egos or with radical social otherness in their social realities provides beneficial but seemingly threatening change.