Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXin mind, and, as Garnett rightly points out, the mere"draining off" o emotion is not sublimation.It is not until the coming of Christianity that the ideaof sublimation, even as a concrete image, begins to takedefinite shapes. It istraced back to an early Father of theEgyptian Desert, Abba Macarius the Great, sometimes regardedas "the first scientific mystic of Christendom"; andEvelyn Underbill in The Mystic Way expounds his psychologicalview of a gradual transformation in the substanceof the soul(which he did not regard as absolutelyimmaterial) into an ever less dense and more pure spiritualityunder the influence of the Divine Fire. "Likemetals," he said, "which, cast into the fire, lose their naturalhardness, and the longer they remain in the furnaceare more and more softened by the flame." The painfulfire becomes heavenly light, and for Macarius light andlife are identical. Here we have, as definitely as possible,our modern conception of sublimation. Macarius was thefriend of St. Basil, who was in the main stream of Christiantradition, and this idea constantly recurs in the laterChristian mystics and is the foundation of St. Catharineof Genoa's doctrine of Purgatory the fire of purgatoryburning away the rust of sin.Later it appears, apart from any religious doctrine,under the definite name of "sublimation," in the poetsand still later in the moralists. To sublimate is to bringa substance by heat from what we usually regard as itsgrosser,more "material" and sordid form, to a state ofvapor which we usually regard as more exalted and refined.The poets seized on this process as symbolizing whattakes place in the human spirit,and they frequently usedthe idea in the early seventeenth century. Thus Davies inhis "Immortality of the Soul" sang of turning "Bodiesto spirits by sublimation strange." Prose writers, religious[36*]