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

CONCLUSIONnot achieved sublimation. It would not be necessary tostate this if tne notion had not been foolishly put forward.By some psycho-analysts, carrying on the suggestion ofFreud that all civilization may be regarded as a sublimationof libido, the idea has been pushed to extremelengths. Thus, the Swiss school of analysts (notably asonce represented by Maeder) have emphasized sublimationas helping to constitute a kind of psycho-synthesis,and even a kind of religion, the soul being led, as Dantewas in his great poem, through Hell and Purgatory toParadise, the physician as guide playing the part of Virgil.The Italian psycho-therapeutist Assagioli more temperatelyattaches high value to sublimation when there isa contrast and conflict between excessive sexual energyand the obstacles to its normal gratification. He does notdesire to explain all the highest psychic faculties as simplythe product of the more elementary impulses, and, puttingaside the efforts of direct psycho-analytic treatment, heattaches importance to auto-sublimation. He does not regardit as less real because we cannot register it on arevolving cylinder and show a graphic curve, and herightly points out that to gain the benefits of sublimationit is necessary to put aside the notion that sex is bestialand shameful, and "repression" therefore required. Thesexual excitation may be intense but it may at the sametime be linked on to higher emotional and spiritual activities,and especially, he holds, by a complete change ofoccupation, to some creative work, for artistic creation isdeeply but obscurely related to the process of sexual sublimation.(Hirschfeld has referred to genus and genius ashaving the same root.) Assagioli invokes Wagner's Tristanas a marvelous example of sublimation since it was clearlyfilled with the fire and passion of itscomposer's ungratifiedlove for Mathilde Wesendonck.[365]