Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation

Ken Gemes

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 38, Autumn 2009, pp. 38-59
(Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nie.0.0048

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v038/38.gemes.html

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Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation

KEN GEMES

ABSTRACT: The notion of sublimation is essential to Nietzsche and Freud.

However, Freud’s writings fail to provide a persuasive notion of sublimation.
In particular, Freud’s writings are confused on the distinction between patho-
logical symptoms and sublimation and on the relation between sublimation and
repression. After rehearsing these problems in some detail, it is proposed that a
return to Nietzsche allows for a more coherent account of sublimation, its dif-
ference from pathological symptoms, and its relation to repression. In summary,
on Nietzsche’s account, while repression and pathological symptoms involve
a disintegration (of the self), sublimation involves integration. The article con-
cludes with a brief consideration of some post-Freudian accounts of sublimation
that represent a return to a more Nietzschean approach.

1. Introduction

T he penultimate sentence in the entry on sublimation in Laplanche and

Pontalis’s seminal The Language of Psychoanalysis reads: “In the psy-
choanalytic literature the concept of sublimation is frequently called upon;
the idea answers to a basic need of the Freudian doctrine and it is hard
to see how it could be dispensed with” (1973, 433). One reason that subli-
mation is a key notion in psychoanalysis is that from a therapeutic point
of view, successful psychoanalytic treatment ideally aims at sublimation,
inasmuch as sublimation is seen as a necessary condition for full psychic
health. By bringing to conscious light hitherto repressed drives, desires, and
wishes, energy that has previously displayed itself in unpleasurable symp-
toms may be harnessed and directed to more productive and felicitous ends.
And indeed, at first glance, sublimation might seem a clear enough concept.
It involves the redirecting of a repressed sexual drive toward a nonsexual aim.1
As Freud puts it in his essay “On Narcissism”: “Sublimation is a process that
concerns object-libido and consists in the instinct directing itself towards an aim
other than, and remote from, that of sexual satisfaction; in this process the accent
falls upon deflection from sexuality” (S.E. 14:94).2 Yet Laplanche and Pontalis’s
entry on sublimation ends with a starkly negative assessment of attempts to
clarify the notion of sublimation: “The lack of a coherent theory of sublimation
remains one of the lacunae in psychoanalytic thought” (1973, 433). The claim

JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 38, 2009

Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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that sublimation is a vexed concept is repeatedly echoed in the secondary literature

on the topic. Indeed, this is true from the early days of that literature, as evi-
denced in Edward Glover’s assertion in his important 1931 article “Sublimation,
Substitution, and Social Anxiety”: “It is generally agreed that prior to 1923 a good
deal of confusion existed regarding the exact nature of sublimation. Since then it
has increased rather than diminished” (1931, 263). More recently Jacques Lacan
notes “the virtually absurd difficulties that authors have encountered every time
they have tried to give a meaning to the term ‘sublimation’” (1992, 142–43).
To get an entry to these difficulties let us begin by considering the simple
definition given above, which emphasizes the redirecting of a drive from a
sexual to a nonsexual aim. Before demonstrating the major problem with this
definition we shall briefly consider two minor but important problems with this
definition. First, there is the problem of distinguishing aims that involve sexual
satisfaction and those that do not. After all, it was Freud who argued that many
prima facie nonsexual activities (e.g., thumb-sucking) have a sexual component.
Perhaps this can be finessed by emphasizing overtly sexual aims from aims
that are not overtly sexual. Second, there is the problem that much sublimation
seems to involve a diversion of arguably nonsexual instincts. Thus aggressive
drives, drives associated with what Freud would later call the death drive, may
find sublimated discharge in nonaggressive behavior.3 These are concerns we
will return to later (see section 6 below).

2. Substitute Formations, Symptoms, and Sublimations

Now for the major problem: The definition in terms of the substitution of
nonsexual for sexual aims fails to distinguish sublimations from symptom for-
mation. An obsessive-compulsive who compulsively aims to avoid treading on
cracks in the pavement may have substituted a nonsexual aim for a sexual aim,
but that would not normally count as a case of sublimation (though see section 3
below). On Freud’s basic account various drives are repressed and later these
may manifest themselves in various behaviors. These behaviors, often labeled
by Freud as “substitute formations,” are related in complex ways to the original
drive. They are what Freud calls the “return of the repressed” (“Repression,”
S.E. 14:154). Our key question, then, is how to separate those substitute forma-
tions, those instances of the return of the repressed, which are symptoms, from
those that are sublimations.
Of all Freud’s writings perhaps the one that most acutely demonstrates the
need for a clear means of separating symptoms from sublimations is his 1910
essay “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” (S.E. 11:57–137).
In that essay Freud argues that Leonardo is a model of that type of individual
whose repressed sexual desires find sublimated expression by becoming attached

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40 KEN GEMES

to a powerful drive for scientific and artistic research. In his summarizing final
section Freud shows implicit recognition of the difficulties of separating symp-
toms from sublimations, and, relatedly, illness from health, when he writes:
We must expressly insist that we have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic
or a “nerve case,” as the awkward phrase goes. Anyone who protests at our so
much as daring to examine him in the light of discoveries gained in the field of
pathology is still clinging to prejudices which we have to-day rightly abandoned.
We no longer think that health and illness, normal and neurotic people, are to be
sharply distinguished from each other, and that neurotic traits must necessarily be
taken as proofs of a general inferiority. To-day we know that neurotic symptoms
are structures which are substitutes for certain achievements of repression that we
have to carry out in the course of our development from a child to a civilized human
being. We know too that we all produce such substitutive structures, and that it is
only their number, intensity and distribution which justify us in using the practical
concept of illness and in inferring the presence of constitutional inferiority. From
the slight indications we have about Leonardo’s personality we should be inclined
to place him close to the type of neurotic that we describe as “obsessional”; and
we may compare his researches to the “obsessive brooding” of neurotics, and his
inhibitions to what are known as their “abulias.” (S.E. 11:131)

After holding up Leonardo as a model of sublimation throughout the essay

and then in the first sentence of this quotation protesting that he has not reck-
oned Leonardo to be a neurotic, Freud in the final sentence concludes that we
must place Leonardo close to the obsessional neurotic. The distance between
sublimation and neurotic symptoms seems vanishingly small. Here we have in
microcosm our problem: how to separate sublimations from neurotic symptoms,
both of which count as substitutive formations.

3. The Social Factor in Sublimations

In many of Freud’s explications of sublimation there is an emphasis on the social

value of the activity resulting from sublimation. Thus in his New Introductory
Lectures he says, “A certain kind of modification of the aim and a change of
object, in which our social valuation is taken into account, is described by us as
‘sublimation’” (S.E. 22:97). In one of his earliest published references to sublima-
tion in the Dora case of 1905 he talks of “the undifferentiated sexual disposition
of the child . . . being diverted to a higher sexual aim” and thereby providing “the
energy for a greater number of our cultural achievements” (S.E. 7:50). And in
the Three Essays dating from the same period he writes that sexual curiosity can
be “diverted (sublimated) in the direction of art” (S.E. 7:156).
This emphasis on socially valued achievements would provide some means of
separating neurotic symptoms from sublimations but at the high cost of introducing
a totally nonpsychoanalytic, indeed a nonpsychological, element to the definition,
namely, that of social valuation. One, presumably uncomfortable, consequence

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FREUD AND NIETZSCHE ON SUBLIMATION 41

of such an account would be that as social values change, behavior that was at
one time pathological would become a sublimation. For instance, suppose our
compulsive crack avoider mentioned above successfully presents his activities as
a kind of performance art and receives much social acclaim for his continual per-
formances. Does that move his activity from neurotic symptom to sublimation?
The reference to social acclaim has led many authors to be suspicious of
such definitions.4 Thus in his article “What Is Sublimated in Sublimation”
Donald Kaplan begins: “The whole idea of sublimation has been a vagrant
problem for psychoanalysis from the very beginning. This is because sublima-
tion, in one of its meanings, refers to felicitous exercises of the mind, while
psychoanalysis is suspicious of any such simple creed” (1993, 549). One gets
a clear picture of the problem posed by the introduction of social valuation as a
defining characteristic of sublimation, and the related problem of distinguishing
neurotic symptoms from sublimations, by contrasting Freud’s essay on Schreber
with his essay on Leonardo. The later is perhaps his most sustained surviving
piece covering the topic of sublimation.5 According to Freud, Schreber’s illness
stemmed from his repression of homosexual desires first overtly expressed in
his quickly suppressed thought that “after all it would be nice to be a woman
submitting to the act of copulation.” This repression later gave rise to the obses-
sive thought that God was trying to unman him and led to various other obsessive
thoughts and behavior. This would not normally count as a case of sublimation.
Contrast this with Freud’s Leonardo case. According to Freud, Leonardo, like
Schreber, repressed his homosexual desires and this repression later led to his
scientific inquisitiveness and inventiveness and his artistic activities, including
his obsession with capturing in drawings perfect representations of the male
body. This for Freud is a classical case of sublimation. Is the only pertinent
difference here that in the Schreber case the end activity that results from a
repression of erotic desires, namely, obsessive behavior and thought centering
on his relationship to God, is not considered socially valuable, whereas in the
Leonardo case the end activity that results from a repression of erotic desires
is considered socially valuable? Or, as Kaplan might put it, is it simply that we
regard Schreber’s exercises of the mind as nonfelicitous but regard Leonardo’s
as felicitous? Such distinctions as socially valuable/not socially valuable, felici-
tous/nonfelicitous, clearly involve value judgments. Moreover, such distinctions
do not seem to be analytical distinctions. Thus it seems that a fundamental notion
in psychoanalysis is not to be explained in strictly psychoanalytical terms. Even
more worrying, those terms seem irredeemably normative and thus run against
Freud’s general claim to be providing a merely scientific/descriptive account
of psychological phenomena. It is presumably this kind of concern that leads
Laplanche and Pontalis to raise the question: “Should the fact that activities
described as sublimated in a given culture are accorded particularly high social
esteem be taken as a defining characteristic of sublimation?” (1973, 433).

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42 KEN GEMES

If we do choose to abandon the social valuation factor in separating sublimation

from symptom formation, any new account should, I suggest, be tested by how it
handles the Leonardo and Schreber cases. The respective behaviors of Leonardo
and Schreber may be taken as paradigms of sublimation and pathogenic symp-
toms. What we are looking for, then, is a strictly psychoanalytic account that
would class Leonardo’s behavior as sublimation and Schreber’s as pathogenic
symptom.

4. The Relation Between Sublimation and Repression

Another serious problem raised by Freud’s own writings on sublimation con-

cerns the relation between repression and sublimation. In one understanding
of Freud’s telling of the Leonardo case, Leonardo’s homosexual urges were
continuously repressed and hence he lived an asexual adult life, and it is this
repression that gave rise to his adult scientific and artistic drives: “The sexual
repression which set in after this phase of his childhood [where he experienced
the ‘excessive tenderness of his mother’] caused him to sublimate his libido
into the urge to know and established his sexual inactivity for the whole of his
later life” (S.E. 11:135). Here it seems out of place to talk of the repression of the
original drives being lifted; for if the repression were lifted, there would be no
account of the continuation of the scientific and artistic drives and the continual
asexuality.6 On this model, at its simplest, Leonardo’s scientific and artistic
drives, like his asexuality, are really kinds of symptoms, and, as per the usual on
the Freudian model, lifting of the repressions behind the symptoms should lead
to elimination, or possibly the transformation, of the symptoms. The notion that
sublimation involves repression is reinforced by one of Freud’s earliest men-
tions of sublimation in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.7 There he
refers to “the diversion of sexual forces from sexual aims and their direction to
new ones—a process that deserves the name of ‘sublimation’” (S.E. 7:178). In the
same place he goes on to say that “we would place its [sublimation’s] beginning
in the period of sexual latency of childhood.” Clearly such redirection on the part
of the child involves nonconscious repression of those sexual forces qua sexual
forces, and such repression is exactly what Freud describes as the progenitor of
the period of sexual latency. It is not that the child consciously faces his or her
erotic desires and chooses not to act on them but, rather, pursues some other
activity as a substitute satisfaction. The sublimation of those desires first requires
their repression. Indeed, there is even some tendency in the psychoanalytic lit-
erature to at least implicitly identify sublimation as a species of repression. For
instance, in his book Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis
Hans Loewald writes, “Traditionally sublimation is classified in psychoanalysis
as a defence” (1988, 3), and in fact Freud’s earliest reference to sublimation in his

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1892 letter to Fliess refers to sublimations as “protective structures” (S.E. 1:247).

A page later in a footnote Loewald notes that “it must be noted, however, that
in the psychoanalytic literature, including works by Freud himself, the very
distinction between defence and repression has been blurred, in as much as
repression is used interchangeably with defence” (1988, 4–5). So if sublimations
are defenses and the notions of defenses and repressions are interchangeable, it
follows that sublimations are repressions. Fenichel, whose work on sublimation
we shall shortly consider, indeed comments that sometimes sublimation is called
a “successful repression” (1945, 148).
In fact, while the Leonardo text and the extract from the Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality suggest that repression is part of sublimation, often in other
texts when Freud explicitly considers repression and sublimation together he
claims that sublimation is an alternative to repression. Thus in a passage from
Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis he says, “Premature repression makes the
sublimation of the repressed instinct impossible; when the repression is lifted,
the path to sublimation becomes free once more” (S.E. 11:54). In a letter to
Putnam Freud even goes so far as to claim that the two are mutually exclusive:
“It [psychoanalytic theory] teaches that a drive cannot be sublimated as long as it
is repressed and that is true for every component of a drive” (Hale 1971, 121).
To clarify the relation between sublimation and repression it helps to con-
sider exactly what gets repressed in repression. Here the best place to turn
is Freud’s 1915 essay “Repression” (S.E. 14:141–58). A crucial point of that
essay is Freud’s claim that a drive has both an “ideational” component and an
energetic component, what Freud calls “a quota of affect” (S.E. 14:152). The
ideational component is the content of the drive, including its aim. The energetic
component is the force associated with that aim, including the strength of the
drive. In repression both the ideational component and the force component are
repressed. The repression of the ideational component involves not letting the
aim be consciously apprehended. The repression of the force involves not letting
the force be expressed in behavior. While Freud refers to the repression of the
ideational component as “primal repression,” he emphasizes that “the vicissitude
of the quota of affect belonging to the representative is far more important than
the vicissitude of the idea” (S.E. 14:152).
With this distinction in hand we can now see how sublimation both does
and does not involve repression. In sublimation the ideational component may
or may not be repressed. In the case of childhood sublimations the aim of the
original drive, the drive’s ideational component, is typically held back from
conscious apprehension. In the case of sublimation reached through psycho-
analytic treatments, typically, the ideational component becomes available for
conscious apprehension. However, in all sublimations, therapeutically achieved
or otherwise, the force component is expressed in behavior. All sublimations
involve an expression of a pent-up quota of affect. The picture suggested here

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44 KEN GEMES

is that all sublimations typically take repressions as causal antecedents. In this

sense sublimations are another manifestation of the phenomenon that Freud
calls “the return of the repressed.” What sublimations undo is the repressing of
the energetic component; they steer it to an outlet, an aim that deviates from its
original aim. Indeed, in the passage quoted above from Five Lectures on Psycho-
analysis Freud contrasts neurotics who owing to their repressions “have sacri-
ficed many sources of energy” with cases of sublimation “in which the energy
of the infantile wishful impulses is not cut off but remains ready for use—the
unserviceable aim of the various impulses being replaced by one that is higher,
and perhaps no longer sexual” (S.E. 11:53–54). Here Freud is explicitly claiming
that in sublimation it is the repression of the energy that is lifted.
This reading does not seem to square with the letter to Putnam where Freud
says that sublimation precludes the repression of any component of a drive.
However, it is worth noting that in that letter he is focused on the clinical practice
of psychotherapy. Presumably his idea is that the analyst is faced with a patient
presenting various symptoms the patient experiences as distressing. These patho-
genic symptoms are the manifestation of various unconscious repressions. By
bringing the repressed drives into full consciousness—this of course involves
more than just the patient’s intellectual recognition of the drives—this allows for
their expression in more acceptable forms. Note, on this model it is not that the
ideational component of the drive ceases to be suppressed but that the suppression
takes on a conscious form that somehow allows the energetic component for-
merly associated with it to be redirected to new, more acceptable ends. This
model does not fit the nontherapeutic cases such as that of Leonardo since there
is no conscious recognition on Leonardo’s part of his underlying homoerotic
drives. Nor does it fit the text of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
where the child in his or her latency period has no conscious awareness of the
desires being sublimated. Clearly the child (unconsciously) represses rather than
(consciously) suppresses his or her erotic desires. So the conclusion to be drawn
here is that the sublimation that is the result of successful psychoanalytic inter-
vention involves the lifting of unconscious repression of both the ideational and
energetic components; but the sublimation involved in typical cases of scientific
and artistic expression or that occurs in the latency period in childhood typically
only involves lifting of the repression of the energetic component and continued
repression of the ideational component.
I suspect that it is this model that leads to Fenichel’s idea of sublimations as
successful repressions; they are successful in that while the ideational component
is kept from consciousness, the energy associated with it is allowed an outlet.
Freud’s claim in the Putnam letter that a drive cannot be sublimated as long as
any component is repressed would then have to be read as asserting that “in the
practice of psychotherapy a drive cannot be sublimated as long as any com-
ponent of it is unconsciously repressed.” This understanding of the relation of

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FREUD AND NIETZSCHE ON SUBLIMATION 45

repression and sublimation still leaves us hard-pressed to distinguish sublimation

from other instances of the return of the repressed, such as pathological symptoms.

5. Fenichel’s Account of Sublimation

Fenichel in his influential work The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis gives an

account of the relation between sublimation and repression and the distinction
between pathological symptoms and sublimation that is worth recounting since
variants of it are very common in the subsequent literature. On Fenichel’s
account both repression and sublimation are ego defenses against unacceptable
instinctual drives. He describes sublimation as a successful defense and
repression as an unsuccessful defense. He rejects the attempt to define the dif-
ference between success and failure in terms of the social valuation of the relevant
behaviors, noting that “the factor of valuation usually included in the definition
of sublimation had better be omitted” (1945, 141). In its place he gives a strictly
psychoanalytic account. The first difference he locates is that in sublimation
“the original impulse vanishes because its energy is withdrawn in favour of the
cathexis of its substitute” (1945, 141). A second difference he locates is that
sublimated impulses “find their outlet” (1945, 141) whereas repressed impulses
do not. And the third difference he (1945, 142) mentions is that in sublimation,
as opposed to neurotic substitute gratifications, there is a desexualization.
Let us see how these factors pertain to the test cases of Leonardo and
Schreber. Regarding the vanishing of the original impulse, it is questionable
that Leonardo’s original homosexual impulse had vanished. It is more natural
to say that it continued to be expressed in his activity. In particular, his fondness
for beautiful disciples of questionable artistic talent in whom he took a very
protective interest does not evidence a cessation of his homosexual impulses.
Also his obsession with capturing in his drawings representations of perfect
idealized male bodies also suggests a continuation of his homosexual impulses.
This same evidence militates against Fenichel’s third factor of desexualization as
a marker that separates sublimations from pathological symptoms. Furthermore,
our previous considerations of the obsessive crack avoider, whose pathologi-
cal symptom is presumably even more desexualized than any of Leonardo’s
above-mentioned activities, militates against the relevance of desexualization
as a marker. So although in much of the literature on sublimation the factor of
desexualization, or as it is often called, neutralization, looms large, it seems not
to be a significant marker between sublimations and pathological symptoms.8
Both sublimations and pathological symptoms can appear in sexualized and
nonsexualized forms.9
The Schreber case is probative against Fenichel’s claim that in sublimation,
but not repression, impulses find an outlet. Schreber’s rich panoply of obsessive

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46 KEN GEMES

behaviors clearly were a result of his repressed homosexual drive. Presumably

they were also an outlet for that drive. Or are we to somehow differentiate
between results of drives and outlets of drives? Here the worry would be that
outlets are simply those results we find socially acceptable, in which case the
factor of valuation Fenichel warns against has reentered the picture.

6. Nietzsche’s Solution

We will now turn to Nietzsche as it will be argued below that Nietzsche’s work
provides means for clearly separating sublimation from repression and subli-
mation from pathological symptoms in a way that neatly explains why da Vinci
counts as a case of the former and Schreber counts as a case of the latter.10
Nietzsche, like Freud and like their common predecessor Schopenhauer, takes
individual humans to be, at some fundamental level, collections of drives.11
However, most modern humans, as members of what he denigratingly calls
the herd, are simply disorganized collections of competing drives, with dif-
ferent drives having relative ascendancy at different times: “In the present
age human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that
is opposite and not merely opposite drives and value standards that fight
each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late
cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings”
(BGE 200).
In many cases drives, particularly aggressive drives, are treated as per the
Freudian model by repression: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves
outwardly turn inwards—this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was
that man first developed what was later call his ‘soul.’ The entire inner world,
originally as thin as if stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended
itself, acquired depth, width, and height, in the same measure as outward dis-
charge was inhibited” (GM II:16). Central to Nietzsche’s account is the notion
of splitting off. Aggressive drives, which are not viewed as acceptable, typically
because acting on them would exact a painful retribution, are repressed to the
point that one does not even acknowledge that one has such drives.12 These drives
may nevertheless find their outlet, often in disguised form—indeed, often in a
form that contradicts their very nature. Thus Nietzsche claims that the Christian
value of brotherly love was originally in fact a transformed expression of hostile
drives to dominate one’s fellow man. By successfully preaching brotherly love
the weak get their oppressors to voluntarily disarm themselves and become
subservient to the values of the weak. In doing so they, both the weak and the
strong who have been converted to the values of the weak, split off their contrary
aggressive drives from conscious apprehension, so that at the same time they
harbor both unacknowledged aggressive drives and acknowledged beneficent

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drives. This repression and splitting off of drives makes us sick creatures of what
Nietzsche calls ressentiment.13
For Nietzsche, in certain rare cases drives, rather than being split off, are
harnessed into a centered, unified whole. At one point Nietzsche took Wagner
to be such a case: “The dramatic element in Wagner’s development is quite
unmistakable from the moment when his ruling passion became aware of itself
and took his nature in its charge: from that time on there was an end to fumbling,
straying, to the proliferation of secondary shoots, and within the most convoluted
courses and often daring trajectories assumed by his artistic plans there rules
a single inner law, a will by which they can be explained” (RWB 2). The story
of Wagner’s achievement of a higher unity born from some master drive is of
course the story Nietzsche would repeat about himself in the dramatic section
of Ecce Homo where Nietzsche elaborates the subtitle of that work, “How One
Becomes What One Is”:
To become what one is, one must not have the slightest notion of what one is. . . .
The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—must be kept
clear of all great imperatives. . . . Meanwhile the organizing “idea” that is destined
to rule keeps growing deep down—it begins to command; slowly it leads us back
from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that
will one day prove to be indispensable as a means towards the whole—one by
one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant
task, “goal,” “aim,” or “meaning.” (EH “Clever” 9)
This notion of training of subservient drives is to be explicated in terms of
the redirection of those drives away from their initial, primary goal toward a
secondary goal that is more in line with the master drive. This idea is partially
expressed in the following passage from Human, All Too Human:
Microcosm and macrocosm of culture. Man makes the best discoveries about
culture within himself when he finds two heterogeneous powers governing there.
Given that a man loved the plastic arts or music as much as he was moved by the
spirit of science, and that he deemed it impossible to end this contradiction by
destroying the one and completely unleashing the other power; then, the only thing
remaining to him is to make such a large edifice of culture out of himself that both
powers can live there, even if at different ends of it; between them are sheltered
conciliatory central powers, with the dominating strength to settle, if need be, any
quarrels that break out. Such a cultural edifice in the single individual will have
the greatest similarity to the cultural architecture of whole eras and, by analogy,
provide continuous instruction about them. For wherever the great architecture of
culture developed, it was its task to force opposing forces into harmony through
an overwhelming aggregation of the remaining, less incompatible powers, yet
without suppressing or shackling them. (HH I:276)
A point to be emphasized here is that on Nietzsche’s ideal weaker drives are not
suppressed or shackled. Rather, they are to be harnessed to allow their expression
in service to a higher aim. Thus in his notebooks Nietzsche writes, “Overcoming
of the affects? No, if that means their weakening and annihilation. But instead

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48 KEN GEMES

employing them; which may mean a long tyrannizing of them. . . . At last they
are confidently given freedom again: they love us as good servants and happily
go wherever our best interests lie” (KSA 12:1[122]).
This gives us the material we need to affect a Nietzschean account of the
distinction between repression and sublimation. Sublimation is what happens
when a drive’s primary aim is substituted for by a secondary aim that allows for
expression of the drive in a manner consonant with the master drive. As John
Richardson succinctly puts it, “Drive A rules B insofar as it has turned B towards
A’s own end, so that B now participates in A’s distinctive activity” (1996, 33).14
Repression is what happens when a drive is denied its immediate aim and is then
split off from other drives in the sense that its aims are not integrated with the
aims of other drives and it must battle, often unsuccessfully, for any opportunity
to achieve expression.
Consider again our cases of Leonardo and Schreber. Leonardo’s homosexual
drive is redirected toward the secondary aims of scientific, as opposed to sexual,
researches and artistic creation, including possession of idealized representa-
tions of the male body, as opposed to actual sexual possession of male bodies.
These ends fit in with his master drive of scientific and artistic creativity. Schreber,
on the other hand, by his own admission split off his religious activity completely
from his life as senate president. He claimed that neither activity in any way
informed the other. Schreber did not integrate his sexual drive with his wider life
but strove to isolate it and separate its expressions from his other activities.
The Nietzschean solution to the problem of differentiating sublimation from
pathological symptoms may be summed up in the slogan that sublimations
involve integration or unification, while pathological symptoms involve splitting
off or disintegration, as we might call it. What is disintegrated is of course the
(possibility of a) unified self. For Nietzsche the difference between repression
and sublimation is that in sublimation the stronger drive co-opts a weaker drive
as an ally and this allows the weaker drive expression, albeit to an end that con-
tains some degree of deflection from its original aim (for example, Leonardo’s
homosexual drive is expressed in the possession of idealized representations of
male bodies rather than literal possession of male bodies); whereas in repression
the stronger drive attempts to stifle any expression of the weaker drive so that its
expression either is fully stifled or can only be achieved in a heavily disguised
form that often represents the inverse of the original aim (the Christian’s hate and
envy of, and desire to have power over, his or her fellow man being expressed
as professions of brotherly love and disinterest in power). The relation between
sublimation and repression is that often but not always sublimations have repres-
sions as antecedents. If a stronger drive does not at first have sufficient strength
to co-opt a weaker drive to its own ends, it may simply act to stifle that weaker
drive.15 As the stronger drive gains in strength, opportunities for co-option rather
than stifling may arise.16

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FREUD AND NIETZSCHE ON SUBLIMATION 49

For Nietzsche, unified selves, what he takes to be genuine persons, are rare
achievements; hence he cautions that “one should not at all assume that many
humans are ‘people’” (KSA 12:10[59], my translation) and “most men present
pieces and fragments of man: one has to add them up for a complete man to
appear” (KSA 12:10[228]).17 It is Nietzsche’s aim to foster the development of
such genuine persons. In the same vein his Zarathustra says, “It is my art and aim,
to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful
chance” (Z II:20). Sublimation, for Nietzsche, is the primary means to a unified
self. Nietzsche, like Freud, takes sublimation as a mark of health. ‘Health’ is a
term that both Freud and, especially, Nietzsche, who more than Freud explicitly
pronounces a strong normative agenda, positively valorize. However, while for
Freud health is measured in more utilitarian terms of relative contentment, for
Nietzsche health is measured in terms of such interrelated vectors as freedom
from ressentiment, creative agonal struggle between drives, self-overcoming,
and superabundance of expressive energy.18
Nietzsche’s important and difficult normative ideas of amor fati, eternal
recurrence, and affirmation of life are all strongly related to his aim of over-
coming ressentiment.19 Ressentiment is directly connected to repression, in that
where there is ressentiment, there is some drive that we have been forced to stifle.
Nietzsche claims that in order to fully love fate or to fully wish back everything
eternally, both of which are exemplary ways of affirming life, we would have
to overcome all such ressentiment. To affirm all of one’s life, to overcome
ressentiment, would be to affirm all of one’s drives—life, for Nietzsche, being
nothing but a collection of drives.20 This does not mean to simply let all of one’s
drives have free expression. That would involve conflict, chaos, and, inevitably,
disintegration.21 It means harnessing one’s drives to allow them a form of con-
certed expression. As Nietzsche himself nicely puts the point: “The multitude
and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them
results in a ‘weak will’; their coordination under a single predominant impulse
results in a ‘strong’ will: in the first case it is the oscillation and lack of gravity;
in the later, the precision and clarity of direction” (KSA 13:14[219]). Sublimation
is for Nietzsche the key means to such concerted expression and, hence, to
overcoming ressentiment.22
On Nietzsche’s picture of sublimation the questionable element of social
valuation drops out of the picture.23 Another important difference from the
Freudian account is that the notion of desexualization also drops out. Where in
his account of sublimation Freud deals primarily with a libidinal drive (Eros),
Nietzsche allows for a multiplicity of drives. Relatedly, for Nietzsche aggressive
drives as well as sexual drives are prone to sublimation. Given the problems
of Freud’s notion of desexualization, and his concomitant failure to revise his
account of sublimation after his positing of a death drive separate from the
libidinal drive, these differences in Nietzsche’s account are a gain rather than

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50 KEN GEMES

a loss. The price paid for this gain is that Nietzsche, much more than Freud,
remains unclear about the range of drives available for sublimation and repres-
sion.24 More important, what also gets dropped out in Nietzsche’s account is the
role of the ego. Rather than having a higher-level agency, such as Freud’s ego,
censor lower-level drives, Nietzsche simply posits an agonal struggle between
the drives; thus he says in Beyond Good and Evil: “The will to overcome an
affect is, in the end, itself only the will of another, or several other, affects” (BGE
117). And even in those cases where there is consciousness of the drive that is
causing a disturbance, that consciousness is not the engine of repression:
That one wants to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand
within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does
the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire
procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive, which is a
rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us. . . . While “we” believe we
are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which
is complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are
suffering from the vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another
equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect
in which our intellect is going to have to take sides. (D 109)
While this passage allows that our conscious selves may be aware of the drive
that is causing us distress, it emphasizes another drive, not the conscious I, as the
repressing force. Other texts from Nietzsche make clear that he envisages such
struggles between drives often occurring with no conscious awareness, that is,
with no participation of the conscious I, or ego, as Freud would call it (see, for
instance, the passages above describing Wagner and Nietzsche himself).
An advantage here is that Nietzsche does not face the notorious censor prob-
lem pointed out by Sartre: For Nietzsche there need be no ego that rejects and
thus in some sense faces—to reject X is to be aware of X—impulses it cannot
face.25 However, this in turn brings with it the worry that this notion of drives
struggling against each other implies some recognitional capacities on the part
of the drives. They are in danger then of becoming subpersonal homunculi.26
While Freud faces the problem of a conscious I, which in order to repress various
ideas must recognize those very ideas it seeks to repress and hence not recognize,
Nietzsche seems to have subpersonal units engaged in acts of recognition that
we normally ascribe to consciousness. The first point to be noted here is that
modern psychology and the philosophy of mind have little trouble ascribing the
functional equivalent of recognition capacities to subpersonal units. Thus those
who follow Fodor’s modularity of mind thesis take there to be, for instance,
calculational capacities below the level of consciousness that determine behav-
ior that is naturally described in terms of recognitional capacities. Some argue
that the simple act of catching a ball involves recognition of trajectories and
calculations of changes of trajectories that occur at a level below consciousness.
Furthermore, a Nietzschean account of repression itself could simply bypass

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FREUD AND NIETZSCHE ON SUBLIMATION 51

any suggestion of recognitional capacities on the part of the drives themselves

by focusing on the notion of a drive commanding resources at the expense of
other drives seeking to command those same resources. Thus consider an indi-
vidual who sees a moderately large animal in his or her proximity. The drive
to nourishment might prompt the individual to interact with that animal as if it
were a potential source of food; so, for instance, under the influence of that drive
perceptual capacities would be trained to help figure the quickest route toward
that animal. On the other hand, if the drive for survival is stronger perhaps it will
orient the perceptual capacities to help figure the quickest escape route from that
animal’s vicinity. Here it is not a case of a drive recognizing another drive and
deciding to not let it be expressed but, rather, simply a matter of the stronger
drive grabbing resources and thus preventing a competing drive from grabbing
those same resources and using them to achieve its aim.
While this type of account might work to provide a nonhomuncular Nietz-
schean account of repression, it seems more difficult to provide an analogous
nonhomuncular account of sublimation or at least nonconscious sublimation.
The problem is that in sublimation, since there is redirection of a weaker drive
to a secondary aim, which is a deflection from its primary aim, it seems hard
to account for this without attributing to the stronger redirecting drive some
amount of recognition of the divergence between its aim and the original aim
of the weaker drive. In sublimation the weaker drive is not simply blocked off
from commanding resources but, rather, its command of resources is at first
blocked and then eventually permitted when, through the influence of the stron-
ger drive, it is directing them to new ends consonant with those of the stronger
drive. Now in cases of nonconscious sublimation perhaps this can be attributed
to some subpersonal, nonconscious, computational structure whose resources
are commanded by the stronger drive. In this case one would not be attributing
recognitional capacities to the stronger drive itself. Rather, some computational
structure, one to which an agent does not have conscious access, assesses that the
weaker drive’s initial aim is not consonant with that of the commanding drive
and so redirects it to a new aim. While on such a picture it is the computational
structure that is the proximate cause of the weaker drive’s redirection, since it is
the stronger drive that causes the computational structure to seek to redirect the
weaker drive, it would not be amiss to talk here of the stronger drive co-opting
the weaker.27
Rather than pursue these issues, which would take extensive philosophical
analysis requiring essay-length treatments, I want to conclude by making an
important qualification and then briefly noting some similarities between the
Nietzschean account of sublimation and certain post-Freudian accounts. First
the qualification: the emphasis on Nietzsche’s picture of the sublimated self as a
coherent structure of sublimated drives under the dominance of the sublimating
master drive may easily suggest a static notion of the self, as if once the lesser

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52 KEN GEMES

drives have been sublimated there is a permanent harmony within the drives.
However, famously Nietzsche rejected all such static notions on both descrip-
tive and normative grounds. All life, or at least all healthy life, for Nietzsche
involves overcoming and indeed self-overcoming. But note, the Nietzschean
picture of sublimation I have developed need not transgress this Nietzschean
dictum. When a master drive reorientates a lesser drive to an object that is a
deflection from its original object, that does mean that the weaker drive has
totally lost all impetus toward the original object. Thus in the case of Leonardo,
his sexual drive still had an impetus toward sexual congress with males, even
though, through the direction of his master drive, it only expressed itself in his
obsessions with representations of perfect male bodies, his fondness for platonic
relations with beautiful male models, and so on. However, if in the continual
agonal struggle between drives his original master drive should have weakened
sufficiently and/or his sexual drive should have strengthened sufficiently, it
could well be that his sexual drive would have asserted itself as the new master
drive and thus reoriented the direction of Leonardo’s activities. That a master
drive for some time asserts a hegemony over other drives does not imply that
those other drives cease their efforts at self-assertion. As Nietzsche observes
in one of his notebooks, “Every drive is a kind of attempt to dominate; each
has its own perspective, which it wants to force as a norm on the other drives”
(KSA 12:7[60]).28

7. Klein, Segal, and Leowald: Toward a Reconciliation of Freud

and Nietzsche

While, as noted above, most of Feud’s texts on sublimation emphasize notions

such as desexualization and social valuations, there are occasional texts that
emphasize the unifying element in sublimations. In The Ego and the Id Freud
tells us that sublimated energy may “retain the main purpose of Eros—that of
uniting and binding—as it helps towards establishing unity, or a tendency to
unity” (S.E. 19:45).29 While Freud fails to thematize this notion of sublimation
as unification, some post-Freudians, in particular those working in the tradition
of Melanie Klein, do attempt to thematize the important notions of disintegration
and integration in their discussions of sublimation.
In her essay “Infant Analysis” Klein explicitly turns to consideration of
Freud’s analysis of Leonardo in order to “set forth more exactly the analogies
and differences between symptoms and sublimations” (1926, 41). The key com-
ponent she attributes to Leonardo, which allowed him to achieve sublimations
rather than hysterical conversions, is his capacity for “identification with the
objects of the world around him.” It is this that allowed his fixations to “become
consonant with the ego” (Klein 1926, 43). According to Klein, having introjected

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FREUD AND NIETZSCHE ON SUBLIMATION 53

various objects that are assigned both good and bad qualities—this for Klein is a
feature of what she calls the depressive position, which is reached after an initial
paranoid-schizoid position where enduring objects are not recognized as such—
sublimation is achieved when hostility to these introjected objects is overcome
through fantasies that allow a symbolic representation of the introjected object
in a nonhostile form. It is through such fantasies and symbolic representations
that these introjected objects are integrated with the ego. While we cannot hope
to fully rehearse here Klein’s notion of depressive position and so forth, what
is clear is that for Klein sublimation involves integration and overcoming of
hostility to inner objects. Since these inner objects are for Klein manifestations
of drives (for instance, bad objects are manifestations of aggressive drives),
Klein’s account of sublimation bears a striking resemblance to the Nietzschean
account offered above.30 The Kleinian account of sublimation as integration
is a theme taken up by Hanna Segal in her “A Psychoanalytical Approach to
Aesthetics,” which concludes that “a satisfactory work of art is achieved by a
realization and sublimation of the depressive position” (1952, 206). For Segal
this sublimation involves “the desire to unite” (1952, 207). Art, for Segal is a
form of sublimatory activity, a working through of the depressive position, which
allows us through symbolic representations to take objects toward which we
have sadistic hostile impulses and reintegrate them into a world that is “whole,
complete and unified” (1952, 204).
Another psychoanalyst, influenced by Klein, who identifies sublimation with
a type of integration, albeit under the name of “internalization,” is Hans Loewald.
Internalization, according to Loewald, involves “unconscious ego processes that
undo the splitting off” that is characteristic of repression (1973, 12). The split-
ting off that characterizes repression, according to Loewald, “maintains psychic
processes and structures on lower organizational levels,” while sublimation,
or internalization, as he calls it, “leads to higher organization and an enriched
psychic life” (1973, 14). In his later book Sublimation, in reference to Freud’s
Leonardo case, Loewald notes that “there are unitary experiences which give
way to experiences of differentiation, but that in sublimation the experience of
unity is restored” (1988, 45). Interestingly, Loewald (1973) cites Nietzsche, and
in particular Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, as a precursor for his
own notion of internalization. In fact, Nietzsche’s term internalization is closer
to the notion of repression than sublimation. For Nietzsche, as expressed in the
passage from GM II:16 quoted above, internalization is the turning back inside
of instincts that cannot be discharged outside.31
What is missing from these post-Freudian accounts of sublimation as integra-
tion or unification, or a higher level of organization, is an account of what exactly
is meant by integration, unification, or higher organization. Nietzsche’s account
of a master drive with a determinate aim realigning the aims of weaker drives, to
aims that augment rather than conflict with the aim of the master drive, at least

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54 KEN GEMES

provides a start to such an account. Whether Kleinians or other post-Freudians

can utilize such a Nietzschean conception of sublimation as unification without
joining Nietzsche in putting such strong conditions on what is necessary for
unification, or joining Nietzsche in his rejection of the notion of the ego, is
something that awaits further investigation.

Birkbeck College, University of London

School of Humanities, University of Southampton
[email protected], [email protected]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due to Gudrun von Tevenar, Christine Lopes, Dina Emundts,
Sebastian Gardner, Bernard Reginster, and Jane White and to the participants
of the St. John’s College Research Centre’s Interdisciplinary Seminars in
Psychoanalysis for helpful feedback on this essay; and to Hanna Segal for
discussions of her ideas about sublimation and how they differ from Nietzsche’s.
Initially I approached the topic of sublimation thinking that I could use Freud to
clarify Nietzsche on sublimation. It was Sebastian Gardner who, upon hearing
a paper in which I gave my Nietzschean account of sublimation, helpfully
suggested to me that perhaps it would be more advisable to use Nietzsche to
clarify Freud on sublimation.

NOTES
1. Freud often distinguishes between the aim and object of a drive. On one version of Freud’s
aim/object contrast the aim of a drive is simply satisfaction, or put another way, its aim is to
discharge its associated quanta of energy; and the object of a drive is that characteristic activity
or thing toward which that energy is directed. However, Freud often uses the aim/object contrast
to differentiate the characteristic activity of a drive (the aim) from the particular things that drive
focuses on at different times (the objects). In this essay the term aim is typically used in the sense
of the active direction of a drive. Thanks are due to Sebastian Gardner for bringing my attention
to this point.
2. The term Freud invariably used is ‘Trieb,’ which the translators of the Standard Edition
have unfortunately rendered as “instinct” rather than “drive.” There are three reasons to be wary
of the S.E. choice here. One is that the German language contains the distinct term ‘Instinkt,’
which is literally translated as the English “instinct,” and, as the editors of the S.E. themselves note
(S.E. 1:xxv), Freud does in fact occasionally use the German term ‘Instinkt.’ Second is that many
writers in the German psychological tradition before Freud, including Nietzsche, used the term
‘Trieb’ rather than ‘Instinkt,’ and here ‘Trieb’ has generally been translated as “drive.” Third is
that the notion of instinct caries with it today the connotation of being hard-wired—drives but not
instincts can be acquired; relatedly, and, more important, instincts have the connotation of being
nonplastic in their aims—this is part of their hard-wired nature. Now one might want to claim that
for Freud all Triebe are indeed part of our inherited constitution and cannot be acquired after birth,
but it is absolutely essential for Freud that their aims are indeed plastic, since the substitution of
aims in ‘Triebe’ is a central explanatory notion in Freud’s theories.
3. Bergler similarly notes, “At the time Freud formulated his views on the subject [of
sublimation], only the repressed phallic and pre-genital wishes and their contributaries where
considered to be part of the id. Later, Freud put at least equal stress on repressed aggressive trends.

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FREUD AND NIETZSCHE ON SUBLIMATION 55

However, no revision of the problem of sublimation was undertaken on the basis of this inclusion
of aggressive trends” (1945, 77).
4. See, for instance, Arlow 1955, 515; Glover 1931, 266–67; Hartmann 1955, 10.
5. The editors of the S.E. hypothesize that among Freud’s lost metapsychological essays from
1915–17 there was a paper dealing explicitly with sublimation (S.E. 14:106).
6. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud gives perhaps his strongest formulation of
the claim that sublimations do not involve the removal of repressions: “The repressed instinct
never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction. . . . No substitute or reaction formations and no
sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct’s persisting tension” (S.E. 18:42).
7. The first known references by Freud to sublimation occur in letters and drafts of letters to
Fliess dating from 1897 (S.E. 1:247–48). The first reference to sublimation in works published by
Freud occurs in the Dora case (S.E. 7:50) and in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, both
published in 1905.
8. See, for instance, Kris (1955) and Hartmann (1955), the latter of whom says that “neutral-
ization is essential in what we call sublimation” (1955, 18). A key source for this notion of neu-
tralization is Freud’s 1923 work The Ego and the Id where he refers to a “displaceable energy . . .
neutral in itself . . . desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy”
(S.E. 19:44–45).
9. Note, while Freud himself often emphasizes desexualization in his accounts of sublimation,
in the above quotation from Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis he makes the pointedly weaker
claim that the aim of sublimated energy is “perhaps no longer sexual” (S.E. 11:54; emphasis
added). Given how much of art, itself a much heralded result of sublimation, involves a more or
less explicit sexual component, this weaker formulation is well advised.
10. There is a good deal of literature devoted to expounding the relationship between Freud
and Nietzsche. Unfortunately much of it concerns the question of to what degree Nietzsche
anticipated Freud and to what degree Freud did or did not cover up influence from Nietzsche. By
and large literature governed by these concerns tends to do little to illuminate the work of either
Freud or Nietzsche. Perhaps the best, or at least most comprehensive, book of this questionable
genre is Lehrer 1995. Less helpful is Assoun 2000. A most succinct example of this genre is
Chapman and Chapman-Santana 1995.
11. Schopenhauer was more prone to speak of wills (Willen) rather than drives (Triebe). How
much this is merely a terminological difference is a difficult question to answer. For Schopenhauer,
beyond individual time-located willings, there is, notoriously, the transcendental notion of Wille,
for which Nietzsche had no sympathy. However, Freud’s notion of Eros may, arguably, be seen as
a return to a more transcendental picture.
12. While Nietzsche never takes on anything approximating Freud’s topological model of the
id, ego, and superego (see, for instance, The Ego and the Id [S.E. 19]), Nietzsche countenances
different modes of repression that have echoes in Freud’s topological model. For instance, in On
the Genealogy of Morals I Nietzsche tells the story of slaves who initially repress their drives
principally because their reality principle tells them that they are too weak to act on those drives
in the face of the masters’ oppression; later in GM Nietzsche tells how that practical repression
takes on a more moralized form. Indeed, in sections 19–22 of GM II, Nietzsche tells how it is in
reaction to our debts to our fathers, forefathers, and God that we develop what he calls a guilty
conscience. The first kind of repression is somewhat akin to repression seated in the ego, and the
second kind is akin to repression seated in the superego (itself formed according to Freud through
the internalization of godlike authoritarian father figures).
13. Reginster also argues that a kind of splitting of self is integral to ressentiment, claiming
that “ressentiment corrupts or dis-integrates the self ” (1997, 301).
14. More generally Richardson (1996, e.g., 25) gives an account of Nietzsche on sublimation
that anticipates the one given here. It is quite possible that this essay’s original inspiration comes

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56 KEN GEMES

from the excellent Richardson 1996 since, on reflection, that seems to be true of so much of my
work. Another source may have been May 1999, which persuasively argues that sublimation, power,
and form creation are Nietzsche’s key criteria for value. For an amusing, but much more important,
case of such “anxiety of influence” I direct the reader to Bos 1992, which expounds the convoluted
relationship between Nietzsche and Freud on the concept of the “It” or “Id” as mediated by the
curious figure of George Groddeck, author of the somewhat notorious Book of the It (2006).
15. As Dina Emundts has pointed out to me, and as acknowledged above, such stifling, which
can be short of full stifling, does not mean that the weaker drive need find no form of expression.
For instance, in Shreber’s case his repressed homosexual drive found outlet in his paranoid
fantasies and his transvestism. In the Christian slave, according to Nietzsche, his repression of his
desire to have what the masters have is expressed in his proclaimed repudiation of the masters’
attainments. The point is that in repression, as opposed to sublimation, those expressions typically
take on the logic of opposites—Shreber’s desire to be a female is expressed as his being forced by
God to be a female against his will, the Christian slave’s desire to have power over his masters is
disguised as an alleged love of his enemies and his renunciation of the desire for power. So where
repressed desires find expression they do so in a way that cannot be integrated into a coherent
whole; they represent a disintegration, not an integration, of the subject.
16. Note, it is not being claimed here that Nietzsche uses the term ‘sublimation’ with this
exact meaning. While Nietzsche does occasionally use the term ‘Sublimieriung’ and cognates in
his writings (see, for instance, GM II:7), he never gives a thematized account of sublimation. The
account of sublimation as unification given here is described as a Nietzschean account in that it is
in line with many of his uses of that term and, more important, it is based on one of Nietzsche’s
central ideals of health (see below); and equally important, this account serves to underwrite the
very distinctions between repression and sublimation and between pathological symptoms and
sublimations that Freud’s account of sublimation fails to underwrite. This reading allows that in
certain passages, for instance KSA 12:254, Nietzsche uses the term ‘Sublimieriung’ and cognates
in ways more akin to Freud’s actual usage and in ways that do not imply the notion of a united
self. Schacht (1983) plausibly claims that in fact Nietzsche tends to use the term ‘spiritualization’
(Vergeistigung) in the sense of sublimation. He further contrasts this to Nietzsche’s term
‘internalization’ (Verinnerlichung). This accords with the argument presented in section 7 below
that Nietzsche’s use of the term internalization is better construed as repression rather than
sublimation. For a reading that argues that Nietzsche’s notion of sublimation is closer to that of
Freud’s, see Golomb 1989, especially 67–77.
17. Similarly, Nietzsche sees the achievement of free will as something open to a limited few.
For more on both these themes, see Gemes 2006.
18. Nietzsche, like Freud, often makes a direct connection between artistic creation and
the sublimation of sexual energy: “It is one and the same energy that man expresses in artistic
conception and in the sexual act” (KSA 13:23[2]).
19. The French term ‘ressentiment’ is expressly used by Nietzsche, most notably in GM I.
20. For more on this, see Gemes 2008, where affirming drives is not explicated in terms of
taking a certain cognitive stance, endorsing some positive proposition about one’s drives, but,
rather, as fully expressing one’s drives.
21. One needs to be a little careful here in avoiding the suggestion that Nietzsche favors
some static permanent hierarchy among the drives. In fact, Nietzsche often emphasizes the need
for a kind of agonal struggle between the drives. Agonal struggle is along the lines of a contest
that develops, brings out, the best of the participants, rather than a struggle that leads to their
evisceration. While I do not believe that there is genuine conflict between the Nietzsche ideal of
a unified self and the Nietzschean ideal of a self engaged in agonal struggle, limitations of space
prevent me from here developing this point. Suffice it for now to say that even a master drive, in
order to fully develop itself, needs the conflict of robust challenges.

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22. Kaufmann (1980) similarly lays great stress on the importance of the notion of sublimation
for Nietzsche. In chapter 7, “Morality and Sublimation,” Kaufmann explicitly contrasts repression
and sublimation as two methods for dealing with the chaos of impulses. Kaufmann places
Nietzsche as a strong advocate of the second of these methods. Indeed, Kaufmann (1980, 219–20),
while noting that other modern philosophers including Goethe, Novalis, and Schopenhauer used
the notion of sublimation, claims that it was Nietzsche who gave the notion the connotation of the
transformation of sexual energy that it caries today.
23. Since Nietzsche says little about the nature of master drives, there is a certain amount of
vagueness about what counts as a unified self for Nietzsche. With the element of social valuation
absent there is the worry that, for instance, a reclusive obsessive stamp collector may count as a
unified self. For such a person we may envisage a stamp collecting master drive. The answer here
is that Nietzsche as a naturalist believes that as humans we come with a rich panoply of inherited
drives—this allows that we may also in the course of acculturation acquire new drives. As a matter
of empirical fact the reclusive stamp collector will not be a being who is giving expression to all
his or her drives (for instance, drives to sociability, sexual drives, and aggressive drives).
24. At one point Nietzsche talks of “fifty separate drives” (D 422). Commenting on this Paul
Katsafanas in his dissertation notes that “he is undercounting: throughout his corpus he names
over one hundred distinct drives” (2008, 130). In fact, some interpreters, including the philosopher
Heidegger (1979) and the psychoanalyst Adler (1928), insist that for Nietzsche there is one basic
drive or force, namely, will to power, and all more specific drives are just modifications of this drive
or force. But this is a difficult matter in Nietzsche interpretation that I cannot here enter into.
25. See Sartre 1958, 51–54. Also the excellent Gardner 1993 contains a good presentation of
the censor problem (1993, 47–52) and attempts a Kleinian defense (1993, chap. 7).
26. Robert Pippin and Sebastian Gardner have pressed on me a different philosophical
worry about this Nietzschean account of genuine persons as unified hierarchies of drives and its
attendant neglect of emphasis on the notion of ego. They argue that such third-person accounts
of personhood fail to account for a first-person point of view; in particular, they ignore the
phenomenology of what it is to be a person, to, for instance, feel one’s mental states and actions
to be one’s own. While I cannot fully document an answer here, my basic response to this is that
Nietzsche generally aimed for third-person accounts of such notions as personhood, agency,
and free will and took allegedly related phenomenological states to be largely epiphenomenal
and often illusory. For instance, members of the herd may believe that they are, may experience
themselves as, persons who act freely, but for Nietzsche they are wrong on both counts and their
experience is illusory.
27. This section has benefited immensely from conversations with Jane White.
28. Conversations with Edward Harcourt were especially helpful in alerting me to the fact that
the picture of the harmonious alignment of drives suggested in my account of sublimation needed
to be reconciled with Nietzsche’s repeated valorization of continuous agonal struggle.
29. Generally Freud emphasizes not unity but incompatibility between the demands of various
subpersonal agencies, such as the ego, superego, and id. This is also true of The Ego and the Id
where he paints a picture of the ego being ever menaced by the conflicting demands of the reality
principle, the id, and the superego. It is in this voice that he there labels Eros not as a uniter but as
“a mischief maker” (S.E. 19:59).
30. I owe this observation about the relationship of internal objects to drives to a private
correspondence from Bernard Reginster.
31. An important attempt to differentiate pathological symptoms from sublimations, stemming
from the work of Klein, stresses the notion of symbolization. Basically, in pathological symptoms
there is a failure of symbolization. For instance, a fetish object is taken to literally be the penis
rather than a symbol for the missing penis. In a case cited in Segal 1957 a violinist refuses to
perform in public because he takes his violin to be his penis and so playing in public is for him

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58 KEN GEMES

masturbating in public. In contrast, sublimation involves recognition of substitutes as symbols

rather than an identification of the symbol with that which it substitutes for. See also Gardner
1993, sec. 6.8; Klein 1926; Loewald 1988, chap. 4. If failure of symbolization simply means
failure to realize that a symbol stands for something else, then it is not immediately clear how the
distinction between successful symbolization and failed symbolization could be used, for instance,
to distinguish Leonardo’s behavior from Schreber’s. In particular, it is not at all clear that Schreber
suffered such a failure of symbolization. Even if, as Hanna Segal suggested to me in conversation,
failure of symbolization can be broadened to include failure to realize that symbols are being used
to hide, obliterate, parts of reality (for instance, Schreber used the idea of God persecuting him to
hide his own homoerotic desires), it is not clear how this can underwrite the distinction between
pathological symptoms and sublimation. Indeed, one might argue that inasmuch as Schreber
acknowledged that someone (God) wanted him to play the part of the woman, he was closer to
acknowledging his homoerotic desires than was Leonardo. Though a lot more needs to be said
about the Klein/Segal approach, limitations of space prevent me from here giving this line of
thought the attention it deserves.

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