Description
Sublimation is the sole psychic defence that does not involve distortion. Instead, it harnesses the full energy of the drive or desire to address complexities in creative ways that can transfigure our subjective and social worlds. It can breathe new life into what may have become moribund, and it can displace the distortions that support dehumanising and de-realising emotions, mentalities and practices. However, in defending against ontological insecurity, sublimation always competes with the many other psychic defences that do involve distortion and that thereby suffer a loss of creative energy. Hence, its political implications are vast, but only if it can flourish. To do so it relies upon a social field in which norms of recognition that support the capacity to dwell in ambivalence gain predominance by displacing norms that encode the friend-enemy distinction. The dilemma for political sublimation is that to transform social and political relations the relevant parties must move in tandem towards realising their capacity for sublimation. If only one party begins to transform its relations with the other(s) through sublimation, while those others maintain their reliance on defences of splitting, projection and abjection, the potential for transformative sublimation collapses. The crucial political issue becomes how to support such mutual processes of sublimation across and between whole societies to avoid a descent into friend-enemy relations.
