Neo-Reality and Sublimation: Are there similarities?
In a programme on “Hype and Reality” (SAMRA Conference 2018) there appeared the following quotation:
"My diary is full today. So is my head: with the past, present, future. Numbers and words and images and thoughts and sounds and smells and tastes flame through my brain. Reality and serenity and substance and science and innovation and engagement and pleasure and passion and imagination and agitation and exaggeration… but what is hype and what is reality?!”
When reading this a concept came to mind which has relevance in psychoanalytic thinking and is rather unexplored: Neo-reality. This paper attempts to elucidate some ideas on neo-reality and its possible relation to the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation.
What follow are firstly some thoughts on neo-reality and thereafter on sublimation and a concluding statement on differences and similarities between the concepts.
Neo-reality
In Wikipedia Neo Reality is defined as: “A substitute for reality”. Baudrillard on his ideas about the media quoted in Merrin (2005), suggested the transformation of the lived character of the world into signs of itself so that we live sheltered by signs in the denial of the real. History is no longer produced by real experience but produced as artefacts. This simulation process creates a neo-reality which assumes the face of reality. “There is thus the creation of a culturally constructed neo-reality, a process of simulation in which the real is eclipsed and replaced by neo-reality”.
The French psychoanalyst A. Green suggested that the ego is susceptible to being captured by the imaginary, for within the ego there is the co-existence of contradictory functions: “However potent the reality test and the reality principle may be, the pleasure-unpleasure principle is still powerful enough to construct a more or less extensive neo-reality” (1973).
Green, in Kontou (2017), when discussing negative hallucination, points to the formation of neo-reality as being potentially helpful in life. In negative hallucination, the subject is equipped with non-verbal signs of a gap, and it provides an opportunity to consider the gaps and fill them in. Green called this a “neo-reality” of emptiness, which is real and conscious and also an imagining construction (neo) that has been invented as a mechanism of defence in order to preserve the equilibrium of the organism.
Pasche (1975) wrote about the infant that places inanimate substances, that is, toys, clothes between themselves and their mother as a condition for their autonomy. “Finding an inanimate substance, one that is soulless, enables infants to spread out their cathexis so as not to jeopardize their self-preservation and their identity, as well as to satisfy their drives at little cost and with less risk”.
Sublimation
Wikipedia defines psychological sublimation as a mature type of defence mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse (Wikipedia, accessed 2019).
Freud’s cardinal initial contributions consisted of the ideas that sublimation is an unconscious process that it is not so much concerned with normal sexual desire as with the energy of the infantile erogenous components, such as what occurs during the taking of nourishment. In 1905, he emphasized the importance of “touching” and “looking”, the latter which is analogous to the former, as intermediary erogenous or sexual aims.
“The tendency to linger at this intermediary sexual aim of the sexually accentuated looking is found to a certain degree in most normals; indeed it gives them the possibility of directing a certain amount of their libido to a higher artistic aim… by making the sexual object a thing of beauty” (Levey, 1939).
In works up to 1923, Freud continued to example sublimation as artistic sublimation sourced by the energy of infantile sexual components and object-libido, modified through the mechanism of displacement. He also consistently described the energy underlying sublimation as sexual and non-repressed.
The transformation of object libido into narcissistic libido implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a process of desexualization and this could also be the path taken in sublimation, that is, sublimation takes place through the agency of the ego, which begins by changing sexual object libido into narcissistic libido and gives it another aim.
Lacanian sublimation centres to a large part on the notion of Das Ding. His general formula for sublimation is that “it raises an object to the dignity of The Thing”. Lacan considers these objects (whether human, aesthetic, or philosophical) to be signifiers which are representative of Das Ding and that “the function of the pleasure principle is, in effect, to lead the subject from signifier to signifier, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain at as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus”. Furthermore, man is the “artisan of his support system”, in other words, he creates or finds the signifiers which delude him into believing he has overcome the emptiness the Thing. Lacan also considers sublimation to be a process of creation out of nothing, whereby an object, human or manufactured, comes to be defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding (Lacan, 1959-1960).
Lacan considers Das Ding a lost object ever in the process of being recuperated by Man. Temporarily the individual will be duped by his or her own psyche into believing that this object, this person or this circumstance can be relied upon to satisfy his needs in a stable and enduring manner when in fact it is in its nature that the object as such is lost. It will never be found again. Something is there while one waits for something better, or worse, but which one wants and again is to be found at the most as something missed. One doesn't find it, but only its pleasurable associations. Human life unravels as a series of detours in the quest for the lost object or the absolute Other, governed by the pleasure principle.
Klein (1923) suggested that repression is instrumental in the progression from identification to symbol formation. The latter provided an opportunity for the libido to be displaced on to other objects and activities of the self-preservative instincts, which is called sublimation. As the individual advances to the genital stage, pressures exerted by the superego are mitigated and felt by the ego as a sense of guilt with the result that restitutive tendencies and sublimations develop (1932).
The attempts to save the love object, to repair and restore it, are determining factors for all sublimations and the whole of ego-development. She mentions the specific importance for sublimation of the bits to which the loved object has been reduced and the effort to put it back together. The desire for perfection is compelling because it has to disprove the idea of disintegration. This desire is rooted in the depressive anxiety of disintegration, which is of great importance in all sublimations.
Bersani (1986) viewed sublimation as coextensive with sexuality, as an appropriation and elaboration of sexual impulses, rather than as a renunciation of such impulses. He argued for the perspective of the father not as the phallic inhibitor instituting repression, but rather as an agent for a type of sublimation as a duplicating generalization of the loving at the mother’s breast. Sublimation then becomes an extension of desire, taking the form of a productive receding of consciousness in replication, modulation, supplementation and metamorphic distillation. He referred to Mallarmé on his view of sublimation as a mechanism, not by which desire is denied, but rather as a self-reflexive activity by which desire multiplies and diversifies.
It seems that both concepts, neo-reality and sublimation, imply a change from one thing to other thing(s), through the mechanism of displacement. This is brought about by a decathexis and a recathexis, or in other terms, disinvestment and reinvestment. The reasons for this seem multiple: prohibition, unavailability, loss, emptiness, reparation, restoration, elaboration and supplementation. While some of the reasons seem based on negativity, others are based more on progressivity.
What seems to energize these changes? Might it be the drives; the search for the other and by implication the self, parts-other and part-selves? The clinical implication seems that before reaching pathological conclusions, such as that something is perverse, the concepts of neo-reality and sublimation and their relation to desire might be considered, especially in clinical practice.
Johan is a qualified Psychologist (Clinical), based in Sea Point, Cape Town, South Africa.
With a commitment to mental health, Mr Grové provides services in Afrikaans and English, including Psychotherapy (Psychodynamic).
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