Sublimation (psychology)

“ A most important instrument of sublimation is to be found in the development of esprit de corps. There is thus produced a body of sentiments which contribute greatly to military efficiency, while at the same time they provide a most valuable means of sublimating energy which might otherwise work in the opposite direction. ”

“ Much of the strange and outre, as well as the commonplace, in human activity conceals energy transformations of inestimable value in the work of sublimation. The race would go mad without it. It sometimes does even with it, a sign that sublimation is still imperfect and that the race is far from being spiritually well. A comprehension of the principles here involved would further the spread of sympathy for all forms of thinking and tend to further spiritual health in such mutual comprehension of the needs of others and of the forms taken by sublimation processes. ”

“ In all other uses of amplification, if you subtract the element of sublimity you will take as it were the soul from the body. No sooner is the support of sublimity removed than the whole becomes lifeless, nerveless, and dull. ”

“ We are accustomed to think of sublimation as a process of a more or less artificial kind, by which the physician directs the energy of a conflict into a channel more healthy and beneficent than that it has taken under the influence of those natural forces we denote collectively by the term "disease." ”

“ There is another process at work in the human mind which is of the utmost importance for our problem. I mean the process of sublimation. If it is not easy to give a short and clear definition of sublimation, at least the process is familiar to all. The commonest example is “falling in love,” where the simple sex-instinct becomes intertwined with other instincts and with past emotional experience, and projects itself in wholly new guise upon its object. We may perhaps best say that a sublimated instinct has more and higher values attached to its satisfaction than one unsublimated. ”

“ And secondly, these compensating equivalents are obliged necessarily to present themselves in the language of the unconscious—that is, in material of a heterogeneous and subliminal nature. For all the material of the conscious mind which is of no further value, and can find no suitable employment, becomes subliminal, such as all those forgotten infantile and phantastic creations that have ever entered the heads of men, of which only the legends and myths still remain. ”

“ The subliminal self not only contains the record of unheeded past impressions—a latent memory—but also has activities and faculties far transcending the range of our conscious self. In this it also resembles the invisible radiation of the sun, which is the main source of life and energy in this world. ”

“ I am in hopes that by the study of various forms of subliminal consciousness, subliminal faculty, subliminal perception, we may ultimately obtain a conception of our own total being and operation which may show us the incarnate mind's perception of the discarnate mind's message as no isolated anomaly, but an orderly exercise of natural and innate powers, frequently observed in action in somewhat similar ways. ”

“ Furthermore, dissociation in most cases is not complete; now and again, and especially when there is successful sublimation—in some people when in love, in others with religious ecstasy, in others again with some form of art—now and again re-association of the parts occurs, and there is an extraordinary sense of the irruption of some vast beneficent force, some great extra-personal flood of soul, into the meagre stream of everyday life. The lives of a certain number of saints and ascetics, mystics and poets, abound with phenomena of this sort ”

“ In these one's real consciousness may be lost in sleep while the subliminal self, the alter-ego which never slumbers nor sleeps, rises to the surface and speaks in no uncertain tones. The mind sees with the startling clearness as if in a vision. ”

“ I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes. ”

“ Since the impression produced by sublimity is one of very exceptional strength, we are not able to feel it continuously for long, though we can repeat it after a pause. In this the sublime differs from the ‘beautiful,’ on which we like to dwell after our first surprise is over. A tragedy or symphony that was sublime from beginning to end could not be so experienced. Living among mountains, we feel their beauty more or less constantly, their sublimity only by flashes. ”

“ Thus much I wish to say: but my thesis is not to be pushed further:—as though I claimed that all our best thought was subliminal, or that all that was subliminal was potentially "inspiration."
It is true, however, that the range of our subliminal mentation is more extended than the range of our supraliminal. At one end of the scale we find dreams,—a normal subliminal product, but of less practical value than any form of sane supraliminal thought. ”

“ We are invited to one gradual undivided process of sublimation, penetrating ever more deeply into the reality of the Universe, to find at last “that One who is present everywhere and absent only from those who do not perceive Him.” What we behold, that we are: citizens, according to our own will and desire, of the surface world of the senses, the deeper world of life, or the ultimate world of Spiritual reality. ”

“ Call it mind-projection, making one’s self visible at a distance, sending out the subliminal self—call it what we may—it is a glimpse of a phenomenon, rare in its occurrence, but which nevertheless has been observed a sufficient number of times to claim serious attention, and calm and candid consideration. ”

“ Sometimes the subliminal self takes full control, making itself the active ruling personality to the entire exclusion of the primary self; and sometimes it only sends messages to the primary or ordinary self, by suggestion, mental pictures, or vivid impressions made upon the organs of sense and producing the sensation of seeing, hearing, or touch. ”

“ Now, this peculiar doubleness in our apprehension of sublimity, this presence of two equally necessary stages or phases, a negative and a positive, seems to correspond with the peculiarity which we found in the sublime object when we were provisionally regarding it by itself. It is its overwhelming greatness which for a moment checks, baffles, subdues, even repels us or makes us feel our littleness, and which then, forcing its way into the imagination and emotions, distends or uplifts them to its own dimensions. ”

“ In sleep the conditions are favorable for this readjustment, and the subliminal self comes more or less perfectly to the surface; then appears that most peculiar and interesting series of pictures and visions which we call dreams; sometimes the [Pg 143] rearranged, or rather unarranged, impressions and perceptions of the waking hours brought together, possibly just before the power of attention is entirely lost; sometimes the Puck-like work of the subliminal personality, the Léontines of the dream-country influencing the unconscious or semi-conscious primary self ”

“ Thus the sublime opens to us a road to overstep the limits of the world of sense, in which the feeling of the beautiful would forever imprison us. It is not little by little (for between absolute dependence and absolute liberty there is no possible transition) , it is suddenly and by a shock that the sublime wrenches our spiritual and independent nature away from the net which feeling has spun round us, and which enchains the soul the more tightly because of its subtle texture. ”

“ Not that we pretend that dreams have any prophetic foreboding, but we suggest, that there might be a possibility of discovering in their unconscious material those future combinations which are subliminal just because they have not reached the distinctiveness or the intensity which consciousness requires. ”

“ The mystic way is best understood as a process of sublimation, which carries the correspondences of the self with the Universe up to higher levels than those on which our normal consciousness works. Just as the normal consciousness stands over against the unconscious, which, with its buried impulses and its primitive and infantile cravings, represents a cruder reaction of the organism to the external world ”

“ And these rare displays of subliminal capacities are held to foreshadow the further course of mental evolution, to afford us a glimpse of tha higher plane on which the mind of man may habitually and normally live, if further evolution of the nervous system shall render it a less inadequate medium for the exercise of the spiritual faculties and for the influx of the psychical energies which at present, owing to its imperfections, are for the most part latent or confined to the subliminal self. ”

“ Our only plan, therefore, must be to leave it entirely alone, and to consider merely the distinctive character of sublimity. Let beauty in general be what it may, what is it that marks off this kind of beauty from others, and what is there peculiar in our state of mind when we are moved to apply to anything the specific epithet ‘sublime’?—such is our question. ”

“ We thus find that the objections to the subconscious are based on insufficient grounds. We also find that the abandonment of the subconscious leads to a tangle of difficulties and to the quagmire of mediaeval metaphysics. If the metaphysical interpretation of the subconscious in the sense of a cosmic self lands one in the misty regions of religious mysticism, the opposite view of the total negation of the subconscious, apparently in the interests of science, lands one in regions no less shadowy, regions of naturalistic mysticism. ”

“ If there be any one point, however, on which there is tolerable unanimity among all writers, ancient and modern, great and small, it is the absence in dreams of the normal acts and processes of volition, and, especially, of the faculty of attention. Now, this is exactly the condition which is conducive to the more or less perfect emergence and activity of the subliminal self, under whatever circumstances it occurs. ”

“ Sometimes we seem to see our subliminal perceptions and faculties acting truly in unity, truly as a Self;—co-ordinated into some harmonious "inspiration of genius," or some profound and reasonable hypnotic self-reformation, or some far-reaching supernormal achievement of clairvoyant vision or of self-projection into a spiritual world. Whatever of subliminal personality is thus acting corresponds with the highest-level centres of supraliminal life. ”

“ By sublimation is meant a process in which an instinctive tendency, more or less fostered by experience, which would normally find expression in some kind of undesirable conduct, has its energy directed into a channel in which it comes to have a positive social value. By side-tracking we mean a process in which the energy so diverted acquires no special social value, but is altogether harmless, or at any rate less harmful to the welfare of the individual and community than that expression in which the energy would otherwise find its outlet. ”

“ Still, the mind is in rapport, however dim, in contact, if not indeed continuous with a larger consciousness of unknown and perhaps universal scope that is disclosed to us in our subliminal self. On this view the brain does not secrete thought but obstructs it like a bad conductor, so that when the thought currents of the great Autos make the nerves glow, the phosphorescence or incandescence caused by the resistance of the brain is what appears to our fragmentary subliminal mind as consciousness. ”

“ The direction taken by the condensations of the dream is prescribed on the one hand by the true foreconscious relations of the dream thoughts, an the other hand by the attraction of the visual reminiscences in the unconscious. The success of the condensation work produces those intensities which are required for penetration into the perception systems. ”

“ At the other end of the scale we find that the rarest, most precious knowledge comes to us from outside the ordinary field,—through the eminently subliminal processes of telepathy, telæsthesia, ecstasy. And between these two extremes lie many subliminal products, varying in value according to the dignity and trustworthiness of the subliminal mentation concerned. ”

“ From the point of view here taken the action will appear to have been neither reflex nor voluntary in the ordinary sense, but subliminal;—a subliminal uprush, an emergence of hidden faculty,—of nerve co-ordinations potential in his organism but till now unused,—which takes command of the man and guides his action at the moment when his being is deeply stirred. ”

“ For the most part we think that there are few degrees of sublimity, and that the highest is but little higher than that which we now behold; but we are always deceived. Sublimer visions appear, and the former pale and fade away. ”

“ Spirit messages are to them examples of the activity of the subliminal self, and a medium is a person gifted—or cursed—with extraordinary subconscious force and 65 lucidity. Materializations, they argue, are produced through the effluvia of the living and controlled by the subliminal forces of the participators in the séance. ”