Art and Sublimation
Art, whether a painting or a song, made not for the audience but for the artist, gives us the opportunity to transform internal tension into something profound and personal. In this episode I will discuss Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse’s call that we engage with this essential instinct to create as a way of knowing ourselves.
Excerpts
— Swiss-German writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hermann Hesse is an author beloved by my family, or at least my father and I. A few years ago, during lock-down, I made a hobby out of searching the internet for a copy of every single Hermann Hesse book that had been published in English.
Hesse believed strongly in the non-analysis of art. He felt that engaging the intellectual mind in the pursuit of understanding art was a surefire way to rob oneself of experience. Were he alive today, I believe that Hesse would be a great supporter of David Lynch. Hesse received possibly thousands of letters from students in his lifetime, always wanting to know what something meant or seeking validation for having “figured out” something they believed to be a solvable puzzle in one of his works. I found this characteristically dry letter that Hesse wrote to a student wanting to know how his thoughts on Franz Kafka who Hesse described as the uncrowned king of German Literature. Translated by scholar Gerry Busch, Hesse writes:
“This "interpreting" is a game of the intellect, often a very pleasant game, suitable for clever people without artistic sensibility, who can read and write books about African art and twelve-tone music, but never find their way into the core of a work of art, because they stand before the gate, trying the lock with a hundred keys, never noticing that the gate is, in fact, open.”
— As many know, Sigmund Freud considered one of the grandfathers of modern psychology was a revelatory agent in elevating the cultural perception of psychoanalysis in the late 1800s. His friendship with Jung started with great affection and the two worked closely, sharing great respect and admiration for each other over many years.
The split between the two had profound impact, causing a fissure through psychiatry that lasts to this day. It feels slightly fickle and perhaps even disrespectful to sum up the divide into a sentence or two, so I will suggest that anyone interested in the particulars conducts further research. But essentially, Freud felt very strongly that sublimation was an important defense mechanism within the adult mind, that transformed, socially taboo impulses into acceptable behaviour, believing that these socially taboo impulses were always stemming from a psycho-sexual root inherent as an instinct within the human mind. Jung felt that this was far too limited and that the fixation on psycho-sexual behaviour was doing a disservice to sublimation. Jung felt that Freud’s ideas pathologised and eclipsed something far greater within the psyche, he believed that sublimation was of alchemical origins, a social duty we all owe each other and our culture at large, that the transformation of oneself is impossible to scientifically describe and that the mystery was part of the unspeakable experience within the individual as they evolve through a transformational experience.
It is common belief around art making is that it is built on neurosis and were an artist to resolve some of the psychic tension within their minds, their artistic expression would be diminished.
— Hesse, no doubt, influenced by Jung, writes “by sublimating, by submitting the unconscious to the conscious idea, the artist fulfills his role.” Many people state the phrase Art for Art’s sake. But I will suggest that Hesse and Jung, and myself if I am picking a side, believe that true Art is for Sublimation’s sake. That is to say that sublimation is the alchemical process that draws forth unconscious material into the conscious and thus the psyche is transformed, the Self with a capital S is able to know itself and be released. It is not advisable to continually mine the same wound for Art’s sake, but rather maintain a trajectory of upward individuation that allows us to move continuously, an ascension that does not require one to stop and intellectualise, but rather to be wholly transformed by the experience.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst and story collector, in her book Late Bloomer tells the reader point blank that bed is not the place to recover. Of course if you are ill, take rest. But when life has knocked you so hard that you find you are chronically tired, your mind constantly shifts to fantasies of bed, you wish for nothing more than hours of scrolling on your phone or binge watching a tv show. You are not resting. Of course if you are bedridden for whatever reason, be bed-ridden, but then ask the world to bring art to you. But if you are not, then go out into the world and find things to make. You will have much more energy and joy for life than if you lay in bed all weekend or in front of the television on the couch.
Clarissa said that these thoughts of inadequacy, these why-bother thoughts come to us like a wind and she advises that we say “be gone. You are not welcome here. Be gone, I will not visit you and you will no longer visit me.”
Whether you are a parent or not, you would surely agree instinctively that you should not hold up a piece of art that a child has made and publicly compare it to another child. You would rather ask the child how they felt making it. How they experienced the art. The same is as true for you today at whatever age you are.
— One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power…If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn’t use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That’s why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived high possibilities.
It is a worthwhile exercise to see where in your life you have neurosis, or where there is excess, too much wine, too much scrolling on your phone, too much obsessive thinking about someone in your community. Follow the tail and see what you find, it is highly likely that you will find an internal avoidance, a lack of something that you want to do, but your conscious mind rejects out of fear or pain.
Of course scrolling on your phone is today’s sliced bread. Nearly all of us are bedridden with this illness. What are you drawn to on your phone though. What games do you play, what apps do you return to. Do not think that the universality of this neurosis makes it less interesting or more difficult to unearth.
— There is an absolutely brilliant book on Art called the Adventures of Looking by Hervey Adams. He writes:
“a simple example is the intense blueness that we see in the night sky when looking through the window of a lamplit room. If we were to walk outside into the darkness, the sky would appear to have lost its blue brilliance, which was induced by the contrast of the yellowish light in the room. So every colour is affected both by the direct and the reflected light that falls on it and also by the quality of the colour of colours adjacent to it.”
I believe this passage could be just as much about the nature of Self exploration as the nature of colour and light.