Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Sublimation of States of Mind

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

But first I need to introduce a major difficulty in traditional views on moral states of mind.

The Need for Clear Terminology

The realm of emotions has always been a difficult one within traditional views of morality. Morality is needed in the control and management of negative states of mind, such as unpleasant emotions. Unfortunately, a lack of understanding of the nature of emotion has led to the adoption, within moral debate, of disparaging attitudes towards a few emotions like vanity and narcissism [¹]. Such attitudes are based on confusion, which means that some traditional moral beliefs are inherently confused. To penetrate and attempt to clear the confusion I need to make some distinctions in terminology. I give specific meanings to the terms “morality”, “virtue”, and “ethics”. Over the past few centuries the progress of science and technology has been quite spectacular. However, the moral development of mankind has not kept pace with it, and has not developed very much in the last 2000 years. In general, the moral standards of most Western peoples are patchy and poor, and only kept in place by social pressures rather than by individual integrity. In fact, social pressures are both the usual source of moral standards and the force that maintains them.

Social pressures produce social conditioning and social learning. The distinction between them that I make is that social learning is a product of free choice, whilst social conditioning is a product of the parents’ morality that is forced on the child by discipline and punishment. For most people, moral standards are standards of behaviour that are derived from social conditioning.

The moral standards of any society represent the degree of evolution of that society. As a society matures it can develop more mature ideas of goodness and truth. However, maturity is not uniform within society’s members: not everybody can accept advanced ideas. In general, for the individual member of any society, the rules of social behaviour that he adheres to represent the level of goodness that he can practice and the level of truth about ideas of right and wrong that he can accept.

When a person advances beyond the social consensus and becomes a spiritual idealist or a New Age idealist, the contemporary state of social conditioning becomes restrictive to his further evolution. He needs to examine, and possibly discard, contemporary moral standards until he can formulate a higher set of rules for himself. Social conditioning is always a challenge to overcome in order to progress to higher standards.

Terminology

Standards reflect the person’s character traits. I need to make a distinction in the origin of these traits. I need to make this distinction because character traits have two different roots, and in order to label these roots I use the terms “morality” and “virtue”. I am therefore changing traditional terminology, which treats these two terms as being more or less identical. There are two roots because some traits of responsible behaviour are social ones, and others are purely aspects of individuality. Social conditioning always produces social traits, since individuality can never be forced on a child. Free choice is always a product of individuality, and so individuality leads to social learning.

Some traits are produced by social conditioning; I call these moral traits.
Other traits are produced by social learning; I call these virtues or virtuous traits.

Quite often, social learning occurs as a reaction to social conditioning. For example, if a person rebels to some degree against social pressures and decides to go his own way in life and make his own decisions, irrespective of what other people think of him, then he begins to cultivate the virtues of independence of mind and freedom of spirit.

The problem with any morality that is derived from social pressures is that it is unstable and likely to change (in the direction of becoming more right-wing) during the hard times of social abreaction [²]. When, however, some deliberate reflection is involved in determining one’s standards then I use an opposition of ethics against both morality and virtue. Conditioning and learning just affect behaviour. Deliberation brings in motives. I consider ethics to be the critical and clear-minded analysis of the problems of right and wrong, good and evil.

Sublimation

To ensure that ethical debate is meaningful, an understanding of the process of sublimation is needed. Sublimation is the process of making emotional dynamics that are (usually) considered to be unpleasant into socially-acceptable attitudes and states of mind. It is the process whereby the emotions (and their associated beliefs and attitudes) that are considered to be “bad” are transformed into qualities of character that are considered to be “good”. In past times negative emotions were repressed. Now they need to be sublimated. Repression denies wholeness to a person. Sublimation enables one to fulfil oneself. The rationale of sublimation is that all emotions have a place in human development.

Freud, in his early writings, considered that the primary drive in man is the sexual instinct, libido; the process of sublimation becomes the various ways of re-directing libido. I reject this assumption. I reject the idea that any physiological drive or instinct can produce ethical, even spiritual, states of mind. Existential choice can never arise from any instinct.

Nietzsche proposed that the will to power is the person’s primary drive. I accept this as a partial explanation of the evolutionary process, but with a qualification. For Nietzsche the will to power was more of a physiological drive rather than “will” in the conventional sense. I translate the will to power back into an existential drive, without any connotations of instinct.

For me, the will to power is the conscious and/or subconscious means of directing personal evolution. The will to power acts as an existential drive, focusing on the use of free will; the dynamic of this process is the person’s intensity of idealism. The psychological content of this drive arises from ways of satisfying the person’s needs.

The binary (or complementary) process to the will to power is the desire for power [³]. The desire for power always arises first in the person’s evolutionary journey, and only when it is frustrated and then (sometimes) repudiated does the will to power arise – frustration begins the process of self-questioning, which is the origin of higher idealisms. Freud had little understanding of power. Everything that he explained using the concept of libido can also be explained by the desire for power. The re-direction of the desire for power into sexuality gives rise to the sexual politics of the family. But I cannot see how re-direction of libido can give rise to the politics of power; it may generate the idea that might is right (a rationalisation of physical strength, which can pass as a product of an instinct), but nothing else. Certainly not socialism nor anarchism nor existentialism.

After reading Nietzsche’s concept of sublimation, I set myself the task of identifying attitudes that have their base in my repertoire of regular emotions. The difficulty with establishing the sublimation of an emotion is that it cannot be deduced by either wishful or logical thinking. The only way to do it is to take any major attitude that is currently dominant in your mind, or any major ideal that is currently motivating you, and then try to identify through awareness what emotion it springs from, that is, what subconscious emotion is associated with it. Identifying emotions is an empirical task and not a rational one. Conversely, any rational conjecture on sublimation has to be verified by empiricism.

Emotions form into pairs or binaries. A good principle to use is that the sublimation of one emotion needs to be compatible with the sublimation of its binary. I give a list of the binary emotions that featured in my investigation of sublimation. Then I give their sublimations, which I derived from an analysis of my own states of mind.

Binary Emotions

I repeat my list of binary emotions.

I begin with the first binary.

• Narcissism and Jealousy

Some moral practitioners want to better the condition of the world rather than to concentrate on personal salvation; such moral idealists usually focus on the practice of duty and social obligation. Social concerns have a base in jealousy. The sublimation of jealousy leads to morality.

The narcissistic person prefers to be free, free from social obligations and morality, since these carry the blemish of coercion. The sublimation of narcissism produces individualism. Individualism has various levels to it: for example, at the bottom is the amoral person; somewhere in the middle we have the individualism of nineteenth-century Liberalism, defined in political and economic terms; at the top is the subjective existentialist, trying to break all the chains of coercion that restrict him.

To be more specific about the sublimations of these two emotions I turn to their component emotions. Both jealousy and narcissism are compound emotions and consist of two other emotions. This means that both jealousy and narcissism give rise to two different sublimations.

Jealousy = love + self-pity
The love mode of jealousy generates sociability and a focus on community, which is needed when individualism is no longer the best response to changing times. The self-pity mode generates social dependency. Through sublimation, social dependency transforms into a positive asset. Obligation and duty, and morality in general, are social traits of good character that make social dependency respectable.

Narcissism = love + vanity
The sublimation of the love mode of narcissism gives a positive feature to egotism. Individualism is the love of a completely free life, without any chains. Without individualism, there would be nothing to challenge a community (based on jealousy) that had deteriorated and become unable to meet the needs of changing times. The vanity mode fosters my own abilities and strengths. Virtues are the individual’s traits of good character that are independent of society, such as dignity, tolerance, courage, integrity. Some of these traits (such as integrity) do not arise from narcissism, but nevertheless require an affirmation of narcissism before they can be developed.

The sublimations of jealousy are:
Love mode generates sociability.
Self-pity mode generates morality.

The sublimations of narcissism are:
Love mode generates individualism.
Vanity mode generates virtues.

In times of social change, people tend to centre on either jealousy or narcissism. Change is a dialogue between people who need to affirm their sense of individuality and other people who need to base themselves on a sense of community.

The roots of some sublimations are not always as obvious as they might appear. For example, the ideals of brotherhood and camaraderie are quite different. The ideal of brotherhood is a social one, and reflects the love mode of jealousy. Here each person is assumed to be one’s friend; the group is a collection of socially-centred people. Whereas camaraderie within a group reflects the love mode of narcissism, because each person is equal to the other members, in tried and tested ways; the group is a collection of individuals. In peculiar circumstances, such as the trench warfare of World War I, ideals of brotherhood and camaraderie intermingle.

The connections between jealousy, desire for power (focused on jealousy), and morality (sublimation of jealousy) “stabilises” or solidifies a person’s character and makes him dislike social change. If a person engages in a deep psycho-analysis and abreacts the intensity of jealousy then this type of power is minimised and the person becomes more at home in his own company. A deep psycho-analysis also abreacts the intensity of narcissism, thereby enabling the person to feel more at home in a community. In effect, the aim of understanding oneself is to become a balanced person, equally comfortable with being social when necessary and being an individual at other times.

• Love and Hate

I look at the binary comprising love and hate. It is not just negative emotions that cause problems and so need to be sublimated. Even pure love needs to be sublimated, just like other emotions; love can cause difficulties for the idealist, just as any other emotion can. Love can take away the need to learn about oneself and other people.

Equality is the only attitude that is derivable from a motivation of pure love. Equality dissolves the passion from love, thereby enabling love to be applied to everyone in the same way. The unconscious idea that creates pure love is “ I am the same as everyone else”. The practice of equality enables a person to treat everybody in the same way.

All ability in concentration and meditation requires an emotional dynamic of hate. Hate enables the meditator to clear the mind of irrelevant detail.  Hate clears the mind, but also clears the person from society and into solitude. The unconscious idea that maintains hate is  “ I am different from everyone else”. It is more common for original thinkers of any depth to be anti-social, for example Isaac Newton; it is unusual for such a thinker to be social, for example Leibniz. The Buddhist way of offsetting the necessity of hate in the meditator is the advocacy of a compassionate attitude to all others. Compassion dissolves the passion from hate.

The sublimation of love is equality.
The sublimation of hate is compassion

• Guilt and Pride

Guilt is a regular companion to the spiritual seeker. When it is not clearly recognised, it will be felt as a lack of self-worth. The person often places little value on himself.

Guilt = self-hate + self-pity
The self-hate mode produces a very unpleasant state of mind and can cause intense levels of distress. The usual way to survive this kind of self-hate is to aim for a state of purity where criticism no longer harms oneself.

The self-pity mode is debilitating and makes one languid and tired; no matter how long one rests, one never gets refreshed. To overcome it one needs to generate an attitude of perfectionism. Becoming a perfectionist in one’s work creates a resolute mental routine that offsets the meaninglessness that the self-pity mode produces. Set routines maintain set lines of thinking, and so banish any questions. Set routines are a way of handling a lack of meaning in one’s life.

Pride = vanity + hatred of other people
Pride can be inflexible; in some ways this attitude is valuable. The bedrock of my character is my integrity: I can sacrifice everything except that. If I lose my integrity in any social situation then I switch to guilt and start to feel intense self-hatred – in this situation even the desire for suicide may awaken in me. The vanity mode generates integrity and cannot be devalued without intense trauma.

I hate other people when they impose themselves on me. Only my world is important. What is important about my world is the freedom to do things my way, irrespective of the demands of other people. I only begin to consider that other people’s views are just as good as mine when I learn to respect people.

The sublimations of guilt are:
Self-hate mode generates purity.
Self-pity mode generates perfectionism.

The sublimations of pride are:
Vanity mode generates integrity.
Hate mode generates respect for other people.

• Greed and Envy

These two emotions are very important, since they can shape the course of a nation’s history. In particular, envy is the basis of social and cultural destruction.

Greed
A person seeks a moral teacher because he has no sense of being a moral authority himself. By doing the will of a teacher the person acquires a surrogate moral authority. The drama of being devoted to an outstanding person revolves around the greed for moral authority, and the person gets this authority in the measure that he is devoted to the teacher. Greed is consecrated into devotion.

The more that a person is centred on a materialist life, which means that greed is focused on materialist desires, then correspondingly the less likely it will be that greed can be sublimated. Additionally, the less capable of spiritual effort such a person will be.

Envy
When envy stirs in me I deny attachment to any people who I feel have shown a lack of fairness to me. Envy is stimulated by being on the receiving end of injustice. I direct my envy internally to destroy social conditioning; this destructiveness is my revenge for the trauma of my infancy. I can give up my envy, my revenge, when justice has been done to me. Politicians direct envy externally to destroy culture, political systems and social groups: for example, Hitler (with his anti-Semitism and the Nazi’s books-burning episodes) and Stalin (the 1930s communist show trials). Envy is the motive when barbarian tribes destroy more cultured societies: for example, the fall of the Minoan and the Roman civilisations.

Envy is the most destructive of all emotions and I consider it to be the basis of Freud’s “death instinct”. Correspondingly, the only basis for an enduring and non-destructive society is justice. Justice precedes in importance all other attitudes and ideals, even those of freedom and equality. If a society lacks justice it will not survive for very long: it will eventually become destructive, since envy will sooner or later eclipse all “good” emotions, including love.

The sublimation of greed is devotion.
The sublimation of envy is justice.

• Self-pity and Vanity

At one stage of my psycho-analysis I was plunged into a state of catatonia for a few minutes. This experience haunted me for a year and generated a great amount of hopelessness and self-pity. I scrambled out of it by affirming complete faith in myself.

This experience taught me that the sublimation of self-pity is faith. There are three forms of self-pity, so there are also three forms of faith. Jealousy is a social emotion, and its mode of self-pity generates blind faith in a teacher or in any person acting as a role model. Guilt in self-pity mode is the ultimate disaster, so faith needs the highest helping hand, that of God.

The sublimations of self-pity are:
Self-pity generates faith in oneself.
Self-pity (as a mode of guilt) generates faith in God.
Self-pity (as a mode of jealousy) generates faith in a teacher.

There are three forms of vanity, and so there has to be three forms of its sublimation. I have mentioned two already.
The sublimation of vanity (as a mode of narcissism) is virtue.
The sublimation of vanity (as a mode of pride) is integrity.

Now I turn to vanity by itself; it is a most interesting paradox. Vanity is often conflated with egotism and then universally denounced in traditional religious ethics, both Eastern and Western. This view indicates confusion and self-deception. If a person examines the emotional dynamics of any of his noble ideals he will find that they are based on vanity. Vanity is the carrier wave for all ideals.

The sublimation of vanity is idealism.

For example: if a person sets justice as his noblest ideal, then the emotional dynamics of this ideal are vanity plus envy. If a person prefers duty (as an aspect of morality) as his highest ideal, then the emotional dynamics of this ideal are vanity plus jealousy (mode of self-pity).

It is a common criticism of idealists that they are vain – this only means that their idealism is intense, and so their vanity is correspondingly intense. For normal man, his vanity within his ideals may not be noticeable simply because his ideals are not set very high. However, for the high-flying idealist who considers himself to be following a spiritual practice, his intense vanity does cause serious problems, such as a sensitivity both to criticism and to failures in relationships.

This is the paradox of spirituality: vanity causes problems, but you cannot do without it if you want to achieve your spiritual ideals.

• Resentment and Bitterness

A person may be deeply upset by some form of immorality that he engaged in earlier in his life, or he may believe that he is the victim of some form of injustice. Such beliefs generate intense resentment and bitterness.

Forgiveness dissolves resentment. And the fading of bitterness leads to the acceptance of the previously-disturbing belief. Since resentment and bitterness are regular states of mind produced by regular sequences of abreaction, so forgiveness and acceptance need to become regular states of mind too.

The sublimation of resentment is forgiveness.
The sublimation of bitterness is acceptance.

• Anger and Fear

Often my response to dominant fear is to access anger and then keep it controlled by my idealism so that I can face the unpleasant situation. Anger sustains the attitudes needed to give leadership when a person is under great stress in difficult situations.

What is the sublimation of fear?  It is the consciousness of freedom. Fear of something always prevents a person from being what he wants to be. Freedom is the only state of mind that enables a person to face fear without denying it, without repressing it, or without switching to anger as an antidote.

The sublimation of anger is leadership.
The sublimation of fear is freedom.

Levels of Sublimation

There can be more than one sublimation for some emotions. For example, in some situations, the sublimation of guilt (self-pity mode) is perfectionism, and in other situations the sublimation is faith in God. Similarly, jealousy (self-pity mode) may sublimate to morality, or it may sublimate to faith in a teacher.

Each emotion is associated with its own cluster of beliefs, attitudes and needs. When an emotion gives rise to more than one sublimation, then which particular sublimation occurs depends on what belief or need is most important to the person. Using guilt (self-pity mode) as an example, perfectionism is its sublimate, but what does perfectionism mean to a person?  For some people, perfectionism is sought within themselves, whilst for others the belief in a perfect God is what they need. Requiring God to be perfect is a psychological need. Other people, with different needs, require God to be a God of pure love or to be a just God.

So the sublimation of an emotion may give rise to more than one belief or need, depending on how the person interprets the sublimate. A high-flying idealist will interpret perfectionism, or freedom, or justice in different ways from that of a materialist. Hence we can think of the process of sublimation as a process that produces different levels of effect, depending on how the sublimate is interpreted. These levels can be arranged in a hierarchy of importance or significance. The particular belief espoused will reflect either the person’s needs or the social needs of the Age. In a low-stress society, a belief that is at the bottom of the hierarchy of importance may be what is needed. In a high-stress society, the stress tends to energise the beliefs at the top of the hierarchy.

Each person may have many goals, many ideals, which he wishes to achieve. These can be graded according to the intensity of the underlying emotional motivations. This means that whatever is a person’s highest ideal will indicate which is the most powerful emotional drive in him, and hence which is the most likely sublimation he may attain. Different ideals usually arise from different emotions.

Compensation and Sublimation

The sublimation of a state of mind is not the same as the theme of compensation. A person may try to compensate for a negative state of mind by pursuing the opposite state of mind. The sublimation of something is not the pursuit of its opposite; it is the pursuit of the resolution of the negative state and its opposite. That is, it is the pursuit of the resolution of the binary which consists of the negative state and its opposite.

For example, suppose that a person is living in poverty. He may feel a sense of degradation with his life. The compensation to poverty is the pursuit of wealth. Whereas, the sublimation of poverty and degradation, or of wealth, is the practice of honour and dignity, no matter what one’s circumstances are like. When a person is immersed in poverty or degradation, he has nothing except his honour with which to have a sense of self-worth, self-value.

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. I have six articles on Abreaction on the Home page. [2]

[³]. I analyse the will to power and the desire for power in a separate article, The Structure of Power. [3]

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