On Interest

Letters

Vol. 18 No. 17 · 5 September 1996

From David Maclagan

I found Adam Phillips’s article (LRB, 20 June) the usual mixture of the baffling and the thought-provoking. The topic of sublimation, and of an ‘interest’ that is not simply prompted by an adult translation of childish sexual curiosity, is one that needs thinking about.

One of the problems with Freud’s concept of sublimation is that it seems to presuppose an original form of instinctual and unsophisticated psychic drive, whose main aim is physical (‘sexual’) gratification, which we learn, painfully, in the course of education and acculturation to redirect towards ‘higher’ and less immediate pursuits – intellectual, scientific or artistic work. At the same time, sublimation seems to entail some qualitative transformation of these original drives. In this way Freud’s concept comprehends the two aspects traditionally associated with sublimation (in alchemy, for example): an upward aspiration combined with the refinement of a base substance. ‘Interest’ could then be seen as a form of psychic investment that is no longer simply driven by instinctual need, and that has something optional about it (as the financial analogy implies).

However, this model of sublimation just doesn’t seem to match up with experience. As we grow up, or at least older, the nature of our appetites – even the ‘basic’ ones for food, shelter, company or sex – gradually becomes more and more sophisticated. In other words, they are increasingly complicated by a weaving together of our personal experience with cultural and social influences. This happens unevenly: some people’s sophistication in matters of food is greater than in matters of sex; in some cases it seems hardly to have happened at all; and in others it gets taken to the kind of extreme in which particularity and perversity of taste are almost indistinguishable. But at no point can we, as adults, draw a line on one side of which is ‘raw’ need and on the other a completely sublimated derivative of it.

With ‘Art’ the problem is that there is a more or less evident ‘jump’ between the kinds of investment we make in forms of conversation, conviviality and decoration, and the rather different ‘interest’ we derive from those forms of art (literature, music, painting) that are in some way set apart from the everyday textures of life. This jump seems to match Freud’s concept of sublimation, because it implies a special kind of transformation or ‘work’. Take Freud’s famous comment about a group of avant-garde artists: ‘Meaning is but little to these men; all they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given over to the Pleasure Principle.’ One way of making sense of this is to suppose some failure of sublimation because these artists had got stuck at a preliminary stage of narcissistic and hedonistic pleasure and had not done the transformative work necessary for a ‘proper’ work of art. Staying with this example, we can infer that for Freud successful sublimation was intimately connected with a process of conventional refinement. But when the gap between immediate pleasure-yield, lusty curiosity, transformation and interest begins to close, as it does in many forms of modern art, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out a conventional model for the sublimatory process: indeed it was one of the Surrealists’ tactics to aim at works of art that were anti-sublimatory in their effect.

David Maclagan
Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, Sheffield University