Often it is not our repressed aggression or sexuality that fills us with the greatest fear. It is our greatness, our potential for goodness, beauty, and truth that arouses our resistance. In this way, we repress the sublime.
By Frank Haronian, Ph.D., Translated by Annabritt Jakielski
Presented at a seminar at The Psychosynthesis Foundation on December 15, 1967
The origin of the word repression of the sublime
The title “Repression of the Sublime” comes from the writings of Robert Desoilles (1945). In this article I will not present any new ideas. Instead, I will summarize a number of other people’s ideas in such a way that together they make the concept of “Repression of the Sublime” so vivid and real to you that you will recognize it in yourself, in your clients and in your collaborators in an increasingly clear and indisputable way.
I do not find it necessary to define what repression means, but rather I will go into the question of what is meant by the sublime in this case. We can look at it from a classical psychoanalytic angle and consider all higher artistic, social and spiritually oriented activities as sublimations of primitive erotic and aggressive drives. These would be sublime activities, but sublimations of lower drives. However, we can also consider the possibility that these same higher impulses, desires and motives exist in themselves and that they develop regardless of whether the sexual and aggressive drives are satisfied. In fact, we can go so far as to claim that it is more likely that a person’s higher and more sublime needs will be awakened and developed if the so-called lower, sensual drives are satisfied, rather than if they are frustrated and “sublimated”. It is more often from a feeling of boredom and satisfaction of the senses that we begin to look for a higher meaning in our lives.
There are other ways to look at the term sublimation. In its broadest sense, it refers to all of man’s impulses, instincts, drives, and urges to become better and greater than he is. Personal growth and standing out are part of the picture, to be sure, but beyond that, the understanding of the sublime involves several other general areas. It refers to the good, the true, and the beautiful. We orient ourselves toward the sublime when we unselfishly seek to know things in their true nature, when we care for others out of a desire to delight in seeing them grow, when we arrange physical events so that they are perceived as beautiful and artistic.
Then there is the tendency towards community, brotherhood and care. It is based on the feeling, the belief and the conviction that we all ultimately share the same destiny. In the thinking of Robert Desoilles, in whose writings I first encountered the concept of the repression of the sublime, the impulse towards the sublime demands that we care for others and that we find our deepest satisfaction in serving others. In translation, I reproduce the passage from his 1945 book in which he says: “There are many forms of service, and among them the selfless efforts of the learned and the artists are among the highest.” The impulse to act in such ways is an expression of a deep urge to trust in life, to give freely of oneself and to forget one’s own selfish concerns. These are some of the expressions of the sublime.
There is another aspect of the sublime, which is somewhat misleadingly called the religious. It is the inescapable need of every human being to answer his own existential questions and to dedicate himself to a purpose, a task, an ideal which he sees as greater and more important, more lasting than his own fleeting life and powers. When we understand the sublime as the feeling of communion with and dedication to something greater than ourselves, we will experience this basic religious impulse. It may be theistic, agnostic or atheistic; it does not require belief in a God, but is in harmony with such a belief. According to Desoille, it is the task of the therapist to assist his client in becoming fully aware of this basic and normal religious impulse and to help the client to clarify any reminiscences of childish theological understandings. Finally, the therapist helps the client to develop his primitive religious impulses to a level where they can be channeled into reflective thinking rather than simply being emotionally charged magical thinking.
The displacement of responsibility
To return now to the title of this paper, “Repression of the Sublime,” I would like to show that it is an important part of being human to feel the impulse and pull towards the sublime in the various ways I have described here. It is typically neurotic for us to shirk the responsibility of seeking to respond to this pull from the sublime. However, we often repress it.
There are many ways in which we avoid the pull of the sublime. Why, for example, do we seek to avoid the challenge of personal growth? We fear growth because it means letting go of the known in favor of the unknown, and that always involves risk. I recently came across the same idea in the writings of Andras Angyal (1965), where he says: “To abandon the known in favor of the unknown always involves risks. When the changes are extensive or abrupt, they will invariably arouse fear. The view that growth is inseparable from fear is shared by practically all thinkers who have contributed significantly to our understanding of fear…. The fear we experience at the prospect of the dissolution of our present way of being has been associated by some with the fear of definitive annihilation, of which people have some foreknowledge; since growth requires the breaking of old patterns, the willingness to “die” is a prerequisite for life…. Excessive fear of death is often associated with the neurotic fear of growth and change.”
Why do we shy away from expressing care and responsibility for others? We often do so because we fear that we will not be able to know where we want to draw the line and that we will experience ourselves as used and exploited by others. In common parlance, if we give others a little finger, they will take the whole arm. Somehow we lack a stable sense of ourselves that would allow us to say “yes” and “no” in such situations. I think this fear also has to do with the fact that, as part of modern life, we know too many people in a superficial way and we experience too little responsibility for each other.
I suspect that the loss of the sense of security that community with others gives us, the loss of the sense of sharing a destiny with others, has led us to a state where we are no longer able to commit ourselves to an ideal whose values in our eyes exceed the values of our personal lives. This is the reverse of the situation that normally exists within primitive tribes. We rarely experience a close connection with others whose lives we are responsible for, and whom we can also call upon for help when we are stressed or feel threatened. As a result of this loss, the motive for committing ourselves to something larger than ourselves must nowadays be linked to something more abstract than our tribe, something that is harder to define as a value and to keep focused on both intellectually and in our hearts.
Defense mechanisms and repression
Let us now return to the idea of repression. Desoilles’ idea that we repress the sublime can be found in the various works of American psychologists. For example, Angyal (1965) speaks of defense mechanisms such as repression being expressed not only in relation to our neurotic feelings and behavior, but also in relation to our healthier areas. According to his thinking, there are two value norms, attitudes or systems according to which we attribute meaning to our experiences, which compete with each other. One is healthy, the other neurotic. Each of these systems seeks to dominate the individual, and to do this it must suppress the other, competing system. So when the neurotic system is dominant, the healthy system is by nature repressed and out of reach, i.e. excluded from consciousness or repressed. Angyal then says: “This understanding stems from numerous experiences that we can – and do – repress feelings and desires that are in no way socially taboo and that are often considered praiseworthy.”
He calls this annexation or disregard, and he gives an example of an analytic patient who misunderstands his own natural and healthy kindness as maliciously motivated exploitation.
There are a number of other ongoing examples of the repression of the sublime. I would like to highlight some from the writings of Abraham Maslow. Recently he gave a lecture in which he included the concept of the Jonas complex. I quote from Dr. Maslow (1966):
“I would like to highlight one of the many reasons for what Angyal has called “evading growth.” Naturally, everyone present here wants to be better than he is. We all have an impulse to improve, an impulse toward actualizing more of our potential, toward self-realization or full humanity, human fulfillment, or whatever we choose to call it. When that is true for all of us, what is it that is holding us back? What is it that is blocking our path?
“I would like to specifically mention such a defense against growth because it is relatively unnoticed – I will call it the Jonas complex.
“In my own notes I had first called this defense “the fear of our own greatness,” or “the evasion of one’s destiny,” or “the evasion of one’s best talent.” I had wanted to emphasize as bluntly as possible the non-Freudian view that we fear our best as well as our worst, though in different ways. We all have unused potentials or potentials that are not fully developed. It is very true that many of us seek to evade our manifest callings…so often do we evade the attendant (or suggested) responsibilities that life offers us, either by force of destiny or even sometimes by accident, just as Jonas vainly tried to run away from his destiny.
“We fear our highest possibilities (as well as our lowest). We are generally afraid of becoming that which we glimpse in our most exalted moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions that demand the greatest courage from us. We rejoice and tremble at the divine possibilities we see within ourselves in such peak experiences. Yet we simultaneously tremble with weakness, awe, and fear of these same possibilities.
“We are not only ambivalent about our highest potentialities, we are also in a constant—and I think universal and perhaps even necessary —conflict and ambivalence toward these same highest potentialities in other people and in human nature in general. We truly love and admire good people and saints and honest, capable, pure people. But can any human being who has experienced the depths of human nature fail to be aware of our mixed and often hostile feelings toward saintly people? Or toward very beautiful women or men? Or toward great creators? Or toward our intellectual geniuses? We truly love and admire all those people who embody the true, the good, the beautiful, the just, the perfect, the ultimately successful. But they also make us feel uncomfortable, fearful, confused, and perhaps a little jealous or envious; a little inferior and clumsy. They usually make us lose our self-confidence, our self-control, or our self-respect.
“Here we have the first clue. My impression so far is that the greatest people, by their presence and by being who they are, make us aware of our inferiority, whether that is their intention or not. If this is an unconscious effect, and we are not conscious of why we feel stupid or ugly or inferior when this person is around, we are likely to react with projection, i.e. that we react as if he is trying to make us feel inferior, and as if that were his goal. Hostility is then an understandable consequence. It seems to me that conscious attention can parry this hostility. That is, if we are willing to attempt self-awareness and self-analysis of our own opposing tendency to judge, i.e. in relation to our unconscious fear and negativity in relation to the good, the true and the beautiful, etc. In that way we are likely to be less unpleasant towards them. I would make the claim that if If we can learn to love the highest values of others more sincerely, this can lead us to love these qualities in ourselves in a less frightening way.
Displacement as desecration
In another paper, Dr. Maslow (1967) has brought up another aspect of the repression of the sublime. He calls it desecration:
“I will now speak of a defense mechanism that is not mentioned in psychology books, although it is a very important defense mechanism among today’s snooty yet idealistic young people. It is the defense mechanism we might call desecration. These young people distrust the possibility of values and ability. They feel cheated and at odds in their lives. In fact, most of them have parents who are drugged up and whom they do not respect very much; parents who are themselves quite confused about their values and who are regularly really scared of their children and never punish them or stop them from doing what is wrong. We therefore have a situation where young people simply despise their parents – and often for good and understandable reasons. Such young people have learned to generalize crudely: they will not listen to anyone who is an adult, especially not if the adult uses the same words that they have heard from the mouths of the hypocrites. They have heard their father talk about being honest or brave or strong, and they have seen their father being the opposite of all these things.
“The young have learned to reduce this person to a concrete object and to refuse to see what he is, or to refuse to see him as an expression of his symbolic values, or to refuse to see him or her ever again. For example, our children have desecrated sex. Sex is nothing; it is a natural thing, and they have made it so natural that in many cases it has lost its poetic qualities, which is to say, it has lost almost all meaning. Self-actualization means giving up this defense mechanism and learning to re-sanctify.
“To resanctify means to willingly see this person again “in the light of eternity,” as Spinoza said, or to see him in the medieval Christian unifying understanding, that is, to be able to see the sacred, the eternal, the symbolic. That is, to see the woman with a capital C and all that that implies, even when it comes to a specific woman. Another example: In medical school we dissect a brain. Something is clearly lost if the medical student is not in awe, but without the unifying understanding sees the brain as only a concrete object. When we are open to resanctification, we also see the brain as a sacred object and see it as a statement; we see it in its poetic aspect.
“Resanctification is often associated with an awful lot of lost talk – “very square”, as the children would say. Yet this is a very important way for the counselor, and especially for the counselor of older people, where these philosophical questions about religion and the meaning of life come up, to help the person move forward towards self-actualization. The young may say it is square, and the logical positivists will say it is meaningless, but to the person who seeks our help in this process it is clearly very meaningful and very important, and we do our best to answer him. If we don’t do that, we are not doing our job…”
Here is another quote from Maslow (1962) concerning another aspect of the sublime; one that is perhaps more prosaic. The title of the chapter from which the quote comes is “The Avoidance of Knowledge as the Avoidance of Responsibility.”
“…. lack of curiosity can be an active or passive expression of anxiety or fear. That is, we can seek knowledge to reduce our fear, and we can also avoid knowledge to minimize fear. To use a term from Freud, lack of curiosity, learning disabilities, and pseudo-stupidity can be a defense. Knowledge and action are very closely connected, everyone agrees. I go much further and am convinced that knowledge and action are often synonymous – and in the Socratic sense even identical. Where we know fully, appropriate action follows automatically and reflexively. Choices are then made unproblematically and spontaneously …. this close connection between knowledge and action can help us to understand one cause of the fear of knowing as essentially a fear of acting, a fear of the consequences that come from knowing, a fear of the dangerous responsibility. It is often better not to know, because if we knew, we would have to act and stick our heads out.
Roberto Desoille’s chart
There is an interesting theoretical explanation for this idea of the repression of the sublime, put forward by Robert Desoille (1945), the French engineer who made it his mission to develop rêve évellé dirigé or guided visualization (directed daydream). Desoille has woven theory and experience into a quite comprehensive explanation of how, why, and in what way the sublime is repressed. He has his own topographical description of the psyche, as set out below:
It includes Freud’s usual trio—the id, the ego, and the superego; but they are now supplemented by a fourth factor, the Self. The area in the middle represents the consciousness, the ego, and the superego. Further out we find the personal preconscious and unconscious. Behind that is the collective unconscious. It should be noted that the superego does not participate in the collective unconscious.
Desoille borrowed Jung’s concept of the self and modified it somewhat. For him it stands for a state which represents the broad limits of sublimation; a state which expresses the highest ideal that a human being is capable of achieving at a given time. In this case the id is the usual expression of our animal drives seeking expression. We experience it when it has been transformed and enters consciousness with all the associations that have been called up through the stimulation of the primitive instincts. Desoille goes on to emphasize the unity of the psyche. The self and the id are considered as two extreme limits, two opposite poles of the psyche which never collide. Each exerts its own good influence on the ego at the center, and the ego oscillates back and forth between these two instinctive limits, the primitive and the sublime.
The superego is the arbitrary and infantile expression of the ego, representing the demands and derogatory remarks of parents and other authorities as experienced in childhood. Desoille sees it as a temporary structure that must eventually dissolve and its role must be taken over by the Self of the mature personality.
Guided visualization
At this point I would like to take a side trip to describe the types of images that Desoille usually found to appear in the guided visualization. As you probably know, Desoille uses the image of ascent and descent to evoke images at different levels of the psyche or different levels of the archetypal chain, as he puts it. He associates the idea of ascending to heavenly heights with sublimation, with euphoria, calmness and clarification, and ultimately with spiritual growth. However, it occasionally happens that the patient’s ascent is blocked by a monster of some kind, perhaps a dragon. Desoille calls this figure the “threshold guardian” and considers it to be an expression of the superego, whose function was once to prevent the child’s self-expression, i.e. sexual behavior. It is now the task of the adult patient in his visualizations to struggle with and overcome this expression of the superego. If he succeeds in doing this in his visualizations, he thereby abolishes the formidable limitations placed upon him by his parents and other authorities, and in so doing accepts his responsibility to direct his sexual and aggressive drives in ways he himself sees fit. At this point the ego becomes animated by an intense aspiration to reach a sublime goal, as yet only intuited. The superego, which was created by the parental introjections as a bulwark against Oedipal desires and the like, now becomes superfluous as the individual develops his own authority. The self, with its higher, more sublime goals, supplements the superego.
Desoille (1945) draws an important point from Jung. He points out that, among other things, Jung emphasized the necessity of letting go of one’s own instinctive egoism. In this question, Jung said that the old mystical admonition “Let go of all that you have, that you may receive” really means that we must give up most of the illusions we have cherished most. Desoille puts it this way:
“The conflict breaks out between the id and the Self. The Self seeks to make the ego satisfy its needs (for the sublime, its longing for growth) and the id, which opposes the desires of the Self, now assumes the role of the one who opposes (and becomes) an expression of a new form of censorship, the repression of the sublime , in this case of the strong urge for spiritual growth.”
When the patient meets the intense aspirations of the Self, as we mentioned before, and achieves a certain sublimation, the symbol of the guardian of the threshold changes. It is no longer the threatening dragon, but now has a different appearance in the visualizations. It now usually appears as a creature that is both friendly and determined, but it still blocks the way upward. In this situation, the patient no longer feels threatened, but he feels clearly called to make a conscious choice between two attitudes, both of which seem equally possible. According to Desoille, this is what takes place. During the previous sessions, the patient has become aware of the possibility of developing something in himself that is more beautiful, deeper, and more comprehensive. There has been a hint of the sublime, a pull towards becoming a finer person than he is. For this to happen, the patient now realizes that he must write off old habits and stop following the path of least resistance. He must give up the satisfaction of the impulses of the lower unconscious, all of which have previously been tolerated and even encouraged by the superego and accepted by the conscious ego. But the patient hesitates to take the upward path because he feels that it will restrict his freedom and his field of activity. In some cases the patient may even feel that these proposed renunciations seem inhuman to him . It is here that the guardian of the threshold appears – but no longer in a repulsive form. This time it may take the form of, for example, an angel. The conflict between the Self and the id regarding the hold on the ego, or we may say between the sublime and the basic, no longer takes place unconsciously. It now also takes place between the ego on the one hand, which had been in the habit of associating itself with those of the id’s impulses which were accepted by the superego; impulses, which were expressions of the lowest moral values in society, and on the other hand the Self, represented by the guardian of the threshold, the angel, whose call is experienced as increasingly imperative.
In this case we see that the id, acting through the ego with the permission of the superego, is fighting against the demands of the Self. At this point the struggle has become quite conscious, and the ego now seeks to suppress the sublime, just as it suppresses what previously seemed to it banal and utterly worthless.
Reactions to the transpersonal
Desoille says that there are three ways in which the patient can respond to the image of the threshold guardian with its call towards the sublime:
1. During that session, the patient may suddenly decide to abandon his old habits because they now seem to him to represent outdated values. They must be replaced by new values that must be found and acquired. They are symbolized in the following guided visualization of images of treasures that are hidden or guarded. Once this decision is made, the patient can again see himself ascending to greater heights in his guided visualizations.
2. The patient may hesitate and the session may stall at this point. Then, when the patient is alone in the interval between sessions, he may decide to continue as a result of that decision.
3. Alternatively, the patient may directly refuse, consciously or unconsciously, to give up his illusions. With this refusal he creates a negative transference on his therapist. Normally this happens quite discreetly and is quite short-lived, says Desoille, except in special cases.
Assagioli on repression
Psychosynthesis (Assagioli, 1965) emphasizes that we suppress and deny our impulses towards the sublime. One possible reason why we do this is that the more we are aware of our positive impulses, of our strong urge towards the sublime, the more shame we feel at our inability to express these impulses. What follows is a painful experience of consciousness being burned, a feeling of guilt for not being what we could be, for not doing what we could. This is not the guilt of the superego, but rather the cry of the Self for actualization.
We have an easy solution at hand; an escape from this sense of guilt if we accept these popular intellectual arguments which reduce the calling of the higher unconscious to nothing less than the sublimation of the impulses of the lower unconscious. Jung (1933) condemned this reductionism more than 30 years ago, but we still find it soothing and comforting to deny these instincts of the higher unconscious and settle for a degraded self-image because in some ways it is easier to live with.
This is the self-image of the man who has undergone extensive psychoanalysis; he has undergone a kind of spiritual, psychoanalytic “white cut”; an elimination of his normal sensitivity to the higher unconscious and the possibility of spiritual growth. The key to this denial is perhaps to be found in Freud’s idea of sublimation with its emphasis on the conscious repression of sexual and aggressive drives as the source of human kind and generous actions. This emphasis denied the existence of self-directed impulses toward goodness, toward community. This dogma was particularly useful in reducing anxiety because it automatically relieved the patient who accepted it of any responsibility for spiritual growth and of the normal anxiety associated with this quest.
The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis can therefore be seen as an amputated theory of personality, which ideologically seeks to mitigate neurotic symptomatology by amputating or numbing a part of the psyche, the highest and most valuable functions that encourage us to be a living expression of the best that we contain.
Perhaps it is better for a severely neurotic person to temporarily set aside his impulses towards the sublime. These impulses, if abused, can lead to ego inflation and a strengthening of the pathological self-image. A classic example of this is strong self-righteousness. Perhaps the severely neurotic should be prevented from dwelling on the idea of the sublime until he has worked through the cause of his neurosis, just as the aspirant should not be initiated into the secrets of society until he has developed a discipline in respect of the facts and the skills necessary in dealing with them.
The problem that psychosynthesis faces, and which I believe psychoanalysis in the classical sense avoids, is to offer a therapy for both the lower and the higher aspects of the personality. The needs of the lower unconscious are largely met by conventional forms of psychotherapy. Religious guidance seeks to expand the reach and effectiveness of the higher unconscious. Psychosynthesis offers a philosophy that aims to accommodate both the id and the Self. Psychosynthesis seeks to help man to acknowledge all his impulses, to accept the responsibility for deciding which impulses to express and which not to express, and to deal with the fear that is an inevitable aspect of the process of self-actualization.
REFERENCES:
- Angyal, Andras, Neurosis and Treatment, New York: Wiley, 1965.
- Assagioli, Roberto, Psychosynthesis , New York: Hobbs, Donnan, 1965.
- Desoille, Robert, La Rêve éveillé en psychothérapie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945.
- Jung, Carl C., Modern Man in Search of a Soul, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
- Maslow, AH, Toward a Psychology of Being, Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1962.
- Maslow, AH, Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth , Humanitas, III (1966), pp. 153-169.
- Maslow, AH, Self-Actualization and Beyond, In JFT Bugental (ed.), Challenges of Humanistic Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967, pp. 279-286.
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Would you like to read more about working with the unconscious?
The article Answers from the Unconscious is an excellent approach.
The book The Soul of Psychosynthesis also describes a wide range of psychosynthesis techniques for working with the superconscious and sublime.
