Sublimation (n.) that lets erotic tension dissolve unnoticed into religious poetry is thought more beautiful and noble than seeing it; to complain of its unconsciousness is called fanaticism for truth.
Sublimation (n.) is never complete in the visionary, because a crude, intemperate sensuality underneath gives his rarefied air some weight.
Sublimation (n.) is as impossible as it is desirable while the energy already has a real object — a young Italian offers a better gradient than the finest philanthropy.
Sublimation (n.) turns every development, in a purely causal psychology, into a masked expression of the same old thing.
Sublimation (n.) so called are mostly compulsory activities taken up to use up an unbearable surplus of dammed libido.
Sublimation (n.) cannot be done at will — only absolute necessity can inhibit a natural instinct; without it, 'sublimation' is self-deception, a subtler form of repression.
Sublimation (n.) as Freud uses it explains religion the way a physicist would explain electricity as nothing but a culturally deformed waterfall.
Sublimation (n.) is the alchemist's trick of turning base into noble — a pious wish-fulfilment invented for silencing inopportune questions, since no one has converted energy without spending more.
Sublimation (n.) is what the freed instinct ought to undergo — though how this is done without creating a new repression nobody can quite explain.
Sublimation (n.) was invented to rescue us from the unconscious's imaginary claws — but what is real cannot be sublimated by alchemy, and whatever seems sublimated never was what we took it for.
Sublimation (n.) is the transfer of sexual libido into subsidiary functions when it happens without detriment to the individual's adaptation; when the attempt fails, it is called repression.
Sublimation (n.) is the dissolving of the body into spirit, corresponding psychologically to the conscious realization of an unconscious content that lurks in the body like a demon of sickness.