{"id":706426,"date":"2026-07-23T03:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T03:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/706426\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T03:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T03:52:09","slug":"considering-sublimation-in-art-psychology-today-united-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/706426\/","title":{"rendered":"Considering Sublimation in Art | Psychology Today United Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a psychoanalyst, my attention<\/a> is always turned toward the psychological aspects of art works. I understand art, whether it\u2019s literature or painting, through the lens of sublimation<\/a>\u2014always wondering what socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into the work. Of course, sometimes a beautiful picture of a sunset is just that. There’s no unconscious<\/a> meaning to it. But often, there is something more to it.<\/p>\n

This is unfortunate because I am less attuned to the purely aesthetic dimensions of the work, but it is not a choice for me. That\u2019s where my mind goes. For example, in an earlier blog post<\/a> about humor<\/a> as a disguised expression of hostility, I talked about the main character in Richard Russo\u2019s novel, Straight Man.<\/p>\n

Hank is a constant stream of dry humor, dripping with contempt and usually filled with sexual<\/a> innuendo. His humor has three characteristics: It is compulsive, filled with the themes that are most anxiety<\/a>-provoking to him, and it releases a great deal of repressed hostility. His humor creates distance from everyone in his life, but it protects him from his yearning for his father’s attention; his fear<\/a> of being an adulterer like his father; his wish to be more successful than his father; his fear of wanting to kill his father; his anger<\/a> at his mother; and his wish to kill himself. <\/p>\n

Recently, I went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C to see C\u00e9zanne\u2019s portraits. The New Yorker\u2019s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, titled his review (April 9, 2018): \u201cThe Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul C\u00e9zanne.\u201d He said: \u201cThey lack the knitted density of his landscapes and figure groups and the stunning integrity of his greatest works, the still-lifes with apples like succulent cannonballs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Schjeldahl, I cannot discern or describe the differences between the portraits and his landscapes and still-lifes. But I was fascinated by the hostility expressed in C\u00e9zanne\u2019s portraits. He wasn\u2019t angry at the apples, it seems, but he was angry at most of the people whose portraits he painted. Schjeldahl describes the artist as \u201can awkward man of turbulent, half-strangled emotions.\u201d It seems that anger was the primal emotion<\/a> that C\u00e9zanne was trying to strangle\u2014unsuccessfully. The portraits were not created for the enjoyment of the person painted. They were not commissioned by or sold to the people he painted. <\/p>\n

The portrait of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s father is the best example of the portraits as sublimated rage. Louis-Auguste C\u00e9zanne, a banker, wanted his son to be a lawyer and never approved of his art, although he financially supported it. C\u00e9zanne\u2019s father is portrayed sitting in an oversized armchair against a dark background. He is reading a newspaper he hated and there is a painting by the son on the wall behind his father\u2019s chair. The painting combines the son\u2019s wish for the father he never had and his anger at his actual father.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9zanne positioned the figure precariously close to the edge of the seat, almost about to tip over. And the floor too looks tilted forward as if the shifted and broken equilibrium was Cezanne\u2019s way of communicating the tension in the relationship with his father.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9zanne\u2019s portraits bring up an interesting question about the concept of sublimation, which is defined by psychoanalysts as the transformation of sexual or aggressive impulses into something that is socially acceptable. C\u00e9zanne was being defiant when he painted them. They were not \u201csocially acceptable\u201d\u2014they were criticized for not looking like the people he was painting. But from a psychoanalytic<\/a> point of view, painting someone as a defense against wishing to kill them is transforming an unacceptable impulse into something socially acceptable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a psychoanalyst, my attention is always turned toward the psychological aspects of art works. I understand art,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-706426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}