Eckhart Goebel offers lucid and illuminating explorations of the concept of sublimation in Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, important influences on Sigmund Freud's thinking, as well as chapters on Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Lacan, each responding to Freud. The theory of sublimation informs much of the modern discourse on the nature of civilization and art, raising questions about the tensions between the individual and culture, the repression of instinctual drives, the limits of language, along with consequent problems of discontent, pessimism, and the meaning of happiness. Much of this discourse draws on Freud. That said, Freud's own views on sublimation are unsettled and fragmentary, scattered throughout his works. Sometimes he treats it as a creative substitution, as in the cases of Goethe and Leonardo; sometimes it is a forced renunciation, a struggle to transcend natural drives. At other times Freud treats it dialectically as the history of the individual's object-choices. Taking up Freud's admonition that “it would be wiser to reflect upon this [sublimation] a little longer” (ix), Goebel shows that the notion of sublimation is not so much a single doctrine as a continuing debate on the relationship between the self and nature, the individual and civilization.

While a notion of the sublime can be traced back to Plato's Symposium, Goebel begins fruitfully with Goethe's struggle with the tension between passion and artistry as both paradigm and provocation. He focuses on a close reading of the so-called Trilogie der Leidenschaft—“An Werther,” “Die Marienbader Elegie,” and “Reconciliation”—finding in them a pattern that begins with resignation but is then reconceived in terms of the sublime. Unbearable and even destructive desires are resigned to artistic expression; yet in signifying them, the experience of the unspeakable sublime is made possible, and in this lies a source of happiness.

Schopenhauer's notion of sublimation grows out of the metaphysical coexistence between our drives and our representations of the world and ourselves. Anticipating Freud, he argues that our sublimated desires are never truly forgotten, merely repressed in an attempt at ascetic mortification. We are left with the consolation of momentarily losing the self in music. Nietzsche shifts the focus to the psychological, distinguishing a “false” sublimation predicated on ascetic renunciation from a “good” version aimed at a transformation and intensification of life.