The inability to gestate is considered a difficult experience for women. It is impossible to distinguish whether the cause of greatest suffering is the absence of the desired child or the feeling of failure. According to Freudian theory, this inability could reopen the narcissistic wound, arisen in the castration complex, once the woman is inserted as an incomplete being again. Sublimation is a mechanism for dealing with the deprivation, used by Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican artist. The aim of this study was to understand the sublimation in the life of Frida by her inability to gestate.

Biographical research about Frida Kahlo articulated with the Freudian theory.

Frida sublimated her deprivation through the painting: “Painting completed my life. I lost three children…painting substituted for all this. I believe that works is the best thing. Through the emptiness, Frida reinvented herself, recognized her absence and enabled the emergence of other objects “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best”.

Although she managed to sublimate her pain through painting, Frida did not have a happy life: “I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to return”. Sublimation helped her to overcome the lack of children, but not healed her narcissistic wound. Her paintings were a manifestation of her symptoms, the revelation of the discovered behind the repression necessary to sublimation: “I never painted dreams, I painted my own reality”.