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The Incarnate Angel, which has been tactfully cropped.

An introduction to the most successful of all ego defences.

Sublimation is considered by many to be the most “mature” or “successful” of all ego defences. Let me give you a few examples.

If a person feels angry with his boss, he may go home and kick the dog—or he might instead go out for a long run. The first instance (kicking the dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature and destructive ego defence. But the second instance (going out for a long run) is an example of sublimation, which can be defined as the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into positive or productive activities.

If someone finds out that she’s been cheated upon, she might fly into a rage and cut up all her partner’s clothes—or she might instead write a poem to explore and express how she feels. And if the poem or poet were one day to be remembered, would that not be the sweetest revenge of all?

A third example of sublimation is the person with sadistic or homicidal urges who joins the military to provide an outlet for these urges, or who, like Justice Wargrave in Agatha Christie’s And Then Ther Were None, becomes a hanging judge who doles out the death penalty to murdered. In the novel’s postscript, a fishing trawler dredges up a bottle just off the Devon coast. The bottle contains the confession of the late Wargrave, in which reveals a lifelong sadistic temperament juxtaposed with a fierce sense of justice. Though he had longed to torture, terrify, and kill, he could not bring himself to harm innocent people. So instead, he became a hanging judged and thrilled at the sight of convicted (and guilty) criminals trembling with fear.

The Case of Leonardo

In a 1910 essay on Leonardo, Sigmund Freud argued that Leonardo was a “sublimated homosexual” who did not act on his sexual desires but rather converted (sublimed) them into an insatiable curiosity and artistic genius.

Leonardo never showed any interest in women and even wrote that heterosexual intercourse disgusted him. He never married but chose instead to surround himself with beautiful young men such as Salai (a nickname meaning “little devil”) and Melzi, who were both included in his last will and testament. In 1476, at the age of 24, he was twice charged with sodomy, even though the charge was common in the Florence of the quattrocento and later dropped for want of witnesses.

As in his life, so in his art: Leonardo sketched many more male than female nudes and paid much more attention to the male genitals. Many of his figures appear androgynous, especially the John the Baptist (c. 1513) who, complete with the long, fine curls of Salai, looks nothing like the biblical cousin of Jesus and everything like Salai or, indeed, Mona Lisa. And if that were not enough, there is also a drawing, The Incarnate Angel, from the school of Leonardo that appears to be a humorous take on the John the Baptist, portraying John/Salai in a state of, shall we say, excitement.

The Last Supper

In the famous Last Supper (c. 1498), Leonardo painted a female figure, often interpreted as Mary Magdalene, in the privileged position to the immediate right of Jesus. But it is generally understood that it was in fact John the Apostle who occupied this position. In the Bible, at John 13:23, it is written (presumably by John himself, or else someone close to John), “Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” And again at John 21:20: “Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved following; which also leaned on his breast at supper, and said, Lord, which is he that betrayeth thee?” 

In his Spiritual Friendship (c. 1167), St Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx in the twelfth century, contrasts John with Peter. To Peter, he says, Jesus gave the keys to his kingdom, but to John “he revealed the secrets of his heart”. “Peter… was exposed to action, John was reserved for love.”

Whatever the real relationship between Jesus and John, placing a female figure in the place of John in a painting destined for a monastery seems like something more than poor catechism.

Neel Burton is author of Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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Friedrich Nietzsche in circa 1875.

How Nietzsche channelled a traumatic breakup to write his most famous book.

In March 1882, the writer Paul Rée travelled to Rome to join a community of free spirits. There, he met the 21-year-old Lou Salomé, who was travelling with her mother following the death of her father, Gustav von Salomé, an ennobled Russian general.

Nietzsche rejoined them in April, after three weeks in Messina, Sicily. Nietzsche and Salomé first met, of all places, in the grandeur of St Peter’s Basilica. Nietzsche was captivated by her charm and intelligence, and enjoyed reading to her and Rée from his newly published Gay Science.

Love Triangle

The then 37-year-old Nietzsche asked Rée to deliver a marriage proposal to Salomé, without knowing that Rée had himself proposed to her. Salomé rejected both proposals, suggesting instead that she, Rée, and Nietzsche form a platonic “intellectual trinity” and wander in search of some monastery or other edifice in which to establish a commune of free spirits.

On 5 May, Salomé and Nietzsche ascended Monte Sacro, with its romantic views over Lake Orta and San Giulio Island. Nietzsche described this pilgrimage of sorts as “the most exquisite dream of my life”. Later, he wrote to Salomé, “Back at Orta, I conceived a plan of leading you step by step to the final consequence of my philosophy—you as the first person I took to be fit for this.”

He proposed to her a second time in Lucerne’s Löwengarten. Later that day, they had their photograph taken with the reluctant Rée in a photographer’s shop. This photograph (below), with Salomé brandishing a whip, is almost certainly the most famous picture in all philosophy.

On 5 November, in Leipzig, Salomé and Rée suddenly vanished from his life, without word or trace. He knew not where, or why. Some days later, when what had happened had sunk in, he confided to his friend Franz Overbeck, “So I really am going into utter solitude.” He never saw Salomé or Rée again. After hiding in Leipzig for some days, the pair had made for Berlin.

The most famous picture in philosophy, with Nietzsche, Rée, and Salomé holding a whip.

From Heartbreak to Masterpiece

Naturally, Nietzsche’s already fragile health suffered. He began taking heavy doses of chloral hydrate and opium. In mid-December, he sent letters mentioning overdoses and suicide to Salomé, Rée, and Overbeck. To Overbeck, he wrote: “My whole life has crumbled under my gaze… the barrel of a revolver is for me now a source of relatively pleasant thoughts.”

On Christmas day, he wrote again to Overbeck: “This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet had to chew… Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this muck into gold, I am lost.”

Nietzsche did, of course, find the trick. On 14 February, he posted the manuscript for the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to his publisher. It’s his most famous work, and he insisted that everything he wrote afterward was mere commentary on its themes. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, he goes so far as to call it the greatest gift humanity has ever received.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and, consequently, the inability of conventional religion and morality to provide modern man with structure and meaning. Instead, Zarathustra advocates a radical, earthly, and life-affirming philosophy, and introduces some of Nietzsche’s most famous themes: the Superman (Übermensch), the Will to Power, and Eternal Return.

The Ego Defence of Sublimation

Sublimation is considered by many to be the most successful of all defences.

If a person’s partner has just left her for someone else, she might fly into a rage and cut up all his clothes… or she might instead write a poem to express how she feels. The first instance (cutting up all her partner’s clothes) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature ego defence. But the second instance (writing a poem) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of uncomfortable feelings into positive or productive activities, which is a much more mature ego defence.

And if the poem or poet were one day to be remembered, would that not be the sweetest revenge of all?

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Schopenhauer on the psychology of nationalism.

Although he thought of existence as a sorry mistake, the philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer retained a strong “Will to life”. One of his reasons for settling in Frankfurt was the reputation of that city’s doctors. 

In Frankfurt, he took many precautions, bordering on the paranoid, to preserve his life and comfortable lifestyle. For example, he kept loaded pistols at his bedside, carried a leathern flask to avoid drinking infected water, and forbade barbers from shaving his neck. To prevent robbers, servants, and others from reading them, he wrote his business records and personal thoughts in English, Latin, or Greek, or in a shorthand code.

In the final year of his life, he moved to a ground-floor apartment not because he could no longer manage the stairs but from fear of being caught in a house fire. “A man of genius” he wrote in typical style, “is like a person who lives in a house where there are no other people but only dogs and cats; he is the only one who has any intelligence, but he is constantly in danger of being bitten or scratched.”

The 1848 riots

In September 1848, there were violent riots in Frankfurt following the murder of two conservative politicians, a prince and a general.

Schopenhauer, who was then sixty years old, became worried about his property and safety. He welcomed the arrival of Austrian troops, and even allowed some twenty soldiers into his elegant apartment to shoot at revolutionaries from the window. In a parody of his social class, when the soldiers moved next door for a better vantage point, he lent one of the officers his large, double opera glasses.

Shaken by these events, he altered his will to leave the bulk of his estate to a fund for Prussian soldiers who had been maimed while quashing the 1848 revolutions—a series of loosely coordinated protests and rebellions across the German Confederation aimed at establishing a unified nation state, constitutional governance, and civil rights.

Schopenhauer on nationalism

Schopenhauer had no truck with either nationalism or rabble utopias. National pride, he held, is the cheapest form of pride, because it requires no individual effort or character. In Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), he wrote: “Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resort pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.” The Germans, he opined, benefited from having such long words in their mouths, because they “think slowly” and need “time to reflect”.

While the Young Hegelians (most famously, Karl Marx) were agitating for political and social reform, Schopenhauer claimed that misery is the natural, inevitable state for human beings, regardless of external conditions, and would not be alleviated by “progress.” He made a point of stepping outside the torrent of history and “minding not the times but the eternities”—and considered this ability to “rise into timelessness” to be the mark of a genius.

Whereas for Hegel, the state was the aim of human existence, for him it was simply its guarantor. The role of the state, in his Hobbesian view, was strictly to limit “the war of all against all” and afford him the conditions to philosophise and enjoy the arts without having to forsake his opera glasses. States with any higher ideals jeopardised their true goal of simple security.

How the Nazis interpreted Schopenhauer

The Nazis viewed Schopenhauer’s older contemporary G.W.F. Hegel with hostility. They abhorred his emphasis on reason: on history as the march of reason and the state as a body of rational laws and institutions. In 1933, Carl Schmitt, the “Crown Jurist” of the Third Reich, famously declared that “on the day Hitler came to power, Hegel died.”

In his Table Talk, Hitler, who did not have much philosophy, dismissed Hegel’s “tedious” and “Jewish” rationalism in favour of the “irrationalism” of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—even though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both strongly rejected nationalism. Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave morality of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the “good European.” In 1886, he wrote to his mother, “Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.”

Hitler and the Nazis praised Schopenhauer’s ideas on the “will to life,” which, with Nietzsche, became the “will to power.” They glorified this “irrational will” over reason to support their “social Darwinism,” according to which brute force and action are superior to intellectualism, justice, and the rule of law.

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If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather. Here’s why.

In 1809, the twenty-one-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer matriculated at the University of Göttingen, nominally to study medicine and satisfy his interest in the natural sciences. In Göttingen, the skeptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze introduced him to Plato and Kant. Arthur remarked to Schulze, “Life is a tricky business. I’ve decided to spend it trying to understand it.” With that, he left Göttingen to pursue his studies at the newly founded University of Berlin, which had fast risen into Germany’s premier centre of philosophy.

In Berlin, Schopenhauer attended lectures by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of the department, and found him to be abstruse and tedious. He thought of Fichte as a charlatan and second-rate Kant, and, in his notes, referred to his philosophy as a “world-comedy”. He held the dogmatic Friedrich Schleiermacher in equal contempt, and his notes on Schleiermacher’s lectures reveal a budding atheism. He never regretted his beginnings as a medical student. Even at Berlin, he attended more lectures in the sciences and medicine than in philosophy, since, he believed, a philosopher ought to have a strong grounding in the sciences.

The relationship between madness and genius

And not just the sciences, but life itself. In the winter of 1812, Arthur began visiting patients in the “melancholy ward” of Berlin’s Charité hospital to investigate the relationship between madness and genius. In his lectures, Fichte had characterised genius as “divine” and madness as “animal”, but Arthur, who was no stranger to mental illness, suspected the two to be intertwined. “Genius” he would write in The World as Will, “lives only one storey above madness.”

Many of the patients he spoke to were or had been highly accomplished people. They were perfectly capable of rational thought, even of wit, and rarely erred in their knowledge of the immediate present. Madness, he surmised, is not a disturbance of the rational faculty. Instead, it arises when the past is too painful to bear. When this happens, memories are repressed, and may be replaced by new “memories”. “If … certain events or circumstances are wholly suppressed for the intellect, because the will cannot bear the sight of them; and then, if the resultant gaps are arbitrarily filled up for the sake of the necessary connection, we then have madness.” “True mental health” in contrast, “consists in perfect recollection of the past.”

Schopenhauer conceived of genius as an ability to rise into timelessness, to see time merely, in that famous phrase of Plato, “as the moving image of eternity”. Thus, what genius and madness share in common is a disrupted relationship with time. Whereas the madman has lost the thread of the “where” and “when”, the genius can still pick it up, but disentangles himself to better concentrate on the “what”.

What Freud said about it

Freud, who was four years old when Schopenhauer died, denied having been at all influenced by him. But in 1914, he conceded: “What [Schopenhauer] says about the struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a discovery to my not being well read.”

Again, in 1925, Freud wrote: “I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. The large extent to which psychoanalysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality, but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression—is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life.”

If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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The manic defence and when it fails

rushing.jpg

The manic defence is the tendency, when presented with uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, to distract the conscious mind either with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts or feelings.

A general example of the manic defence is the person who spends all of her time rushing around from one task to the next and unable to tolerate even short stretches of inactivity. For such a person, even leisure time consists in a series of discrete programmed activities that she must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or mental list. You need only observe the expression on her face as she ploughs through yet another family outing, cultural event, or grueling exercise routine to understand that her aim in life is not so much to live in the moment as to work down her never-ending list, forever readying for an ever-receding future. If you ask her how she is doing, she is most likely to respond with a robotic smile and something along the lines of, “Fine, thank you—very busy of course!” In many cases, she is not at all fine, but confused, exhausted, and fundamentally unhappy.

Other, more specific, examples of the manic defence include the socialite who attends one event after another, the small and dependent boy who charges around declaiming that he is Superman, and the sexually inadequate adolescent who laughs ‘like a maniac’ at the slightest intimation of sex. In Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway, one of several ways in which Clarissa Dalloway prevents herself from thinking about her life is by planning unneeded events and then preoccupying herself with their prerequisites—in the withering words of Woolf, ‘always giving parties to cover the silence’.

The essence of the manic defence is to prevent feelings of helplessness and despair from entering the conscious mind by occupying it with opposite feelings of euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control. This is no doubt why people feel driven not only to mark but also to celebrate such depressing milestones as entering the workforce (graduation), getting ever older (birthdays, New Year), and even, more recently, death and dying (Halloween). And it is no coincidence that Christmas and New Year happen to have been established in mid-winter.

The manic defence may also take on more subtle forms, such as creating a commotion over something trivial; filling every ‘spare moment’ with reading, study, or on the phone to a friend; spending several months preparing for some civic or sporting event; seeking out status or celebrity so as to be a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’; entering into baseless friendships and relationships; and even, sometimes, getting married and having children.

Everyone uses the manic defence, but some people use it to such an extent that they find it difficult to cope with even short periods of unstructured time, such as holidays, weekends, and long-distance travel, which at least explains why airport shops are so profitable. Since the advent of the smartphone, many people find it trying to go even a few hours, let alone a few days, without WIFI.

In sum, it is not that the manically defended person is happy—not at all, in fact—but that she does not know how to be sad, reflective, or undefended. As Oscar Wilde put it in his essay, The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing, ‘To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.’

Because our society values ‘busyness’, it is easy enough to pass off the manic defence as some kind of virtue or personal sacrifice. In a country such as Kenya, most people do not share in the Western idea that it is somehow noble or worthwhile to spend all day rushing around from one task to the next. When Westerners go to Kenya and do as they are in the habit of doing, they are met with peels of laughter and cries of Mzungu, which is Swahili for ‘Westerner’. The literal meaning of the word mzunguis ‘one who moves around’, ‘to go round and round’, or ‘to turn around in circles’.

But sometimes a life situation can become so unfulfilling or untenable that the manic defence is no longer able to block out negative feelings, and the person has no choice but to switch and adopt the depressive position. Put differently, a person adopts the depressive position when the gap between her current life situation and her ideal or expected life condition becomes so large that it can no longer be carpeted over. Her goals seem far out of reach and she can no longer envisage a future. As in Psalm 41, abyssus abyssum invocat—‘hell brings forth hell’, or, in an alternative translation, ‘the deep calls onto the deep’.