Abstract
In a previous article (Capps and Carlin 2009) we discussed Freud’s visit to the United States in 1909 and the occasion it afforded for James Putnam to meet him and become an advocate of psychoanalysis. We focused on their subsequent correspondence on the concept of sublimation and argued that this correspondence reflected the fact that friendship may be a form of sublimation. In this article we focus on Isador H. Coriat, an advocate of psychoanalysis from the same time period (1910s). We show that his early psychoanalytic writings (Coriat 1917, 1920) not only support our earlier argument but also make a strong case for the role of symbolization in the process of sublimation. We also note his emphasis on the potential role of living religion in the sublimation process. We then discuss his later article on dental anxiety (Coriat 1946) and writings by other psychoanalytic authors to make the case that the patient’s conscious understanding of the meaning of the symbols—in this case, teeth-related symbols—is essential, for otherwise the energies invested in maintaining the repression will be unavailable to the sublimation process. This leads to a consideration of the role that living religion may play in the sublimation of teeth-related anxieties. We conclude that humor may also serve as a proxy for religion in this regard.
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Notes
Coriat presents some of this “assembled material” in an earlier article on symbolic castration in rituals performed by prehistoric tribes (Coriat 1931). He notes that the upper jaws of five male palates with one or two incisors removed have been found in caves of ancient Palestine. In their comments on this article, Lorand and Feldman (1955) say that we may safely “surmise that the ritual practice of removing one or more incisors is a symbolic castration (there is wide evidence from [Theodor] Reik and [Geza] Roheim on this point) and that these findings demonstrate the existence of the castration wish and fear at the very dawn of human culture, proving the amazing uniformity of symbolic features” (p. 150).
In his psychoanalytic biography of Joseph Conrad, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century English novelist who was born in Poland as Jozef Korzeniowski, Bernard C. Meyer (1967) notes that in Conrad’s novels teeth are “the repositories of power” (p. 31), representing strength and hardness. His “pure young men,” however, “are not only devoid of any suggestion of biting sadism; they are virtually edentulous [i.e. toothless] from the viewpoint of masculine aggression” (p. 171). This is not, however, true of his female characters: “The teeth of his heroines are a conspicuous feature of their attractiveness, while among the villainous women they comprise an especially terrifying element in their total feral [i.e. untamed or savage] aspect: they are the fangs of predatory creatures” (p. 171). On the other hand, “images of biting and clawing aggression are not restricted to Conrad’s evil women” (p. 171). One of his heroines, “in response to an amorous advance by her husband, ‘panted, showing her teeth’,” and, in the case of another heroine, “even in her seeming tenderness there lurks a streak of biting cruelty which is akin to cannibalism” (pp. 171–172). Interestingly enough, Meyer also notes that Conrad “was notoriously neglectful of his teeth, moreover, those body parts which in his fiction he held in such high esteem” (p. 333).
It is noteworthy that modern dentistry itself engages in a kind of symbolization in the language it uses for its procedures, diagnoses, and therapeutic solutions: drilling, excavating, root canal, cavities, bridges, braces, crowns, and implants are cases in point as these words or terms are derived from other human occupations and natural phenomena. The crown is an especially interesting example because of its regal connotation. During the writing of this article, one of the authors dreamed that a woman whose occupation was custodial pointed to her breasts and said, with an obvious note of pride, “These are my crowns.”
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Capps, D., Carlin, N. Sublimation and Symbolization: The Case of Dental Anxiety and the Symbolic Meaning of Teeth. Pastoral Psychol 60, 773–789 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-011-0368-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-011-0368-1