Abstract
This article focuses on Freud’s lectures at Clark University in 1909 and the correspondence that followed from Freud’s visit to America with the Boston neurologist James Jackson Putnam. Particular emphasis is given to the concept of sublimation, specifically to Putnam’s desire to make sublimation a goal of psychoanalysis and his view that sublimations should reflect the individual’s recognition of the interests of the community or desire for an ideal community. Against Putnam, we endorse Freud’s view that sublimation should not be a goal of psychoanalysis. However, we support Putnam’s emphasis on the social value of sublimations, but in a more limited sense than he proposes in his correspondence with Freud. We suggest that the correspondence between Putnam and Freud reflects the very fact that the lifting of sexual repressions makes possible the development of male friendships. Thus, we view the correspondence between Freud and Putnam as an instance of sublimation, and suggest that the friendship that this correspondence reflected and nurtured is an example of the ideal community to which we humans aspire but which often remains elusive and unrealized.
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Notes
As noted earlier, William James’ attendance at the fourth lecture prompted him to make comments about Freud’s views on dream interpretation. In the published lectures, Freud moved this material to the third lecture. This relocation also explains why James had nothing to say about Freud’s views on sexuality.
Prochnik wonders what Freud would have made of the traditional Putnam Camp sendoff as they looked out the rear of their departing carriage. The other guests would “drape their arms around each other’s shoulders, then switch-kicking with panache high to the right and to the left in synchrony,” they would sing, “We’ll dance like a fairy and sing like a bird, sing like a bird, sing like a bird. We’ll dance like a fairy and sing like a bird, and while the hours away” (p. 44). Then they would pick up crabapples and fling them at the receding carriage. Prochnik would like to believe that Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi would have found themselves “chuckling, patting each other’s thighs and shaking their heads as they bounced out of the Putnam Camp driveway” (p. 45).
Putnam devotes chapters 3 and 4 of Human Motives (Putnam 1915, pp. 67–133) to psychoanalysis. Chapter 3 is titled “The Psycho-Analytic Movement” and chapter 4 is titled “Educational Bearings of Psycho-Analysis.” In the final paragraphs of chapter 4 he concludes: “Treatment by psycho-analysis, in brief, is a kind of education. The largest part of the benefit to be derived from it is to be obtained not so much through the discovery of the special hidden cause or causes of this or that particular symptom, as through the general development of character that goes on gradually as a result of the removal of the inhibitions by which this development which is part of the normal birthright of every individual had been hitherto obstructed.... In proportion as one gains a more fully developed character, through the removal of fixations or harmful trends of character and temperament, and of the inhibitions based thereon—that is, in proportion as one exchanges immaturity for maturity through education—in this same proportion will one’s unfavorable tendencies gradually pass away, or undergo modification for the better” (pp. 132–133). He also suggests that parents and teachers may learn from psychoanalysis that a child’s “childish and foolish fantasies have a value, as they have for himself,” and that “every mother” needs to recognize that “it is her business to understand the child’s gropings, or at the least not to stifle or check his inquiries,” especially those that concern “the origin of his own physical or spiritual being” (pp. 109–110).
In his October 20, 1911 reply, Putnam agreed with Freud’s interpretation of his unconscious fears of psychoanalysis. He mentions a recent “transference” dream involving “revenge,” for in it he took Freud “through a church (my philosophic ideas) and then made you (indignantly) confess that you had symptoms of depression (as I, formerly, and slightly of late) which psychoanalysis could not remove” (p. 132).
Somewhat ironically, Freud’s belief that sublimation should not be a goal of psychoanalysis supports Gay’s (1992) observation that a “major problem with the concept of sublimation” is that “it does not arise from clinical observations or clinical theory” and is therefore “odd compared to other psychoanalytic concepts, like repression and defense, which originate from daily clinical work” (p. 37).
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Capps, D., Carlin, N. Sigmund Freud and James Putnam: Friendship as a Form of Sublimation. Pastoral Psychol 59, 265–286 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0194-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0194-x