Il dissenso tra Freud e i suoi allievi Jung e Adler, tra Freud e Burrow. Apprezzamento e differenze con Jung, ruolo del preconscio, importanza della sessualità. I fattori originari della solidarietà e del bene comune, cooperazione e conflitto, sublimazione.

The concept of sublimation in its Freudian framing is problematic since it introduces assumptions that are foreign to Freud's own theory of sexuality: there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as an a-sexual aim of a sexual drive. Freud's view of the drive- conflict, on the contrary, describes various sexual drives encountering resistance from others ('organic repression') and these others receiving their support from culture. Sublimation has its theoretical place precisely in this image of the conflict. It comes to the aid of the initial, nascent drives jointly outlawed by nature and culture, and assists them in achieving a new, culture-conditioned, exceptional and triumphal appreciation. Sublimation demands what individuals would deny themselves, thus helping them to overcome their organic/cultural inhibitions. Seen thus, sublimation does not change the drive itself but rather its cultural estimation. It is work on culture. Yet the products (and the means of production) of this work are trophies from societal battle. Accordingly, they are very unequally distributed in different societies.

The concept of sublimation in Freud is examined here as a corollary of the metaphysics underlying the bulk of his works: the human being as moved by Lust. The author focuses on artistic and literary sublimation seen – in contrast with the original theory – not only as a psychic process in the creator, but also as an experience by the spectator or reader. Tracing the paradoxical status that pleasure takes on in classic reflections on art – in Aristotle and Kant in particular – the author reinterprets the concept of Sublimierung, no longer exclusively in relation to Lust, to the dialectics of pleasure/displeasure, but as process leading to the Care (Sorge) for the world, the others and for the works of art. Sublimation, reinterpreted as an initiation to the Care, thus discloses its relationship to the inevitable absence of the thing, hence its “lacunose” quality.

Approfondimento della teoria junghiana in rapporto al fenomeno religioso: debiti, contributi e divergenze tra i fondamenti della psicologia analitica e i concetti fondamentali della disciplina teologica.