About Music, Sublimation and the Body - Recital and Lecture with Marcelo Zigaran

Few concepts from Psychoanalysis have had such relevance for the arts as the concept of sublimation. The term is frequently used to explain some process of artistic creation without a clear relationship to the psychoanalytic root of the word. It would be easy to affirm that sublimation implies sexual repression. Lacan remarked that this is precisely what sublimation does not mean. The concept of sublimation was introduced by Freud to indicate that even though there is no sexual activity, neither is there repression. Freudian sublimation states the paradox, which was recognized by Lacan, that satisfaction of a drive is possible without sexual activity and without repression. In exploring the concept, we will first review some basic concepts of Lacan’s theory and practice, namely the three registers of his experience which he identified as The Real, The Imaginary and The Symbolic, conceived as a way to continue work of Freud’s. For Lacan, this involved a “return to Freud,” a recovery of the Freudian project which he felt had been lost in the subsequent development of psychoanalysis as a discipline.