Sergio Benvenuto is a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome, Italy, and a psychoanalyst, president of ISAP (Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis). He is a contributor to cultural journals such as Telos, Lettre Internationale (French, Spanish, Hungarian, Rumanian and Italian editions), Texte, RISS, Journal for Lacanian Studies,…

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.

Summary: 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 paradoxica…

Summary: The ambivalence of the word and concept of Philosophy in C. G. Jung’s works is the main theme of the first part of this essay. On the one hand Jung distances his work from all kind of philosophy, asserting his aims and methods are only scientific and clinical ones; on the other hand in many works he uses the word “philosophy” in the sense of the ancient philosophers, like a sy…

Summary: Subject of Desire (1987) is Butler’s PhD dissertation, dedicated to the reception of Hegel in the Twentieth-Century French philosophy. The author shows how crucial this book is for a proper understanding of the development of Butler’s thought and how her argumentative method – indebted both to Michel Foucault’s genealogy and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis – is grounded on a th…

Summary: Reflections on the epistemological status of psychoanalysis in the context of contemporary sciences are expressed in this article. The peculiar psychoanalytic focus on singularity is considered as having the same function as the symptom in science. In this context, the notions of love and forgiveness are elaborated in terms of their being both the end and the aim of the psycho…

Summary: Mirror-neurons allow us to understand the other’s action or intention. This is one of the most relevant discoveries of contemporary neurosciences. But how is this “mirroring” phenomenon to be understood? Is there a “content” being mirrored? If we “share” something with the other, as one of the leading researchers in this field puts it, is this shared content “in” one’s mind or…

Summary: Let’s watch the initial scene of the well-known film Wild Strawberries, where it is possible to notice the absence of time in the unconscious system, unlike consciousness. The purpose of this paper is to look into some aspects of heterochrony, as a typically Freudian concept, paying particular attention to early Freudian thought. The underlying fil rouge is the relation betwee…