Foreword and Acknowledgments; Preface; 1 Trilogy of Passion: Goethe as Paradigm and Provocation; 2 The Sound of Psychoanalysis: Arthur Schopenhauer; 3 Transfigured Physis: Friedrich Nietzsche; 4 Self-Control: Sigmund Freud; 5 Walking the Dog: Creaturely Transcendence in Thomas Mann; 6 The Sublimation of Nature: Theodor W. Adorno; 7 Das Ding: Jacques Lacan's Luther; Bibliography; Index
Summary
According to Freuds later works, we do not really feel well or free within civilization. Our discontent never disappears, and we shall never become completely reliable members of society. Alcohol already suffices, Freud tells us, to ruin the fragile architecture of sublimations. Since Beyond the Pleasure Principle, sublimation seems to be nothing more than a euphemism for suppressing the drives. We sublimate because we did not get or were not allowed to have what we actually wanted. Is sublimation a mere surrogate or perhaps even the name psychoanalysis found for theoria in the twentieth centu