Repression and sublimation do work

When you get the monsoon in India, as I expect some of you know, it comes down like a wall. You all rush for the nearest house eave and you huddle under it, but actually, you get soaked. I saw a man, this wall of water came down the street, and we all rushed for this eave. He simply walked down the centre of the street as though he was having a shower bath. Perfectly at ease. The picture of that man – he completely independent of it. We were all going to get wet. He was independent of it, as though he were enjoying it. That picture has been a help to me in times of difficulty when mountains of spite, or venom, or jealousy, or false stories, or maybe genuine accusations are made against you, to be able to simply walk through it.

One Japanese poem is this: The Cicada. The Cicada is a tiny little insect about the size of a thumb, but it can rub its wings together, and it can make a terrific sound. First time you hear it, you think, ‘My God, there’s something there.’ It goes on. I’m telling you it’s a tiny little thing, and this huge voice comes from out of it. In some of the poems, it says the voices of envy, and spite, and calumny, they’re Cicadas. It’s a tremendous noise, but really, those people are nothing. They’re nothing but noise. The Cicada, finally dies, and then it’s eaten. Then you just have the shell. It’s like a little beetle heart with a hard case. It’s just the empty shell. In the famous poem, the poet sees the empty shell, and he says, “Oh, did it become entirely a voice, the Cicada shell?” Those people who make all these furious attacks, they become empty shells. A little poem like this sometimes can be quite helpful in difficulties, so I pass it on to you.

Look at what Freud really said, which is that “Society cannot go on without repression of the personal and sexual freedoms and sublimation.” That’s what Freud actually said. What tends to be thought that he said was that there shouldn’t be any repression at all, but that’s not in fact what he said. I suggest reading Civilization and Its Discontents. You may be talking about much more recent psychologists, and in which case, I would only say this, try it.

I have done very severe athletic training. The body says, ‘Oh no, not again.’ The will says, ‘Yes, again.’ Not unreasonably, but it says, ‘Again.’ The body doesn’t like this, but if you carry it through, the body begins to change. Then there’s a new vitality and vigour in the body when this mastery is attained. This is not meaningless repression of the fatigue and the impulses to do something else, a sort of distraction. It’s not meaningless, it has a purpose. In the same way, Freud said the whole of culture is based on repression and sublimation.

We should try ourselves and observe the effect on ourselves. If I repress my anger, and I’m boiling with it inside, not much is gained except by other people. But I can change that anger within myself by repressing and then sublimating it. I shouldn’t say this perhaps as a personal anecdote but I began seriously studying Sanskrit at 55. It’s much too old to start a new language, but the cultivated antagonistic approach from Judo made me feel this language is like a Judo opponent. I had to change my technique, but I wrote the text I wanted to master out in huge letters and hang around the wall of the room. While I was swinging weights, sometimes I would try to get the meaning. When I’d lost the meaning, I’d go up close and read, ‘Oh yes,’ and come back again and then try again. I changed the technique. This was like a fight, but it wasn’t a meaningless fight. The fighting instinct had been repressed and then sublimated into this abstract opponent, the Sanskrit language. In fact, I have published a couple of books of Sanskrit translation. I give this personal example because it’s real to me. Basically, these things depend on experiment and the thing is to try these things and see what the effect is on oneself.

See whether repressing and sublimating does create a block, see what it does. My teacher used to say there are undreamt-of possibilities in the mind, and by disciplined activity, but meaningful, disciplined activity, they can be brought forth. We can see, for instance in memory, people these days can’t remember much. We don’t train the memory, but someone like Thackeray, 200 years ago, in a storm at sea, to distract his mind from the danger, he recited the whole of Paradise Lost by heart in his cabin.

In the Indian continent, 300 BC, we know from the Greek ambassador, people could remember books by heart. One might think, ‘You can’t do. That’s impossible.’ No, it’s possible. Now, we should find that what we want to do, and then by disciplining the life, and sublimating it to do something worthwhile, see whether these powers do develop in ourselves. If they don’t, stop it. If they do, it would make life much more interesting. You can all read silently, you can pick up something, but in Roman times, they couldn’t do that. They had to verbalize the words. They had to read the words aloud. They couldn’t read silently. You were a genius, like St Augustine or the astronomer, Ptolemy, if you could read silently. Now, everybody can do it, so we’re all geniuses. No, we’re not. We’ve developed this.

© Trevor Leggett

The full talk is Getting beneath the mask