Sublimatio

Sublimatio is an ascent that raises us above the confining entanglements of immediate, earthy existence and its concrete, personal particulars. The higher we go the grander and more comprehensive is our perspective, but also the more remote we become from actual life.

Edinger’s definitive formulation: sublimatio is the upward movement toward archetypal universals, whose cognitive gain is purchased at the cost of increasing distance from lived, effective existence.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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Here sublimatio is described as a purification. When matter and spirit are intermixed in a state of unconscious contamination, they must be purified by separation. The whole history of cultural evolution can be seen as a great sublimatio process.

Drawing on Paracelsus, Edinger equates sublimatio with the separation of spirit from matter through purification, and extends the operation to encompass the entire arc of cultural and moral development.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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The lesser sublimatio must always be followed by a descent, whereas the greater sublimatio is a culminating process, the final translation into eternity of that which has been created in time.

Edinger introduces the crucial distinction between the lesser and greater sublimatio, arguing that only the greater represents the irreversible consecration of individually achieved consciousness to the archetypal realm.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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Dreams of birds generally refer to sublimatio, and bird phobias may indicate fear of a necessary sublimatio. They are also often connected with a fear of death, death being the ultimate sublimatio whereby the soul is separated from the body.

Edinger systematises the symbolic vocabulary of sublimatio — birds, flight, death — and identifies the ultimate instance of the operation as the separation of soul from body at physical death.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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Sublimatio and coagulatio are thus repeated alternately, again and again. Psychologically, circulatio is the repeated circuit of all aspects of one’s being, which gradually generates awareness of a transpersonal center uniting the conflicting factors.

Edinger situates sublimatio within the rhythmic operation of circulatio, arguing that alternating ascent and descent generates the progressive reconciliation of opposites and awareness of a transpersonal centre.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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“Sublimatio est duplex: Prima est remotio superfluitatis, ut remaneant partes purissimae a faecibus elementaribus segregatae.”

Jung cites the Rosarium Philosophorum to establish that sublimatio is intrinsically dual — a twofold removal of superfluity — grounding the psychological operation in precise alchemical authority.

Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954thesis

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the expression “sublimation” is not appropriate in the case of the artist because with him it is not a question of transforming a primary instinct but rather of a primary instinct (the artistic instinct) gripping the whole personality to such an extent that all other instincts are in abeyance.

In correspondence with Hesse, Jung explicitly rejects the Freudian concept of sublimation as inadequate for artistic creativity, insisting that the artist’s instinct is primary rather than a transformed derivative.

Jung, C.G., Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973thesis

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The image of the tower is a typical sublimatio symbol. Hexagram 20 of the I Ching entitled “Contemplation (View)” represents a tower and describes the same kind of contemplation of the archetypal realm.

Edinger enriches sublimatio’s symbol-system by cataloguing the tower image across traditions — Milton, the I Ching, Hermetic literature — as a cross-cultural marker of the contemplative ascent to archetypal vision.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting

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Death consists of the miracle of transformation into a new form of existence. Death is for me the gate to a new birth, and the breaking-through of the transcendental realm into our empirical existence.

Through the testimony of Liliane Frey and J.B. Priestley, Edinger illustrates how the greater sublimatio manifests experientially as revelation visions at the threshold of death and in heightened states of consciousness.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting

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“We ascend thy ladder which is in our heart, and we sing a canticle of degrees; we glow inwardly with thy fire — with thy good fire — and we go forward because we go up to the peace of Jerusalem.”

Edinger traces the ladder as a sublimatio symbol through Augustine and early Christian martyrology, linking the interior ascent of the soul to the broader alchemical motif of upward transformation.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting

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During the sublimation or vaporization of the Stone, the volatile spirits rise to the top of the alembic, which is heaven the top of the alembic; the quintessence, the philosopher’s stone.

Abraham’s lexicographical entry locates sublimatio in its laboratory substrate — the vaporisation of volatile spirits to the summit of the alembic — and identifies that summit with heaven and the philosopher’s stone.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting

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Of all the terms, I must mention especially one pair of operations that have come to… The differentiation of techniques and tools, methods and processes, and giving each particular bit of hand-work its instrument, its intensity, and its own name belongs essentially to the craft of any work.

Hillman frames the plurality of alchemical operations — among which sublimatio stands — as an epistemologically necessary differentiation of craft, resisting reduction to any single master-narrative of transformation.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

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Begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps along the way.

Edinger places Diotima’s ladder of love from Plato’s Symposium within the sublimatio lineage, reading the progressive transfer of libido from sensory to divine beauty as a classical philosophical anticipation of the alchemical operation.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting

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I seemed ever to be borne aloft in the heights in a rapture of soul, and to accompany sun, moon, and all heaven and the universe in their revolutions. Then… peering downwards from the ethereal heights… I regarded the untold spectacle of all earthly things.

Philo’s autobiographical account of ecstatic philosophical contemplation — ascent, panoramic vision, and enforced descent — provides Edinger with an ancient phenomenological template for the sublimatio experience.

Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting

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My method of ordering the chaos of alchemy is to focus on the major alchemical operations. After the prima materia has been found, it has to submit to a series of chemical procedures in order to be transformed into the Philosophers’ Stone.

Edinger’s programmatic introduction to alchemical operations as an ordering framework situates sublimatio within a sequence of seven major procedures, each corresponding to an archetypal psychic process.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985aside

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The sexual theory, to be properly understood, should be taken as a negative critique of our contemporary psychology.

Jung’s qualification of Freudian sexual theory as a historically conditioned critique rather than a positive psychology implicitly frames the Freudian concept of sublimation as a polemical rather than structural category.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966aside

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