The idea that prowess in activities like playing chess or writing poetry might be “fuelled” by frustrated, unconscious sexual desire is fairly well known today. But writing more than a century ago, Sigmund Freud was considered radical in his explanation of how sexual impulses could be transformed into creative or intellectual forces – a process he called “sublimation”.
Writing in 1915, the psychoanalyst Alix Strachey wrote, to explain Freud’s theory, that “in sublimation, a man deals with his homicidal impulses not by turning pacifist but by becoming a criminal lawyer, or a war correspondent or a crime reporter or a writer of blood-and-thunder books”.
