The Protean Nature of Sublimation: Chemical, Psychological, and Apollonian

Mona Lisa. Source: Wikipedia

Introduction

The term sublimation migrates from the natural sciences to psychoanalysis and eventually into broader reflections on creativity and culture. In chemistry, it names the passage of a solid directly into vapor. Freud adopts the word to describe an inner shift in which intimate impulses are displaced into artistic or intellectual achievement. When he turns to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in 1910, this process becomes central to a broader dialogue between art and desire. The transformation Freud describes resembles what Nietzsche earlier called the “Apollonian veil”—an aesthetic surface that makes existence bearable. Sublimation, in this sense, is not only a psychological mechanism; it is a cultural necessity.

The Enigma of a Smile

Freud’s visit to the Louvre leads him to confront what he calls the “riddle” of the Mona Lisa’s expression. Generations of critics had remarked on the smile’s peculiar mixture of warmth and distance. Freud proposes that while Leonardo painted Lisa Gherardini, he unconsciously recalled the expression of his own mother. In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, he argues that the artist revived “the smile of his mother at the time when he was a child,” a memory that saturates the portrait with emotional ambiguity.

For Freud, the smile is not simply an aesthetic feature; it is a psychic event. The painter encounters the sitter’s mouth as both a present object—something he sees—and a lost object—something he desires to re-encounter from early life. The canvas becomes a site where longing and recollection converge. “The wish of the artist,” Freud writes, “was to see once again the lost smile of his mother.” This wish is not fully conscious; it infiltrates the act of creation, shaping the painting’s tone and Leonardo’s struggle to complete it.

The Lost Object

Psychoanalytic theory places great emphasis on early figures whose affection forms the basis of later desire. These figures leave traces that persist long after the relationships themselves have changed. Freud names these traces “lost objects”—not because they disappear, but because they can no longer be accessed in their original form. What remains is a force: a drive that seeks substitutes.

In Freud’s reading, Leonardo longed not only to behold his mother’s face again, but also to be regarded by her with tenderness. The artwork stages this double structure: the artist gazes upon the sitter while imagining himself the recipient of her gaze. The painting becomes a symbolic reunion in which the mother, the child, and the adult creator are threaded together through an aesthetic form.

Freud suggests that Leonardo’s early affection—mingled with voyeuristic and exhibitionistic tendencies described in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality—is reshaped into artistic sensitivity. His fascination with enigmatic faces and subtle gestures expresses a displaced yearning for the maternal look that once provided warmth and recognition. This dynamic sets the stage for Freud’s account of sublimation, the process by which such early impulses are transformed into creative expression.

Sublimation: From Solid to Vapor

The chemist’s notion of sublimation describes a sudden change of state: a solid transitions directly into gas. Freud borrows this image to describe the psychic shift whereby intimate urges are converted into higher creative or intellectual endeavors. Instead of being repressed or acted out directly, the impulse rises into a more refined register.

Sublimation therefore differs from both censorship and gratification. It neither erases the impulse nor satisfies it in its raw form; it transforms it. Erotic, aggressive, or infantile energies ascend into artistic, scientific, or spiritual pursuits. Freud writes that the process “makes possible the higher psychical achievements of which humans are capable.” Art becomes the vaporous result of a desire that once had a far denser, more bodily character.

Leonardo’s enigmatic portrait exemplifies this movement. His longing for the maternal smile, charged with early emotional intensity, becomes an aesthetic expression that others experience as beauty, mystery, and depth. The personal is transmuted into the universal. What begins as a private memory ends as a cultural treasure.

Nietzsche and the Apollonian Veil

Several decades before Freud published his study of Leonardo, Nietzsche described art as an illusion that shields humanity from the harshness of existence. In The Birth of Tragedy, he distinguishes between the Dionysian—chaos, suffering, dissolution—and the Apollonian—form, dream, harmonious appearance. The latter functions as a covering, a “veil,” permitting life to become bearable. As he famously writes, “We have art lest we perish of the truth,” and “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”

The parallel to Freud is striking. Both thinkers understand aesthetic creation as a way of transforming what might otherwise overwhelm the psyche. For Nietzsche, the unbearable truth is metaphysical: the instability and terror of existence. For Freud, the disturbing truth lies in internal life: childhood desire, ambivalence, and loss.

In both accounts, beauty does not falsify so much as transfigure. The Mona Lisa’s smile masks the intensity of Leonardo’s early longing while giving form to it. Nietzsche would call this the Apollonian surface that allows the Dionysian depths to be approached without destruction. Freud would call it sublimation: a psychic alchemy that converts turbulent impulses into cultural form.

Thus the Apollonian veil and sublimation describe parallel operations. Both reveal and conceal. Both make inner or outer chaos bearable. Through art, desire becomes image, and suffering becomes meaning.

Conclusion

Sublimation names a crucial transformation that animates cultural life. It describes how private impulses, often too raw to face directly, rise into creative expression. Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa exemplifies this process: a childhood memory becomes an enigmatic smile whose resonance extends far beyond the artist’s biography. Nietzsche’s reflections on the Apollonian veil echo the same dynamic on a broader scale. In both cases, art is not a luxury but a necessity. It allows humanity to endure truths—whether personal or existential—by transmuting them into form, beauty, and shared experience.

 Bibliografía

• Freud, Sigmund. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. 1910.
• Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. 1872.