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

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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 propo...
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Seeing Askew: Little Hans, Lacan’s Gaze, and the Anamorphic Lesson of Holbein

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Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Source: Wikipedia Introduction: When Seeing Fails Freud’s clinical case of Little Hans is often recalled as an anecdote about childhood sexuality, fear, and the drama of castration. Beneath its narrative surface, however, lies a more unsettling problem: the failure of vision to secure meaning. The child observes quite clearly that his mother lacks a penis and nevertheless insists through fantasy, explanation, and displacement that she must possess one. This obstinate contradiction would later allow Jacques Lacan to extract what he regarded as Freud’s most radical discovery: the primacy of symbolic articulation over visual evidence. Meaning does not follow the eye. It follows desire. Little Hans and the Limits of Perception In Freud’s 1909 case history, Little Hans encounters sexual difference through the figure of the maternal body. The absence of the phallus confronts him with the threat of his own possible loss. To contain this anxiety, Hans produces ...
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Freedom as a Smoke Screen: Bernays, Freud, and the Engineering of Desire

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Introduction On Easter Sunday in 1929, a group of women walked down Fifth Avenue with a lit cigarette in hand. The press covered the event enthusiastically and baptized the gesture “Torches of Freedom.” The scene was not the product of spontaneous rebellion but of Edward L. Bernays’s imagination—Sigmund Freud’s nephew and a pioneer of modern persuasion. The episode may seem anecdotal, yet it condenses a sharp understanding of desire and the power of symbols in public life. This article explores how Bernays translated psychoanalytic intuitions into instruments of influence and what our culture can learn from that maneuver. Bernays and Freud: Genealogy of an Influence Bernays was not a psychoanalyst. Nevertheless, he traveled to Vienna, consulted family papers, familiarized himself with Freudian concepts, and helped disseminate the writings of his famous relative. In Propaganda (1928), he stated openly that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and op...
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The Lacanian Divide in the Age of AI: Hysteric Innovation and Obsessional Preservation

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                                                                Las Meninas. Velázquez-Picasso     Introduction Debates over AI in writing and image-making often appear to concern technology itself. Yet beneath the surface lies a deeper struggle over authorship, authority, and the legitimacy of artistic practice. On social media, artists and writers split into two increasingly polarized camps: those who embrace AI as a tool for experimentation and those who reject it outright, sometimes refusing even to engage with anyone who uses such tools. What looks like a dispute about machines is better understood as a conflict about the cultural rules that define creativity. Here, Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the hysterical and obsessional subject, used metaphorically rather than clinically, provides a compelling len...
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Hysteria, Obsession, and the Progressive–Conservative Divide in a Lacanian Key

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Introduction The divide between cultural innovation and traditional stability is visible everywhere—from the arts to politics, from aesthetics to social values. Modern democracies appear almost evenly split between those who push for transformation and those who defend inherited frameworks. This tension is hardly new, yet psychoanalytic theory offers an unexpectedly revealing lens for examining it. In particular, Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the hysterical and obsessional subject, terms referring not to pathology in the colloquial sense but to enduring psychic structures, provides a subtle way to read the contemporary landscape. Drawing from his interpretation of Freud, Jacques Lacan (as presented by Steven Z. Levine) likens the hysteric to the avant-garde artist and the obsessional subject to the academic artist. Such imagery invites a broader reflection: can these two subject positions serve as metaphors for the progressive and conservative orientations that shape cultural...
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The Ancient Dream of Unity: Universum, Ockham’s Razor and Chomsky’s Minimalism

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Ockham’s Razor. AI image Introduction Western thought begins with a simple, almost disarmingly bold intuition: beneath the swirling multiplicity of appearances lies a single order. The very word universe encodes this hope. From the Latin uni-versum —“turned toward one”—it evokes a world understood as a coherent whole rather than a chaotic heap. Philosophers from antiquity to the Middle Ages embraced this idea in different ways, yet all shared a conviction that understanding requires reducing variety to unity. This ancient aspiration resurfaces, transformed, in the medieval principle now known as “Ockham’s Razor” and, more recently, in Noam Chomsky’s attempt to explain human language with the most economical system possible. Tracing this lineage reveals that the modern appeal to simplicity is not a scientific novelty but a deeply rooted metaphysical expectation. Unity as the First Principle of Explanation Long before medieval scholastics spoke of “razors,” Greek thinkers develope...
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Derrida’s Allergy to Elaboration: A Saussurean Critique

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Introduction: Derrida’s Complaint and Its Problems Late in his career, Jacques Derrida voiced irritation at a question he often encountered in American academic settings: “Could you elaborate?” He described this request as “l’attitude utilitaire, manipulatrice,” a utilitarian and manipulative gesture he associated with U.S. intellectual culture and portrayed as foreign to the European milieu ( see link to video below ). This remark is striking for a thinker committed to questioning the assumptions of the entire philosophical tradition. More importantly, it mischaracterizes the nature of communication itself. Derrida implicitly treats elaboration as coercion, as if clarification were an act of domination rather than a basic communicative necessity. A Saussurean perspective shows why this claim cannot stand: without clarification, there is no shared system of signs at all. The critique that follows takes a firm stance,   Derrida’s reluctance to clarify his conceptual lexicon i...
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