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1969, Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America”, in Styles of Radical Will, Kindle edition, Penguin Modern Classics, published 2009, →ISBN, page 194:
Foreigners extol the American "energy" […] Basically it is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism and acquisitiveness.
When he got home from the parade, however, Professor Solanka was seized by melancholy, his usual secret sadness, which he sublimated into the public sphere. Something was amiss with the world. The optimistic peace-and-love philosophy of his youth having given him up, he no longer knew how to reconcile himself to an increasingly phoney […] reality.
(figurative,psychoanalysis) To modify the natural expression of a sexual or primitive instinct in a socially acceptable manner; to divert the energy of such an instinct into some acceptable activity.
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