Understanding Sublimation in Freudian Theory and Modernist Writing resituates sublimation as an unfinished Freudian concept bound up with a much wider history of philosophical and literary reflection.

Luke Thurston is Director of the David Jones Centre at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis (2004) and Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism (2012), the co-editor (with Scott Brewster) of The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2018) and the translator of Jean Laplanche's The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (2020).

Introduction Sublimation-The Unfinished Theory

Part 1 Metaphor and Metapsyche

Theoretical Prologue: Translating Sublimation

Chapter 1 Freud: the Cleavage of Sense and Horror

Chapter 2 Sublimation and the Ethical

Chapter 3 Sublimation and Anti-Hermeneutics

Interlude Sublimation, War and Modernism

Part 2 Modernism: Drives and Defences

Chapter 4 May Sinclair at the Front

Chapter 5 Halsing David Jones

Conclusion Primal Sublimation