Tiffany Dawn Smith: 02/04/20

Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Sublimation

Today I listened to this YouTube video about the nature of beauty and suffering and what really stuck with me were Zapffe's four primary coping mechanisms which humans use to avoid dealing with the weight of existence. They are:

1. Isolation - where we completely dismiss all disturbing thoughts and feelings
2. Anchoring - which seem to give value and purpose to life and give us a fixed place within the construction. Examples of anchoring are religion, church, government, morality, fate, and other people.
3. Distraction - where we focus all of our energy on tasks and ideas to prevent the mind from turning in on itself.
4. Sublimation - which is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. Those who tend toward sublimation distance themselves and look at existence from a more aesthetic point of view.

While I do believe that all four coping mechanisms have a degree of overlap, and most of us employ all of them, I like to think the one that describes my approach to life most of the time is sublimation.

What about you? What do you think?

tiffany davidson, blog, philosophy, zapffe, coping mechanisms, psychology

“Nonadaptation” by Czeslaw Milosz

"I was not made to live anywhere except in paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries
For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.
I have not loved a woman with my five senses.
I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.
And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and a propitiatory song."

"On Urge to Withdraw" by Naida Muslic

"The withdrawal from the world - into forests as a mad mystic who plays lute to birds and visits the towns only to scandalise and scare people who were too adapted to the world and its ways, seemed the only way to exit the wheel of samsara. I felt aged - like I've already seen it all, had hundreds of children and husbands and wives, like I've been a criminal, a priest, a queen, a prostitute, and there was nothing left for me to be anymore. All the roles seemed too familiar and already explored and lived. It wasn't nihilism that was behind the urge to withdraw - it was inability to see any evidence of my belief that there had to be more to life than dying with a stomach more full than you started with."