ABSTRACT
The sublime and sublimation are the key concepts of two theories of aesthetic experience exploring the spiritual emancipation of man. One theory, born in classical antiquity as a principle of rhetoric, acquired a philosophical or psychological–philosophical status in the pre-Romantic period during the second half of the eighteenth century; the other is instead part of the Freudian view of psychic development. The concept of sublimation has been marked by a degree of ambiguity since its very origin. According to Klein: ‘symbolism is the foundation of all sublimation and of every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equation that things, activities and interests become the subject of libidinal phantasies’. Through a new theory of sublimation, the object of art recalls first of all the originally and exclusively sensory-affective root, and then the sensory-affective aspect – which coexists with the semantic one – of the idea.
