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was above the law. The Ideal ego, as the reservoir of omnipotent fantasies, aims at total and unlimited satisfaction of all desires and drives, eclipsing the restrictive, repressive, ‘forbidding’ superego (Casoni & Brunet, 2002). Brunet and Casoni argue further that the strength of a person’s use of identification with the aggressor is fueled by the subject’s own destructive drives , rendering any acting out based on this mechanism liable to degenerate into extremely cruel behavior in light of his or her regressed social functioning. In addition, the unconscious use of manic defenses often appears for less regressed protagonists of mass social violence as a most efficient means of warding off lingering feelings of guilt because of the gratification of powerful component drives that the use of manic defenses permits. The unconscious potential for primitive aggression available in different degrees in every individual may be activated rapidly in regressive group processes . Throughout history, group activated aggression, in turn, may be amplified by the combination of the collective internalization of historical trauma ( Volkan 1999, Papiasvili and Mayers , 2013). Morris Nitsun’s (1996) concept of the “ Antigroup ”, a confluence of unconscious destructive elements that threaten the functioning of the group , be it a therapy group, organizational or institutional group, or a macro-social group context. Nitsun (1996), as well as Papiasvili and Mayers (2013), emphasize both the limitless destructive and creative potential of the group’s irrational and regressive, yet enlivening and regenerating, unconscious contents and processes. VII. C. ARTS AND LITERATURE “Leonardo …converted his passion into a thirst for knowledge; he then applied himself to investigation with the persistence, constancy and penetration which is derived from passion, and …at the climax of a discovery, he was overcome by emotion, and in ecstatic language praised the splendour of the part of creation that he had studied…” (Freud 1910b, p. 74-75). Freud’s controversial and pioneering paper on Leonardo da Vinci inaugurated interdisciplinary psychoanalytic studies, and “illuminated new psychological dimensions of art” (Blum, 2001, p. 1409). In this paper, which is credited with the first full exposition of narcissism, Freud defined sublimation as the redirecting of sexual instinct towards non-sexual aims. In a case of an exceptional creative personality, libido partially escapes neurotic repression and inhibition, and can be sublimated/transformed early into an urge for research. “The artist”, Freud wrote, is given “the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself, by means of the works that he creates” (Freud 1910b, p. 107). Freud’s views on sublimation have evolved along with the evolution of his drive theories (1910b, 1914, 1920, 1923). In North America, psychoanalytic explorations of sublimation of sexuality and aggression in the context of the arts, sciences and culture at large (Blum 2011; Chessick 2001; Kris, 1952; Papiasvili 2020, Rose 1963, 1987, 19891, 1990;
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