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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, 1991, 1990; Wilson 2003) involved variously conceptualized transformative interplay involving the primary and secondary processes, transitionalit y, destruction, loss and reparation, regression, transgression, disintegration-reintegration, symbolic and representational processes, transformative ego functioning and conflict, going well beyond sublimation as another ego defense. Complexity of such multi-perspectival approaches depicting the drives in the creative work of visual artists may be exemplified by Gilbert Rose ’s statement: “The hand of the artist may continue the old mouth-hand and body-ego integration by carrying sexual and aggressive energy to the canvas as in infancy it carried it from the mouth to the skin. The canvas may sometimes represent the skin” (Rose 1963, p. 787-788). Concerning literary arts , according to Ernest Jones (1953), Freud read Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” during his self-analysis and writing of his “Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). The Comedy was subsequently dubbed “psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages’ (Chessick 2001), and several North American authors attempted to subject it to psychoanalytic exploration. David Aberbach (1984) approaches the Comedy from the Object Relations perspective, focusing on the fate of aggression and love in lost, found and created objects. According to Richard Chessick (2001), Comedy is a drama of structural conflict, where Inferno represents the Id, Purgatory the Ego, and Paradise the Ego Ideal superstructure. Eva Papiasvili (2020) draws and expands on both, giving a multiperspectival account of Dante’s masterpiece as a proto-psychoanalytic poetic representation of recovery and expansion of Eros , involving a complicated self-transforming journey, accessing the most remote parts of the psyche, where the drive is represented throughout in the unprecedented unity of form and content . Dante’s invention and usage of the rhyme ‘terzine’ is viewed as a poetic means of representing the drive of incredible vivacity , which sets in motion and drives the plot without ever falling into monotony. If “For the psychoanalyst, the divine is the
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