You know, that's a philosophical question, Stephen, right?

I apologize for going all philosophy on the psychologist.

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on No Stupid Questions, does Sigmund Freud's concept of sublimation hold up? I did love my mother, but I never wanted to marry her. Well, Freud wouldn't believe you, by the way. I know he wouldn't. He would say, there he goes, coping. Also, how would your life be different if you knew you were going to live forever? The world would get very crowded. Nobody's dying. On the other hand,

you free up all that space from cemeteries. Yeah, exactly. You'd start building condos.

Stephen. Angela. You know, you do a lot of writing and podcasting. I would say these are creative

pursuits. Are you sublimating? And do you need me to define sublimating for you?

This is the psychological form of sublimating and not the chemical form of sublimating, I assume.

I didn't mean going from a solid to a gas.

Without bothering to stop and become a liquid along the way.

You could say that you're going right to gas form and bypassing liquid.

You know, I wasn't thinking that.

No, I meant Mike Freud.

Sure.

So why don't you tell me what Freud meant by sublimation?

Well, this is what I think Freud meant, you know, having not known Freud personally.

But Freud had this idea that pretty much all of human behavior could be explained by these unconscious conflicts that we had deep in our psyche.

And that when you had to deal with the pain of these conflicts, like wanting to marry your mother but not being able to or wanting to do things that you couldn't do, you would in some cases have a mature response.

In some cases have a less mature response, but they were all coping mechanisms.

And sublimation was a coping response that he would have said was a mature coping response

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