their upbringing a little
twisted. For it is here that the transformation of energy and the
resulting possibilities of conflict are wont to enter. In the harmoniously
developing organism, one may say, there is at this period a gradual and
easy transmutation of the childish pleasurable activities into adult
activities, accompanied perhaps by a feeling of shame for the earlier
feelings, though this quickly passes into a forgetfulness which often
leads the adult far astray when he attempts to understand the psychic life
of the child. The childish manifestations, it must be remarked, are not
necessarily unwholesome; they probably perform a valuable function and
develop budding sexual emotions, just as the petals of flowers are
developed in pale and contorted shapes beneath the enveloping sheaths.

But in our human life the transmutation is often not so easy as in
flowers. Normally, indeed, the adolescent transformations of sex are so
urgent and so manifold--now definite sensual desire, now muscular impulses
of adventure, now emotional aspirations in the sphere of art or
religion--that they easily overwhelm and absorb all its vaguer and more
twisted manifestations in childhood. Yet it may happen that by some
aberration of internal development or of external influence this
conversion of energy may at one point or another fail to be completely
effected. Then some fragment of infantile sexuality survives, in rare
cases to turn all the adult faculties to its service and become reckless
and triumphant, in minor and more frequent cases to be subordinated and
more or less repressed into the subconscious sphere by voluntary or even
involuntary and unconscious effort. Then we may have conflict, which, when
it works happily, exerts a fortifying and ennobling influence on
character, when more unhappily a disturbing influence which may even lead
to conditions of definite nervous disorder.

The process by which this fundamental sexual energy is elevated from
elementary and primitive forms into complex and developed forms is termed
sublimation, a term, originally used for the process of raising by heat a
solid substance to the state of vapour, which was applied even by such
early writers as Drayton and Davies in a metaphorical and spiritual
sense.[7] In the sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance because
it comes into question throughout the whole of life, and our relation to
it must intimately affect our conception of morality.