clergy
before and after the Protestant Reformation, though the earlier period may
reveal more daring and brilliant personages, the whole intellectual output
of the later Church may claim comparison with that of the earlier Church.
There are clearly other factors at work besides sublimation, and even
sublimation may act most potently, not when the sexual activities sink or
are driven into a tame and monotonous subordination, but rather when they
assume a splendid energy which surges into many channels. Yet sublimation
is a very real influence, not only in its more unconscious and profound
operations, but in its more immediate and temporary applications, as part
of an athletic discipline, acting best perhaps when it acts most
automatically, to utilise the motor energy of the organism in the
attainment of any high physical or psychic achievement.

We have to realise, however, that these transmutations do not only take
place by way of a sublimation of sexual energy, but also by way of a
degradation of that energy. The new form of energy produced, that is to
say, may not be of a beneficial kind; it may be of a mischievous kind, a
form of perversion or disease. Sexual self-denial, instead of leading to
sublimation, may lead to nervous disorder when the erotic tension, failing
to find a natural outlet and not sublimated to higher erotic or non-erotic
ends in the real world, is transmuted into an unreal dreamland, thus
undergoing what Jung terms introversion; while there are also the people
already referred to, in whom immature childish sexuality persists into an
adult stage of development it is no longer altogether in accord with, so
that conflict, with various possible trains of nervous symptoms, may
result. Disturbances and conflicts in the emotional sexual field may, we
know, in these and similar ways become transformed into physical symptoms
of disorder which can be seen to have a precise symbolic relationship to
definite events in the patient's emotional history, while fits of nervous
terror, or anxiety-neurosis, may frequently be regarded as a degradation
of thwarted or disturbed sexual energy, manifesting its origin by
presenting a picture of sexual excitation transposed into a non-sexual
shape of an entirely useless or mischievous character.

Thus, to sum up, we may say that the sexual energy of the organism is a
mighty force, automatically generated throughout life. Under healthy
conditions that force is transmuted in