260 ■ NOTES
Freudian concept of sublimation, a topic that, if bypassed, might leave
us with the nagging feeling of an unresolved problem. Superficial ap
plications of Freud’s thought have led many people to interpret any
action that is not directed to the satisfaction of basic sexual desires either
as a defense, when it aims to hold back an unacceptable wish that
otherwise might be expressed, or as a sublimation, when an acceptable
goal is substituted for a desire that could not be safely expressed in its
original form. At best, sublimation is a poor substitute for the unsatis
fied pleasure it helps to disguise. For example, Bergler (1970) has argued
that games involving risk provide a release from guilt about sexuality and
aggression. According to the “Icarus complex” a high jumper is trying
to escape from the ties of an Oedipal tangle in a socially acceptable way,
but without really resolving the basic conflict that motivates his actions.
Similarly, Jones (1931) and Fine (1956) have explained chess as a way
of coping with castration anxiety (to mate the opponent’s king with the
help of one’s queen is a sublimated enactment of the father’s castration
with the collusion of the mother); and mountain climbing has been
explained as sublimated penis envy. Nobody seems to do anything,
according to this point of view, except to resolve a festering childhood
anxiety.
The logical consequence of reducing motivation to a search for
pleasure that is instigated by a few basic genetically programmed desires,
however, is a failure to account for much of the behavior that differenti
ates humans from other animal species. To illustrate this, it is useful to
examine the role of enjoyment in an evolutionary perspective.
Life is shaped as much by the future as it is by the past. The first
fish to leave the sea for dry land were not programmed to do so, but
exploited unused potentials in their makeup to take advantage of the
opportunities of an entirely new environment. The monkeys who use
sticks to fish for ants at the mouth of anthills are not following a destiny
carved in their genes, but are experimenting with possibilities that in the
future may lead to the conscious use of tools, and hence to what we call
progress. And certainly human history can only be understood as the
action of people striving to realize indistinct dreams. It is not a question
of teleology—the belief that our actions are the unfolding of a preor
dained destiny—because teleology is also a mechanistic concept. The
goals we pursue are not determined in advance or built into our makeup.
They are discovered in the process of enjoying the extension of our skills
in novel settings, in new environments.
Enjoyment seems to be the mechanism that natural selection has
provided to ensure that we will evolve and become more complex. (This
argument has been made in Csikszentmihalyi and Massimini [1985]; I.
Csikszentmihalyi [1988]; and M. Csikszentmihalyi [1988]. The evolu
tionary implications of flow were also perceived by Crook [1980].) Just
as pleasure from eating makes us want to eat more, and pleasure from