Sublation

Three sentences doing three jobs. The first describes the outcome, a self or a group merged into something larger and identifying more with its endo-ideal than with what they were. The second gives the mechanism in energy terms, since one side of an interaction is absorbed into the animus of the other and the dominant will takes most of the anima, which is what makes sublation a transfer rather than a change of allegiance. The third records that the destination may be a figure or a group, which is the distinction between endo-ideal sublation and endogroup sublation, both forms of traumatic bonding and both commonly produced by initiation. Sublation is one of the three relationship types alongside connection and violation, and it is the middle case, since connection balances and violation attacks an animus directly while sublation takes the will and then draws on the animus freely. What it produces is an endoself, because it disconnects the sublated person from primary anima. Marsh is careful that self sublation is impossible, and so is self oppression, which places the operation firmly outside the person and rules out accounts that locate the problem in a victim's choices. The scale is unlimited in both directions. It applies to a person absorbed into a family and to a nation absorbed into an empire, and the transcendental endogroup is the general case of smaller groups being absorbed upward through successive levels.

Aufhebung in Hegel names the dialectical movement in which something is cancelled, preserved and lifted to a higher stage, and the standard English rendering is sublation. Marx retained the term while inverting the idealism. Marsh keeps the absorption and removes the progress, treating what Hegel described as advance as a loss of will, which is a deliberate reversal rather than a misreading, since she holds elsewhere that Hegel was describing an endoself accurately and mistaking it for the universal case. Social identity theory's depersonalization, in which group identity displaces personal identity, is the nearest empirical parallel.