Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
From Modernism Lab Essays
D.H. Lawrence wrote Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious in the year between Christmas 1919 and January 29, 1920, on the Italian island of Capri. Published in the United States in 1921 and in England in 1923, it represents his attempt to grapple with the logic of psychoanalysis and to develop an alternative to Freud's narrative of sexual development. Lawrence continues this work in a sequel, Fantasia of the Unconscious.
Lawrence and Freud
Surprisingly, there is no evidence that Lawrence had direct contact with the writings of Freud before writing the book. What he knew about psychoanalysis seems to have come “second or third hand” and mostly from a circle of personal friends and acquaintances.[1] Ivy Low, an admirer of Sons and Lovers, contacted Lawrence and introduced him to her aunt, the British psychoanalayst Barbara Low. In 1919, Low published Psycho-analysis: A Brief Outline of the Freudian Theory (a book reviewed by Dorothy Richardson), and while Lawrence could not have read it before writing Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Bruce Steele points out that “it is likely that the substance of Low’s book emerged in their discussions” (xvii). Through Low, Lawrence also met David Eders, who had published in War Shock(1917) one of the earliest treatments of shell-shock —a subject that surfaces in Aaron’s Rod (1922, p. 116) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928, p. 49) (xxxii). Lawrence did read a 1916 translation of Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, and Jung’s influence can be felt in some of the mythico-spiritual jargon of Psychoanalysis (xviii). He also read two articles by the American psychoanalyst Triggant Burrow. In an article cited in passing in the first chapter of Psychoanalysis, entitled "The Origin of the Incest Awe," Burrow makes the argument, clearly formative of Lawrence's own, that it is necessary to "separate our notions of what is primary, subjective and biological, from what is secondary, objective and psychological."[2]
Whatever its origins, Lawrence's knowledge of psychoanalysis seems to me to have been underestimated.[3] He begins the book with a thumbnail history of psychoanalysis, and succeeds (without naming the works) in sketching the conceptual shift that occurs between Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria (1895) and Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1907). In the beginning, Lawrence writes, “[t]he analyst promised that the tangle of complexes would be unraveled … would dissolve … when brought into the light of day … once they were surgically exposed to full mental consciousness” (9). It is not only the accurate paraphrase here that seems to point to the cathartic therapy advocated in Studies; Lawrence actually uses the same metaphors as Freud and Breuer, who themselves refer to the surgical removal of pathogenic memories and an untangling of associations that lead to them. After this early stage, Lawrence continues, “[w]e began to realize that complexes were not just abnormalities. They were part of the stock-in-trade of the normal unconscious. The only abnormality, so far, lies in bringing them into consciousness” (10). He seems to be referring here to the more developed theory found in the Three Essays, in which Freud writes that “neuroses are, so to say, the negative of the perversions”: perversions are repressed to the point that they manifest only as neurotic symptoms.[4] A psychoanalyst might object that the “perversions” discussed by Freud do not include the Oedipus complex—a normal stage in sexual development—but Freud does emphasize throughout his work the fundamental analogy between normal infantile and perverse adult sexuality.
Lawrence seizes on this analogy in formulating what he sees as the flaw in Freud’s logic: if “at the root of almost every neurosis lies some incest-craving, and … this incest-craving is not the result of inhibition of normal sex-craving”—that is, if it is not a neurosis— then repressing it can only cause neurosis (11). To discredit Freud, Lawrence pursues this train of logic ad absurdum: “[Y]ou must remove all repression of incest itself. In fact, you must admit incest as you now admit sexual marriage…” (10).
The "True" Unconscious
Lawrence begins to outline his alternative to this way of thinking by drawing a distinction between the “true unconscious” which is “pristine and anterior to mentality” (an idea borrowed from Burrow) and the “Freudian unconscious,” which he identifies with ideality and the mental and to which he attributes the incest urge (12). His argument differs from most contemporary disavowals of psychoanalysis in that he does not in any way contradict the claim that the incest urge is an important part of human sexuality; instead, he conceives a narrative in which that urge develops out of conscious thought and is then shunted into the second, "Freudian" unconscious-- that is, the unconscious discovered by Freud, which Lawrence memorably calls “the cellar in which the mind keeps its own bastard spawn” (12).
The incest urge, in this account, develops through a kind of logical problem-solving process. Lawrence outlines this process in a passage that seems to say as much about his anxieties concerning his own sexuality as his views on sexual development:
"[Man] has a body of sexual passion which he cannot transfer to a wife. He has a profound love for his mother. Shut in between walls of tortured and increasing passion, he must find escape […] What is the only possible escape? To seek in the arms of the mother the refuge which offers nowhere else. And so the incest-motive is born. (13-14)
Essentially, Lawrence relocates the genesis of the Oedipus complex from childhood to adulthood. For the Lawrentian adult male as he enters marriage, development has not enabled a happy “transfer” of affection (from the mother, Lawrence implies, but Rupert Birkin suggests another source at the end of Women in Love). Given the amount of emotional anguish that is compressed in this passage, Lawrence’s assumption that its content should be self-evident to common sense— “All the labored explanations of the psychoanalysts are unnecessary,” he says next—results in unintentional irony. What is important to understand here is that, however strange its logic may appear to us, the Oedipus complex for Lawrence is a logical concept. Through a process he calls “idealism,” however, this construct comes to “motivize” human action so that it appears to be natural, to pre-exist thought (14).
The structure of Lawrence’s argument bears a resemblance both to Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish (according to which value, a human invention, is perceived as natural) and to his own criticisms of Whitman's "average man” in the Democracy essays he wrote between September and December of 1919. In both writings, Lawrence makes heavy use of machinery metaphors, associating the mental and the mechanical:
First there is an idea, then the idea is substantiated, the inventor fabricates his machine; and then he proceeds to worship his fabrication. (Democracy, 69)[5]
The ideal is but the god in the machine—the little, fixed, machine principle which works the human psyche automatically. (Psychoanalysis, 14)
Lawrence objects to psychoanalysis because it attempts to combat this ideal with idealism, reifying the Oedipus complex in the attempt to resolve it: “[T]he pushing of the ideal to any further lengths will not avail us anything. We have actually to go back to our own unconscious” (15).
The unconscious to which Lawrence seeks to return is “entirely new, underived, underivable,” the "true unconscious" already cited. Lawrence repeatedly characterizes this unconscious as “spontaneous," free from the predictive laws not only of psychoanalysis, but even of heredity: “We deny that the nature of any new creature derives from its parents” (16). This concept may be Lawrence's answer to the fears articulated by Birkin in Women in Love-- that “[i]t’s the hardest thing in the world to act spontaneously on one’s impulses…” and that "people were no longer mystically interesting. They were all essentially alike, the differences were only variations on a theme."[6] Unlike the hypothetical “average man” Lawrence criticizes in Democracy, the true unconscious is entirely individual. It resists generalization to the point of being “unanalyzable” (16).
In identifying this locus of pure individuality and contingency, he looks to the level of the microscopic, and to the moment of human life most full of possibility: “[T]he unconscious appears by creation, as a new individual reality, in every newly-fertilized germ-cell” (18). By this point, of course, Lawrence has left himself open to the charge of self-contradiction, since he has defined and even begun to “scientifically determine [the] laws and processes” of an entity which he has said defies all attempts at general analysis. He seems to anticipate this criticism, and in response he gestures toward a special kindof knowledge, a “super-scientific grace” which “embraces the old religious faculty” (18). It should be remembered that the highly speculative account of development that takes up the last four chapters of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious aims not at scientific accuracy, but at this kind of religious, mythical, or analogical knowledge.
Lawrence's Theory of Development
In the theory of development which follows, the reader learns that the "true unconscious," which has been associated so far with unity and "singleness" (an important word for Lawrence), is in fact multiple: "[A] fourfold polarity ... makes the first great field of individual, self-dependent consciousness" (31). It will be helpful to begin with the complete picture of this polarized unconscious in the functional adult, then outline the chronological development which Lawrence charts chapter by chapter in his book. According to Lawrence, the diaphragm divides the human body, "psychically as well as organically" into what he calls planes: "the first, the lower, the subjective unconscious active beneath the diaphragm and the second, the upper, objective plane, active above the diaphragm" (27). On each of these two planes are two centers, or nerve-clusters (marked A-D on the diagram below, in order of development). The lower centers are (A) the solar plexus, which Lawrence associates with the navel, and (B) the lumbar ganglion, which he associates with the back. The upper centers are (C) the cardiac plexus, associated with the breast or heart and (D) the thoratic plexus, associated with the shoulders.
Each of the four centers aligns with one of two poles, labeled positive and negative (one wonders whether Lawrence was aware that both he and Freud relied heavily on the metaphor of electricity). (A) and (C)-- the navel and the heart, for simplicity's sake-- lie at the the "positive sympathetic" pole; they are oriented toward other individuals (25). (B) and (D)-- the back and the shoulders-- lie at the "negative voluntary" pole: they concern the self and self-definition.
Chronologically, the subjective plane-- something like the Lacanian pre-Symbolic, which exists before the infant has any idea of himself or those who surround him as bounded entities-- develops first. From (A), the navel, the connection with the mother, there passes "direct, unspeakable effluence and intercommunication, sheer effluent contact" (22). This center is "negatively polarized" by (B), the back, which "stiffens" against this flow and asserts the individuality of the infant: "In the lumbar ganglion [B] the unconscious now vibrates tremendously in the act of sundering, separation" (23). These two centers are best understood in terms of the functions Lawrence attributes them: breast-feeding (A) and the first, angry "scream of the ego" (B).
Lawrence is careful to distinguish the upper, objective plane that develops next from the realm of the mental which he has blamed for the incest urge: "Here [on the objective plane] we have no concepts to deal with, no static objects in the shape of ideas [...] We are on straightforward, solid ground; there is no abstraction" (27). Lawrence distinguishes the objective from the subjective, then, based not on a capacity for abstract thought but on a capacity for vision, for "discerning" or "apprehension"-- a word he emphasizes (33). Its centers are associated with the ability to perceive the other-as-other (D, the negative pole) and the ability to be perceived or to put oneself forth as an other (C, the positive pole, oriented toward the other):
"From the sympathetic heart [C] goes forth pure administering, like sunbeams. But from the strong thoracic center of the shoulders [D] is exerted a strong rejective force, a force which, pressing upon the object of attention, in the process of separation, succeeds in transferring to itself the impression of the object to which it has attended. This is the other half of devotional love-- perfect knowledge of the beloved" (34).
As this passage suggests, the objective plane is associated with later development, and the "other" in question can be either the mother or the wife/lover.
Lawrence stresses the interdependence of all of these centers, and especially the need for a balance between the "voluntary separative" and the "sympathetic poles" (35). He explains neurosis as the result of one pole dominating-- in plain language, the result of either too much dependence on the other or too strong a focus on oneself. "No human being can develop save through the polarized connection with other beings," Lawrence writes-- and in order to function properly, the "fourfold circuit" outlined above must align with another to form "an eightfold polarity" (40). I think he is having fun in such passages, making light of his overly elaborate system; but the desire these metaphors articulate is central to Lawrence's work in this highly productive phase of his career. In a sense, the electricity analogy solves a problem for Lawrence by allowing him to figure interconnection (through a current) and separation (of the poles) with one image. In this first sustained study of psychology, Lawrence seeks not so much an individual ideal of mental health or "normalcy" as an ideal human relationship. For Lawrence, as for Birkin, the character in the novels who most resembles him, this relationship is one in which love does not mean fusion but "equilibrium," and in which the fundamental otherness of the other-- the absolute difference that distinguishes his unconscious from Freud's-- remains intact. It is easy to poke fun at Lawrence's obscurity, or to read suspiciously for signs of his repressed sexuality, but in the end there is something quite admirable in this commitment.
- ↑ Bruce Steele, "Introduction." Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. West Nyack, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. xviii. All parenthetical references refer to this edition.
- ↑ Burrow, "The Origin of the Incest-Awe." Psychoanalytic Review 5 (1918), p. 244.
- ↑ Another possible origin of Lawrence's psychoanalytic knowledge, of course, is his wife, Frieda. In 1907 (while still married to Ernest Weekley), Frieda had had an affair with Otto Gross, a disciple of Freud whom she called "almost the first psychoanalyst." See Jeffrey Meyers, D.H. Lawrence: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 80.
- ↑ Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Tr. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000, p. 31.
- ↑ In Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert. New York: Cambridge UP, 1988.
- ↑ Lawrence, Women in Love. London: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 32, 305.
