CHAPTER I_Psychoanalysis and the unconscious

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

D. H. LAWRENCE

NEW YORK

THOMAS SELTZER

1921

THOMAS SELTZER, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I. PSYCHOANALYSIS _vs._ MORALITY 9

II. THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 26

III. THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 45

IV. THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 64

V. THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 83

VI. HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 102

CHAPTER I

PSYCHOANALYSIS _vs._ MORALITY

Psychoanalysis has sprung many surprises on us, performed more than one

_volte face_ before our indignant eyes. No sooner had we got used to the

psychiatric quack who vehemently demonstrated the serpent of sex coiled

round the root of all our actions, no sooner had we begun to feel

honestly uneasy about our lurking complexes, than lo and behold the

psychoanalytic gentleman reappeared on the stage with a theory of pure

psychology. The medical faculty, which was on hot bricks over the

therapeutic innovations, heaved a sigh of relief as it watched the

ground warming under the feet of the professional psychologists.

This, however, was not the end. The ears of the ethnologist began to

tingle, the philosopher felt his gorge rise, and at last the moralist

knew he must rush in. By this time psychoanalysis had become a public

danger. The mob was on the alert. The Œdipus complex was a household

word, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-table chat. Amateur

analyses became the vogue. “Wait till you’ve been analyzed,” said one

man to another, with varying intonation. A sinister look came into the

eyes of the initiates—the famous, or infamous, Freud look. You could

recognize it everywhere, wherever you went.

Psychoanalysts know what the end will be. They have crept in among us as

healers and physicians; growing bolder, they have asserted their

authority as scientists; two more minutes and they will appear as

apostles. Have we not seen and heard the _ex cathedra_ Jung? And does it

need a prophet to discern that Freud is on the brink of a

Weltanschauung—or at least a Menschanschauung, which is a much more

risky affair? What detains him? Two things. First and foremost, the

moral issue. And next, but more vital, he can’t get down to the rock on

which he must build his church.

Let us look to ourselves. This new doctrine—it will be called no

less—has been subtly and insidiously suggested to us, gradually

inoculated into us. It is true that doctors are the priests, nay worse,

the medicine-men of our decadent society. Psychoanalysis has made the

most of the opportunity.

First and foremost the issue is a moral issue. It is not here a matter

of reform, new moral values. It is the life or death of all morality.

The leaders among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand.

Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore

pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is

out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral

faculty in man. Let us fling the challenge, and then we can take sides

in all fairness.

The psychoanalytic leaders know what they are about, and shrewdly keep

quiet, going gently. Yet, however gently they go, they set the moral

stones rolling. At every step the most innocent and unsuspecting analyst

starts a little landslide. The old world is yielding under us. Without

any direct attack, it comes loose under the march of the psychoanalyst,

and we hear the dull rumble of the incipient avalanche. We are in for a

debâcle.

But at least let us know what we are in for. If we are to rear a serpent

against ourselves, let us at least refuse to nurse it in our temples or

to call it the cock of Esculapius. It is time the white garb of the

therapeutic cant was stripped off the psychoanalyst. And now that we

feel the strange crackling and convulsion in our moral foundations, let

us at least look at the house which we are bringing down over our heads

so blithely.

Long ago we watched in frightened anticipation when Freud set out on his

adventure into the hinterland of human consciousness. He was seeking for

the unknown sources of the mysterious stream of consciousness. Immortal

phrase of the immortal James! Oh stream of hell which undermined my

adolescence! The stream of consciousness! I felt it streaming through my

brain, in at one ear and out at the other. And again I was sure it went

round in my cranium, like Homer’s Ocean, encircling my established mind.

And sometimes I felt it must bubble up in the cerebellum and wind its

way through all the convolutions of the true brain. Horrid stream!

Whence did it come, and whither was it bound? The stream of

consciousness!

And so, who could remain unmoved when Freud seemed suddenly to plunge

towards the origins? Suddenly he stepped out of the conscious into the

unconscious, out of the everywhere into the nowhere, like some supreme

explorer. He walks straight through the wall of sleep, and we hear him

rumbling in the cavern of dreams. The impenetrable is not impenetrable,

unconsciousness is not nothingness. It is sleep, that wall of darkness

which limits our day. Walk bang into the wall, and behold the wall isn’t

there. It is the vast darkness of a cavern’s mouth, the cavern of

anterior darkness whence issues the stream of consciousness.

With dilated hearts we watched Freud disappearing into the cavern of

darkness, which is sleep and unconsciousness to us, darkness which

issues in the foam of all our day’s consciousness. He was making for the

origins. We watched his ideal candle flutter and go small. Then we

waited, as men do wait, always expecting the wonder of wonders. He came

back with dreams to sell.

But sweet heaven, what merchandise! What dreams, dear heart! What was

there in the cave? Alas that we ever looked! Nothing but a huge slimy

serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and a myriad repulsive little

horrors spawned between sex and excrement.

Is it true? Does the great unknown of sleep contain nothing else? No

lovely spirits in the anterior regions of our being? None! Imagine the

unspeakable horror of the _repressions_ Freud brought home to us.

Gagged, bound, maniacal repressions, sexual complexes, fæcal

inhibitions, dream-monsters. We tried to repudiate them. But no, they

were there, demonstrable. These were the horrid things that ate our

souls and caused our helpless neuroses.

We had felt that perhaps we were wrong inside, but we had never imagined

it so bad. However, in the name of healing and medicine we prepared to

accept it all. If it was all just a result of illness, we were prepared

to go through with it. The analyst promised us that the tangle of

complexes would be unravelled, the obsessions would evaporate, the

monstrosities would dissolve, sublimate, when brought into the light of

day. Once all the dream-horrors were translated into full consciousness,

they would sublimate into—well, we don’t quite know what. But anyhow,

they would sublimate. Such is the charm of a new phrase that we accepted

this sublimation process without further question. If our complexes were

going to sublimate once they were surgically exposed to full mental

consciousness, why, best perform the operation.

Thus analysis set off gaily on its therapeutic course. But like

Hippolytus, we ran too near the sea’s edge. After all, if complexes

exist only as abnormalities which can be removed, psychoanalysis has not

far to go. Our own horses ran away with us. We 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.

This creates a new issue. Psychoanalysis, the moment it begins to

demonstrate the nature of the unconscious, is assuming the rôle of

psychology. Thus the new science of psychology proceeds to inform us

that our complexes are not just mere interlockings in the mechanism of

the psyche, as was taught by one of the first and most brilliant of the

analysts, a man now forgotten. He fully realized that even the psyche

itself depends on a certain organic, mechanistic activity, even as life

depends on the mechanistic organism of the body. The mechanism of the

psyche could have its hitches, certain parts could stop working, even as

the parts of the body can stop their functioning. This arrest in some

part of the functioning psyche gave rise to a complex, even as the

stopping of one little cog-wheel in a machine will arrest a whole

section of that machine. This was the origin of the complex-theory,

purely mechanistic. Now the analyst found that a complex did not

necessarily vanish when brought into consciousness. Why should it? Hence

he decided that it did not arise from the stoppage of any little wheel.

For it refused to disappear, no matter how many psychic wheels were

started. Finally, then, a complex could not be regarded as the result of

an inhibition.

Here is the new problem. If a complex is not caused by the inhibition of

some so-called normal sex-impulse, what on earth is it caused by? It

obviously refuses to sublimate—or to come undone when exposed and

prodded. It refuses to answer to the promptings of normal sex-impulse.

You can remove all possible inhibitions of the normal sex desire, and

still you cannot remove the complex. All you have done is to make

conscious a desire which previously was unconscious.

This is the moral dilemma of psychoanalysis. The analyst set out to cure

neurotic humanity by removing the cause of the neurosis. He finds that

the cause of neurosis lies in some unadmitted sex desire. After all he

has said about inhibition of normal sex, he is brought at last to

realize that at the root of almost every neurosis lies some

incest-craving, and that this incest-craving is _not the result of

inhibition of normal sex-craving_. Now see the dilemma—it is a fearful

one. If the incest-craving is not the outcome of any inhibition of

normal desire, if it actually exists and refuses to give way before any

criticism, what then? What remains but to accept it as part of the

normal sex-manifestation?

Here is an issue which analysis is perfectly willing to face. Among

themselves the analysts are bound to accept the incest-craving as part

of the normal sexuality of man, normal, but suppressed, because of moral

and perhaps biological fear. Once, however, you accept the

incest-craving as part of the normal sexuality of man, you must remove

all repression of incest itself. In fact, you must admit incest as you

now admit sexual marriage, as a duty even. Since at last it works out

that neurosis is not the result of inhibition of so-called _normal_ sex,

but of inhibition of incest-craving. Any inhibition must be wrong, since

inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity. Therefore the

inhibition of incest-craving is wrong, and this wrong is the cause of

practically all modern neurosis and insanity.

Psychoanalysis will never openly state this conclusion. But it is to

this conclusion that every analyst must, willy-nilly, consciously or

unconsciously, bring his patient.

Trigant Burrow says that Freud’s _unconscious_ does but represent our

conception of conscious sexual life as this latter exists in a state of

repression. Thus Freud’s unconscious amounts practically to no more than

our repressed incest impulses. Again, Burrow says that it is knowledge

of sex that constitutes sin, and not sex itself. It is when the mind

turns to consider and _know_ the great affective-passional functions and

emotions that sin enters. Adam and Eve fell, not because they had sex,

or even because they committed the sexual act, but because they became

aware of their sex and of the possibility of the act. When sex became to

them a mental object—that is, when they discovered that they could

deliberately enter upon and enjoy and even provoke sexual activity in

themselves, then they were cursed and cast out of Eden. Then man became

self-responsible; he entered on his own career.

Both these assertions by Burrow seem to us brilliantly true. But must we

inevitably draw the conclusion psychoanalysis draws? Because we discover

in the unconscious the repressed body of our incest-craving, and because

the recognition of _desire_, the making a mental objective of a certain

desire causes the introduction of the sin motive, the desire in itself

being beyond criticism or moral judgment, must we therefore accept the

incest-craving as part of our natural desire and proceed to put it into

practice, as being at any rate a lesser evil than neurosis and insanity?

It is a question. One thing, however, psychoanalysis all along the line

fails to determine, and that is the nature of the pristine unconscious

in man. The incest-craving is or is not inherent in the pristine psyche.

When Adam and Eve became aware of sex in themselves, they became aware

of that which was pristine in them, and which preceded all knowing. But

when the analyst discovers the incest motive in the unconscious, surely

he is only discovering a term of humanity’s repressed _idea_ of sex. It

is not even _suppressed_ sex-consciousness, but _repressed_. That is, it

is nothing pristine and anterior to mentality. It is in itself the

mind’s ulterior motive. That is, the incest-craving is propagated in the

pristine unconscious by the mind itself, even though unconsciously. The

mind acts as incubus and procreator of its own horrors, _deliberately

unconsciously_. And the incest motive is in its origin not a pristine

impulse, but a logical extension of the existent idea of sex and love.

The mind, that is, transfers the idea of incest into the

affective-passional psyche, and keeps it there as a repressed motive.

This is as yet a mere assertion. It cannot be made good until we

determine the nature of the true, pristine unconscious, in which all our

genuine impulse arises—a very different affair from that sack of horrors

which psychoanalysts would have us believe is source of motivity. The

Freudian unconscious is the cellar in which the mind keeps its own

bastard spawn. The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of

real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived

from the very God who bade them be not conscious of it—it was not spawn

produced by secondary propagation from the mental consciousness itself.