Fantasia of the UnconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Fantasia of the Unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis; Sex; Subconsciousness
The process of transfer from primary consciousness is called
sublimation, the sublimating of the potential body of knowledge with
the definite reality of the idea. And with this process we have
identified all education. The very derivation of the Latin word
_education_ shows us. Of course it should mean the leading forth of
each nature to its fullness. But with us, fools that we are, it is the
leading forth of the primary consciousness, the potential or dynamic
consciousness, into mental consciousness, which is finite and static.
Now before we set out so gayly to lead our children _en bloc_ out of
the dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let us consider a
moment what we are doing.
A child in the womb can have no _idea_ of the mother. I think orthodox
psychology will allow us so much. And yet the child in the womb must
be dynamically conscious of the mother. Otherwise how could it
maintain a definite and progressively developing relation to her?
This consciousness, however, is utterly non-ideal, non-mental, purely
dynamic, a matter of dynamic polarized intercourse of vital
vibrations, as an exchange of wireless messages which are never
translated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no
need to be. It is a dynamic polarized intercourse between the great
primary nuclei in the foetus and the corresponding nuclei in the
dynamic maternal psyche.
This form of consciousness is established at conception, and continues
long after birth. Nay, it continues all life long. But the particular
interchange of dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffers
no interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child has
no conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eye
has no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmission
into concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. But
only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic
interchange. The idea does not intervene at all.
Gradually, however, the dark shadow of our object begins to loom in
the formless mind of the infant. The idea of the mother is, as it
were, gradually photographed on the cerebral plasm. It begins with the
faintest shadow--but the figure is gradually developed through years
of experience. It is never quite completed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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