Fantasia of the UnconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Fantasia of the Unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis; Sex; Subconsciousness
Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. But like all perverted
processes, it is exhaustive, and like the fun wears out. Leaving an
exhaustion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other as a perverter
of life. Almost invariably a married woman, as she passes the age of
thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, or a pity
which is too near contempt. Particularly if he be a good husband, a
true modern. And he, for his part, though just as jarred inside
himself, resents only the fact that he is not loved as he ought to be.
Then starts a new game. The woman, even the most virtuous, looks
abroad for new sympathy. She will have a new man-friend, if nothing
more. But as a rule she has got something more. She has got her
children.
A relation between mother and child to-day is practically _never_
parental. It is personal--which means, it is critical and deliberate,
and adult in provocation. The mother, in her new role of idealist and
life-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her child
the unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she gives
it what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock
strikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, and she
shoves it ideally through baths and massage, promenades and practice,
till the little organism develops like a mushroom to stand on its own
feet. Then she continues her ideal shoving of it through all the
stages of an ideal up-bringing, she loves it as a chemist loves his
test-tubes in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little object is
his mother's ideal. But of her head she dictates his providential
days, and by the force of her deliberate mentally-directed love-will
she pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little devil never knows one
moment when he is not encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent,
idealistic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love-will of the
mother. Never, never one mouthful does he drink of the milk of human
kindness: always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. There is no
mother's milk to-day, save in tigers' udders, and in the udders of
sea-whales. Our children drink a decoction of ideal love, at the
breast.
Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep warm stream of love from the
mother's bowels to his bowels. Never for one moment the dark proud
recoil into rest, the soul's separation into deep, rich independence.
Never this lovely rich forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterly
forgets her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till suddenly,
click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself in her, and she remembers,
and rages round in a frenzy, shouting for her young.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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