Psychoanalysis and the unconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis and the unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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