Psychoanalysis and the unconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis and the unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis
Having realized that the unconscious sparkles, vibrates, travels in a
strong subjective stream from the abdominal centers, connecting the
child directly with the mother at corresponding poles of vitalism, we
realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the
least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since
personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective
self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the
so-called _human_ relations are not involved. The first relationship is
neither personal nor biological—a fact which psychoanalysis has not
succeeded in grasping.
For example. A child screams with terror at the touch of fur; another
child loves the touch of fur, and purrs with pleasure. How now? Is it a
complex? Did the father have a beard?
It is possible. But all-too-human. The physical result of rubbing
fur is to set up a certain amount of frictional electricity.
Frictional electricity is one of the sundering forces. It
corresponds to the voluntary forces exerted at the lower spinal
ganglia, the forces of anger and retraction into independence and
power. An over-sympathetic child will scream with fear at the touch
of fur; a refractory child will purr with pleasure. It is a reaction
which involves even deeper things than sex—the primal constitution
of the elementary psyche. A sympathetically overbalanced child has a
horror of the electric-frictional force such as is emitted from the
fur of a black cat, creature of rapacity. The same delights a
fierce-willed child.
But we must admit at the same time that from earliest days a child is
subject to the definite _conscious_ psychic influences of
its surroundings and will react almost automatically to a
conscious-passional suggestion from the mother. In this way personal sex
is prematurely evoked, and real complexes are set up. But these derive
not from the spontaneous unconscious. They are in a way dictated from
the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if involuntarily. Again they
are a result of _mental_ subjectivity, self-consciousness—so different
from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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