Psychoanalysis and the unconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis and the unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis
It is obvious that the ideal becomes a mechanical principle, if it be
applied to the affective soul as a fixed motive. An ideal established in
control of the passional soul is no more and no less than a supreme
machine-principle. And a machine, as we know, is the active unit of the
material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is
identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most
completely material. Ideal and material are identical. The ideal is but
the god in the machine—the little, fixed, machine principle which works
the human psyche automatically.
We are now in the last stages of idealism. And psychoanalysis alone has
the courage necessary to conduct us through these last stages. The
identity of love with sex, the single necessity for fulfilment through
love, these are our fixed ideals. We must fulfil these ideals in their
extremity. And this brings us finally to incest, even incest-worship. We
have no option, whilst our ideals stand.
Why? Because incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these
ideals have to be carried into passional effect. And idealism has no
escape from logic. And once he has built himself in the shape of any
ideal, man will go to any logical length rather than abandon his ideal
corpus. Nay, some great cataclysm has to throw him down and destroy the
whole fabric of his life before the motor-principle of his dominant
ideal is destroyed. Hence psychoanalysis as the advance-guard of
science, the evangel of the last _ideal_ liberty. For of course there is
a great fascination in a completely effected idealism. Man is then
undisputed master of his own fate, and captain of his own soul. But
better say engine-driver, for in truth he is no more than the little god
in the machine, this master of fate. He has invented his own automatic
principles, and he works himself according to them, like any little
mechanic inside the works.
But ideal or not, we are all of us between the pit and the pendulum, or
the walls of red-hot metal, as may be. If we refuse the Freudian
_pis-aller_ as a means of escape, we have still to find some way out.
For there we are, all of us, trapped in a corner where we cannot, and
simply do not know how to fulfil our own natures, passionally. We don’t
know in which way fulfilment lies. If psychoanalysis discovers incest,
small blame to it.
Yet we do know this much: that the pushing of the ideal to any further
lengths will not avail us anything. We have actually to go back to our
own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted
reflection of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the
true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any
mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any
mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any
way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to
live.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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