Psychoanalysis and the unconsciousLawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis and the unconscious
Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert)
Psychoanalysis
What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast from the
mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism. Where does it
begin? It begins where life begins. But that is too vague. It is no use
talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talk about
electricity, because electricity is a homogeneous force, conceivable
apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general
thing. It exists only in living creatures. So that life begins, now as
always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the
individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and
always, and life has no beginning apart from this. Any attempt at a
further generalization takes us merely beyond the consideration of life
into the region of mechanical homogeneous force. This is shown in the
cosmologies of eastern religions.
The beginning of life is in the beginning of the first individual
creature. You may call the naked, unicellular bit of plasm the first
individual, if you like. Mentally, as far as thinkable simplicity goes,
it is the first. So that we may say that life begins in the first naked
unicellular organism. And where life begins the unconscious also begins.
But mark, the first naked unicellular organism is an _individual_. It is
a specific individual, not a mathematical unit, like a unit of force.
Where the individual begins, life begins. The two are inseparable, life
and individuality. And also, where the individual begins, the
unconscious, which is the specific life-motive, also begins. We are
trying to trace the unconscious to its source. And we find that this
source, in all the higher organisms, is the first ovule cell from which
an individual organism arises. At the moment of conception, when a
procreative male nucleus fuses with the nucleus of the female germ, at
that moment does a new unit of life, of consciousness, arise in the
universe. Is it not obvious? The unconscious has no other source than
this, this first fused nucleus of the ovule.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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