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Psychoanalysis and the unconscious
by David Herbert Lawrence
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Excerpt:
the psyche away from mental consciousness.
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His unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which, though mental, ideal in its nature, yet is unwilling to expose itself to full recognition, and so recoils back into the affective regions and acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and usually destructive. The whole body of our repressions makes up our unconscious.
The question lies here: whether a repression is a primal impulse which has been deterred from fulfilment, or whether it is an idea which is refused enactment. Is a repression a repressed passional impulse, or is it an idea which we suppress and refuse to put into practice—nay, which we even refuse to own at all, a disowned, outlawed idea, which exists rebelliously outside the pale?
Man can inhibit the true passional impulses and so produce a derangement in the psyche. This is a truism nowadays, and we are grateful to psychoanalysis for helping to make it so. But man can do more than this. Finding himself in a sort of emotional cul de sac, he can proceed to deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract, ideal. That is, a man finds it impossible to realize himself in marriage. He recognizes the fact that his emotional, even passional, regard for his mother is deeper than it ever could be for a wife. This makes him unhappy, for he knows that passional communion is not complete unless it be also sexual. He has a body of sexual passion which he cannot transfer to a wife. He has a profound love for his mother. Shut in between walls of tortured and increasing passion, he must find some escape or fall down the pit of insanity and death. What is the only possible escape? To seek in the arms of the mother the refuge
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which offers nowhere else. And so the incestmotive is born. All the labored explanations of the psychoanalysts are unnecessary. The incest motive is a logical deduction of the human reason, which has recourse to this last extremity, to save itself. Why is the human reason in peril? That is another story. At the moment we are merely considering the origin of the incest motive.
The logical conclusion of incest is, of course, a profound decision in the human soul, a decision affecting the deepest passional centers. It rouses the deepest instinctive opposition. And therefore it must be kept secret until this opposition is either worn away or persuaded away. Hence the repression and ultimate disclosure.
Now here we see the secret working of the process of idealism. By idealism we understand the motivizing of the great affective sources by means of ideas mentally derived. As for example the incest motive, which is first and foremost a logical deduction made by the human reason, even if unconsciously made, and secondly is introduced into the affective, passional sphere, where it now proceeds to serve as a principle for action.
This motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle.
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 machineprinciple. 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
ideal peoples are the most completely maidentical with pure materialism, and the most terial. 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.
