D.H. Lawrence's Psychoanalytic Ideas

In the Foreword to his Fantasia of the Unconscious D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) asserted that his theorizing about the nature of the unconscious derived from the experience of literary creation. His novels and poems, he claimed, were "purely passionate experience" and came "unwatched out of one's pen" (Fantasia 15). Like so many of Lawrence's statements about his own efforts, however, these remarks reveal a thicket of complications rather than throwing greater light on the work at hand. The two books on psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and the Fantasia (1922), were published in the two years following Lawrence's success in finally securing the publication of Women in Love (1920). They are, in part, explanations--perhaps even justifications--of that shocking book and of other facets of his literary production up to that point. The two books lay out the views on human psychology and the promptings of the unconscious that had contributed so much to the underlying scheme of Women in Love or, as he would have it, emerged during its composition. But the psychoanalytic writings hardly form a key to the novel and whatever explanatory power they possess in purely literary terms is only one of their minor functions. What they explain, instead, is the ideas, or the knowledge, that Lawrence got in touch with during the writing of the novel and its predecessor The Rainbow (1915).

These books also situated Lawrence's thought in relation to the prevailing no

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ng flow of life itself, perfect as if he were bathed in the womb again (344). Gerald's and Gudrun's equation of their sexual pleasure with life is, of course, mistaken. Their conventional views blind them to those aspects of male-female relationships that transcend the merely sensual. Throughout the novel both characters are tagged with these symbolic indications of Gerald's eventual fate and their discussions revolve around their inability to transcend the sensual--even though they are seldom fully cognizant of the true nature of the problem. Their ignorance is clearly a matter of being blinded--like the rest of humanity--to the truth, despite Birkin's persistent attempts to convince them that "what they both need is to give up the old ego and to enter into a sympathetic connection with each other" (Schneider 257). Ursula, however, is less able to escape the full elucidation of the problem since she spends her time with Birkin. But Ursula "must essentially learn two things: to allow the complete separatist self-assertion of Birkin, and to permit Birkin to express his unconventional need for Gerald Crich" (Balbert 96). The ideas that Rupert Birkin develops throughout the novel receive their final summing up in a chapter t

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