ed society produced in him. The separation of humanity from the instinctual and the reduction of human relations to the mechanical, the commercial, or the superficially sensual had produced a gap between what humanity was and what it truly needed to be, that is, what it instinctively longed for but was unable to comprehend or articulate. Close study of Lawrence's psychoanalytic ideas--both in terms of their relations to Freud and their role in his conception of the artist's calling--will provide greater insight into the way he deployed what he learned during its creation in the pages of Women in Love.
Women in Love was certainly a book that the public was likely to feel needed explaining. After the success of Sons and Lovers (1913) Lawrence had won numerous admirers and was encouraged as he approached the composition of his next book. But he found that this did not come easily. As he saw the problem, a story entitled "The Sisters," that he had originally intended as a simple income-producing interval, more or less took over his writing life. Since, in Lawrence's view, the ideas he was expressing in his fiction came from deep in the unconscious it was not surprising to him that this story "grew and grew strangely, at the hands of an exploratory writer who had a long struggle to find his way and understand what he was discovering" (Kinkead-Weekes xiii). After three years, in which he produced four differing versions of his book, Lawrence finally managed to grasp what it was he wanted to express and, perhaps more importantly, how he should go about it. Finally, in 1915, he produced The Rainbow and, after composing a statement of his philosophy in "The Crown," he spent another year in producing three versions of the sequel to The Rainbow which he entitled Women in Love. Then, just as he had done with the essay on his philosophy, Lawrence paused to elucidate his ideas about psychoanalysis--insights that had resulted from the pro...