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D.H. Lawrence and the Tyranny of Desire
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14431 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
6,196 Words |
| Author
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Eugene Goodheart
Eugene Goodheart is chairman of the English department at
Brandeis University and has written extensively on D.H.
Lawrence. |
Our most powerful associations with the work of D.H. Lawrence revolve around his imagination of scenes of sexual passion. In the popular imagination, Lawrence is often seen as the greatest of our modern professors of desire. I will argue that this liberationist vision represents a profound misunderstanding of Lawrence's achievement, provoked in part by Lawrence himself. When, for instance, Lawrence asserts the claim of the passional consciousness (or unconsciousness) against what he views as the repressive character of Freudian psychology, we must be careful how we construe the basic terms of Lawrence's critique. Character, personality, consciousness, unconsciousness, among other words, are invested with meanings different from, and in some cases opposed to, conventional understanding of them. A reconsideration of Lawrence's attitude toward desire could fruitfully begin with his critique of Freud.
Lawrence's most sustained critique of Freudian psychology can be found in two long essays: "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious" and "Fantasies of the Unconscious." In the first, Lawrence sets out to distinguish the Freudian unconscious from his own conception by identifying the former with inauthentic neurotic life and his own with authentic creative life. in dialectical fashion, Lawrence does not dismiss the Freudian concept from the scene; rather, he places it as an expression (or in therapeutic terms, a system) of the condition that psychoanalysis aims to cure.
As Lawrence understands the Freudian unconscious, there are two versions of it that are not consistent with each other. In the first version, the unconscious is a seething, inchoate energy of sex and excrement, "nothing but a slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and myriad repulsive little horrors spawned between sex and excrement." In the second version, the unconscious is the structure of the Oedipus complex, that is, the notorious triad of parental-filial relationships in which son, mother, and father love and hate one another. According to Lawrence, the common element in the two versions is repression. Rather than the authentic unconscious, they represent projections of a repressive mental consciousness, which in effect rationalizes its repression of unconscious life by conceiving it as a horror show. "It is nothing pristine and anterior to mentality. It is itself the mind's ulterior motive. That is, the incest-craving is propagated by the mind itself, even though unconsciously" (P&F, 8). If unconsciousness is understood in these terms, then repression becomes, in the Freudian view, a rational necessity. Freud becomes a victim of an unnecessary dualism in which the self, poised between a self-destructive unconscious life and a repressive
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