Psychoanalysis and the unconscious

by D. H. Lawrence

CHAPTER IV
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER

In asserting that the seat of consciousness in a young infant is in the abdomen, we do not pretend to suggest that all the other conscious-centers are utterly dormant. Once a child is born, the whole nervous and cerebral system comes awake, even the brain’s memories begin to glimmer, recognition and cognition soon begin to take place. But the spontaneous control and all the prime developing activity derive from the great affective centers of the abdomen. In the solar plexus is the first great fountain and issue of infantile consciousness. There, beneath the navel, lies the active human first-mind, the prime unconscious. From the moment of conception, when the first nucleus is formed, to the moment of death, when this same nucleus breaks again, the first great active center of human consciousness lies in the solar plexus.

The movement of development in any creature is, however, towards a florescent individuality. The ample, mature, unfolded individual stands perfect, perfect in himself, but also perfect in his harmonious relation to those nearest him and to all the universe. Whilst only the one great center of consciousness is awake, in the abdomen, the infant has no separate existence, his whole nature is contained in the conjunction with the parent. As soon as the complementary negative pole arouses the voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion, there is at once a retraction into independence and an assertion of singleness. The back strengthens itself.

But still the circuit of polarity, dual as it is, positive and negative from the positive-sympathetic and the negative-voluntary poles, still depends on the duality of two beings—it is still extra-individual. Each individual is vitally dependent on the other, for the life circuit.

Let us consider for a moment the kind of consciousness manifested at the two great primary centers. At the solar plexus the new psyche acts in a mode of attractive vitalism, drawing its objective unto itself as by vital magnetism. Here it drinks in, as it were, the contiguous universe, as during the womb-period it drank from the living continuum of the mother. It is darkly self-centered, exultant and positive in its own existence. It is all-in-all to itself, its own great subject. It knows no objective. It only knows its own vital potency, which potency draws the external object unto itself, subjectively, as the blood-stream was drawn into the fœtus, by subjective attraction. Here the psyche is to itself the All. Blindly self-positive.

This is the first mode of consciousness for every living thing—fascinating in all young things. The second half of the same mode commences as soon as direct activity sets up in the lumbar ganglion. Then the psyche recoils upon itself, in its first reaction against continuity with the outer universe. It recoils even against its own mode of assimilatory unison. Even it must break off, interrupt the great psychic-assimilation process which goes on at the sympathic center. It must recoil clean upon itself, break loose from any attachment whatsoever. And then it must try its power, often playfully.

This reaction is still subjective. When a child stiffens and draws away, when it screams with pure temper, it takes no note of that from which it recoils. It has no objective consciousness of that from which it reacts, the mother principally. It is like a swimmer endlessly kicking the water away behind him, with strong legs vividly active from the spinal ganglia. Like a man in a boat pushing off from the shore, it merely thrusts away, in order to ride free, ever more free. It is a purely subjective motion, in the negative direction.

After our long training in objectivation, and our epoch of worship of the objective mode, it is perhaps difficult for us to realize the strong, blind power of the unconscious on its first plane of activity. It is something quite different from what we call egoism—which is really mentally derived—for the ego is merely the sum-total of what we conceive ourselves to be. The powerful pristine subjectivity of the unconscious on its first plane is, on the other hand, the root of all our consciousness and being, darkly tenacious. Here we are grounded, say what we may. And if we break the spell of this first subjective mode, we break our own main root and live rootless, shiftless, groundless.

So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious, where the self is all-in-all unto itself, active in strong desirous psychic assimilation or in direct repudiation of the contiguous universe; this first plane of psychic activity, polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion of each individual but established in a circuit with the corresponding poles of another individual: this is the first scope of life and being for every human individual, and is beyond question. But we must again remark that the whole circuit is established between two individuals—that neither is a free thing-unto-itself—and that the very fact of established polarity between the two maintains that correspondence between the individual entity and the external universe which is the clue to all growth and development. The pure subjectivity of the first plane of consciousness is no more selfish than the pure objectivity of any other plane. How can it be? How can any form of pure, balanced polarity between two vital individuals be in any sense selfish on the part of one individual? We have got our moral values all wrong.

Save for healthy instinct, the moralistic human race would have exterminated itself long ago. And yet man must be moral, at the very root moral. The essence of morality is the basic desire to preserve the perfect correspondence between the self and the object, to have no trespass and no breach of integrity, nor yet any refaulture in the vitalistic interchange.