Psychoanalysis and the unconscious

by D. H. Lawrence

As yet we see the unconscious active on one plane only and entirely dependent on two individuals. But immediately following the establishment of the circuit of the powerful, subjective, abdominal plane comes the quivering of the whole system into a new degree of consciousness. And two great upper centers are awake.

The diaphragm really divides the human body, psychically as well as organically. The two centers beneath the diaphragm are centers of dark subjectivity, centripetal, assimilative. Once these are established, in the thorax the two first centers of objective consciousness become active, with ever-increasing intensity. The great thoracic sympathetic plexus rouses like a sun in the breast, the thoracic ganglion fills the shoulders with strength. There are now two planes of primary consciousness—the first, the lower, the subjective unconscious, active beneath the diaphragm, and the second upper, objective plane, active above the diaphragm, in the breast.

Let us realize that the subjective and objective of the unconscious are not the same as the subjective and the objective of the mind. Here we have no concepts to deal with, no static objects in the shape of ideas. We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. We are spared that hateful thing-in-itself, the idea, which is at once so all-important and so nothing. We are on straightforward solid ground; there is no abstraction.

The unconscious subjectivity is, in its positive manifestation, a great imbibing, and in its negative, a definite blind rejection. What we call an unconscious rejection. This subjectivity embraces alike creative emotion and physical function. It includes alike the sweet and untellable communion of love between the mother and child, the irrational reaction into separation between the two, and also the physical functioning of sucking and urination. Psychic and physical development run parallel, though they are forever distinct. The child sucking, the child urinating, this is the child acting from the great subjective centers, positive and negative. When the child sucks, there is a sympathetic circuit between it and the mother, in which the sympathetic plexus in the mother acts as negative or submissive pole to the corresponding plexus in the child. In urination there is a corresponding circuit in the voluntary centers, so that a mother seems gratified, and is gratified, inevitably, by the excremental functioning of her child. She experiences a true polar reaction.

Child and mother have, in the first place, no objective consciousness of each other, and certainly no idea of each other. Each is a blind desideratum to the other. The strong love between them is effectual in the great abdominal centers, where all love, real love, is primarily based. Of that reflected or moon-love, derived from the head, that spurious form of love which predominates to-day, we do not speak here. It has its root in the idea: the beloved is a mental objective, endlessly appreciated, criticized, scrutinized, exhausted. This has nothing to do with the active unconscious.

Having realized that the unconscious sparkles, vibrates, travels in a strong subjective stream from the abdominal centers, connecting the child directly with the mother at corresponding poles of vitalism, we realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not involved. The first relationship is neither personal nor biological—a fact which psychoanalysis has not succeeded in grasping.

For example. A child screams with terror at the touch of fur; another child loves the touch of fur, and purrs with pleasure. How now? Is it a complex? Did the father have a beard?

It is possible. But all-too-human. The physical result of rubbing fur is to set up a certain amount of frictional electricity. Frictional electricity is one of the sundering forces. It corresponds to the voluntary forces exerted at the lower spinal ganglia, the forces of anger and retraction into independence and power. An over-sympathetic child will scream with fear at the touch of fur; a refractory child will purr with pleasure. It is a reaction which involves even deeper things than sex—the primal constitution of the elementary psyche. A sympathetically overbalanced child has a horror of the electric-frictional force such as is emitted from the fur of a black cat, creature of rapacity. The same delights a fierce-willed child.

But we must admit at the same time that from earliest days a child is subject to the definite conscious psychic influences of its surroundings and will react almost automatically to a conscious-passional suggestion from the mother. In this way personal sex is prematurely evoked, and real complexes are set up. But these derive not from the spontaneous unconscious. They are in a way dictated from the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if involuntarily. Again they are a result of mental subjectivity, self-consciousness—so different from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious.

To return, however, to the pure unconscious. When the upper centers flash awake, a whole new field of consciousness and spontaneous activity is opened out. The great sympathetic plexus of the breast is the heart’s mind. This thoracic plexus corresponds directly in the upper man to the solar plexus in the lower. But it is a correspondence in creative opposition. From the sympathetic center of the breast as from a window the unconscious goes forth seeking its object, to dwell upon it. When a child leans its breast against its mother it becomes filled with a primal awareness of her—not of itself desiring her or partaking of her—but of her as she is in herself. This is the first great acquisition of primal objective knowledge, the objective content of the unconscious. Such knowledge we call the treasure of the heart. When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor. For by consciousness they meant, as usual, objective consciousness only. And from the cardiac plexus goes forth that strange effluence of the self which seeks and dwells upon the beloved, lovingly roving like the fingers of an infant or a blind man over the face of the treasured object, gathering her mould into itself and transferring her mould forever into its own deep unconscious psyche. This is the first acquiring of objective knowledge, sightless, unspeakably direct. It is a dwelling of the child’s unconscious within the form of the mother, the gathering of a pure, eternal impression. So the soul stores itself with dynamic treasures; it verily builds its own tissue of such treasure, the tissue of the developing body, each cell stored with creative dynamic content.