Psychoanalysis and the unconscious

by D. H. Lawrence

In two kinds, then, consists the activity of the unconscious on the first upper plane. Primal is the blissful sense of ineffable transfusion with the beloved, which we call love, and of which our era has perhaps enjoyed the full. It is a mode of creative consciousness essentially objective, but yet it preserves no object in the memory, even the dynamic memory. It is a great objective flux, a streaming forth of the self in blissful departure, like sunbeams streaming.

If this activity alone worked, then the self would utterly depart from its own integrity; it would pass out and merge with the beloved—which passing out and merging is the goal of enthusiasts. But living beings are kept integral by the activity of the great negative pole. From the thoracic ganglion also the unconscious goes forth in its quest of the beloved. But what does it go to seek? Real objective knowledge. It goes to find out the wonders which itself does not contain and to transfer these wonders, as by impress, into itself. It goes out to determine the limits of its own existence also.

This is the second half of the activity of upper or self-less or spiritual love. There is a tremendous great joy in exploring and discovering the beloved. For what is the beloved? She is that which I myself am not. Knowing the breach between us, the uncloseable gulf, I in the same breath realize her features. In the first mode of the upper consciousness there is perfect surpassing of all sense of division between the self and the beloved. In the second mode the very discovery of the features of the beloved contains the full realization of the irreparable, or unsurpassable, gulf. This is objective knowledge, as distinct from objective emotion. It contains always the element of self-amplification, as if the self were amplified by knowledge in the beloved. It should also contain the knowledge of the limits of the self.

So it is with the Infant. Curious indeed is the look on the face of the Holy Child, in Leonardo’s pictures, in Botticelli’s, even in the beautiful Filippo Lippi. It is the Mother who crosses her hands on her breast, in supreme acquiescence, recipient; it is the Child who gazes, with a kind of objective, strangely discerning, deep apprehension of her, startling to northern eyes. It is a gaze by no means of innocence, but of profound, pre-visual discerning. So plainly is the child looking across the gulf and fixing the gulf by very intentness of pre-visual apprehension, that instinctively the ordinary northerner finds Him anti-pathetic. It seems almost a cruel objectivity.

Perhaps between lovers, in the objective way of love, either the voluntary separative mode predominates, or the sympathetic mode of communion—one or the other. In the north we have worshipped the latter mode. But in the south it is different; the objective sapient manner of love seems more natural. Moreover in the face of the Infant lingers nearly always the dark look of the pristine mode of consciousness, the powerful self-centering subjective mode, established in the lower body—the so-called sensual mode.

But take our own children. A small infant, as soon as it really begins to direct its attention. How often it seems to be gazing across a strange distance at the mother; what a curious look is on its face, as if the mother were an object set across a far gulf, distinct however, discernible, even obtrusive in her need to be apprehended. A mother will chase away this look with kisses. But she cannot chase away the inevitable effluence of separatist, objective apprehension. She herself sometimes will fall into a half-trance, and the child on her lap will resolve itself into a strange and separate object. She does not criticize or analyze him. She does not even perceive him. But as if rapt, she apprehends him lying there, an unfathomable and inscrutable objective, outside herself, never to be grasped or included in herself. She seizes as it were a sudden and final, objective impression of him. And the conclusive sensation is one of finality. Something final has happened to her. She has the strange sensation of unalterable certainty, a sensation at once profoundly gratifying and rather appalling. She possesses something, a certain entity of primal, pre-conscious knowledge. Let the child be what he may, her knowledge of him is her own, forever and final. It gives her a sense of wealth in possession, and of power. It gives her a sense also of fatality. From the very satisfaction of the objective finality derives the sense of fatality. It is a knowledge of the other being, but a knowledge which contains at the same time a final assurance of the eternal and insuperable gulf which lies between beings—the isolation of the self first.

Thus the first plane of the upper consciousness—the outgoing, the sheer and unspeakable bliss of the sense of union, communion, at-oneness with the beloved—and then the complementary objective realization of the beloved, the realization of that which is apart, different. This realization is like riches to the objective consciousness. It is, as it were, the adding of another self to the own self, through the mode of apprehension. Through the mode of dynamic objective apprehension, which in our day we have gradually come to call imagination, a man may in his time add on to himself the whole of the universe, by increasing pristine realization of the universal. This in mysticism is called the progress to infinity—that is, in the modern, truly male mysticism. The older female mysticism means something different by the infinite.

But anyhow there it is. The attaining to the Infinite, about which the mystics have rhapsodized, is a definite process in the developing unconscious, but a process in the development only of the objective-apprehensive centers—an exclusive process, naturally.

A soul cannot come into its own through that love alone which is unison. If it stress the one mode, the sympathetic mode, beyond a certain point, it breaks its own integrity, and corruption sets in in the living organism. On both planes of love, upper and lower, the two modes must act complementary to one another, the sympathetic and the separatist. It is the absolute failure to see this, that has torn the modern world into two halves, the one half warring for the voluntary, objective, separatist control, the other for the pure sympathetic. The individual psyche divided against itself divides the world against itself, and an unthinkable progress of calamity ensues unless there be a reconciliation.

The goal of life is the coming to perfection of each single individual. This cannot take place without the tremendous interchange of love from all the four great poles of the first, basic field of consciousness. There must be the twofold passionate flux of sympathetic love, subjective-abdominal and objective-devotional, both. And there must be the twofold passional circuit of separatist realization, the lower, vital self-realization, and the upper, intense realization of the other, a realization which includes a recognition of abysmal otherness. To stress any one mode, any one interchange, is to hinder all, and to cause corruption in the end. The human psyche must have strength and pride to accept the whole fourfold nature of its own creative activity.