Psychoanalysis and the unconscious

by D. H. Lawrence

It is obvious that the ideal becomes a mechanical principle, if it be applied to the affective soul as a fixed motive. An ideal established in control of the passional soul is no more and no less than a supreme machine-principle. And a machine, as we know, is the active unit of the material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most completely material. Ideal and material are identical. The ideal is but the god in the machine—the little, fixed, machine principle which works the human psyche automatically.

We are now in the last stages of idealism. And psychoanalysis alone has the courage necessary to conduct us through these last stages. The identity of love with sex, the single necessity for fulfilment through love, these are our fixed ideals. We must fulfil these ideals in their extremity. And this brings us finally to incest, even incest-worship. We have no option, whilst our ideals stand.

Why? Because incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these ideals have to be carried into passional effect. And idealism has no escape from logic. And once he has built himself in the shape of any ideal, man will go to any logical length rather than abandon his ideal corpus. Nay, some great cataclysm has to throw him down and destroy the whole fabric of his life before the motor-principle of his dominant ideal is destroyed. Hence psychoanalysis as the advance-guard of science, the evangel of the last ideal liberty. For of course there is a great fascination in a completely effected idealism. Man is then undisputed master of his own fate, and captain of his own soul. But better say engine-driver, for in truth he is no more than the little god in the machine, this master of fate. He has invented his own automatic principles, and he works himself according to them, like any little mechanic inside the works.

But ideal or not, we are all of us between the pit and the pendulum, or the walls of red-hot metal, as may be. If we refuse the Freudian pis-aller as a means of escape, we have still to find some way out. For there we are, all of us, trapped in a corner where we cannot, and simply do not know how to fulfil our own natures, passionally. We don’t know in which way fulfilment lies. If psychoanalysis discovers incest, small blame to it.

Yet we do know this much: that the pushing of the ideal to any further lengths will not avail us anything. We have actually to go back to our own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted reflection of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to live.

What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast from the mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism. Where does it begin? It begins where life begins. But that is too vague. It is no use talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talk about electricity, because electricity is a homogeneous force, conceivable apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general thing. It exists only in living creatures. So that life begins, now as always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and always, and life has no beginning apart from this. Any attempt at a further generalization takes us merely beyond the consideration of life into the region of mechanical homogeneous force. This is shown in the cosmologies of eastern religions.

The beginning of life is in the beginning of the first individual creature. You may call the naked, unicellular bit of plasm the first individual, if you like. Mentally, as far as thinkable simplicity goes, it is the first. So that we may say that life begins in the first naked unicellular organism. And where life begins the unconscious also begins. But mark, the first naked unicellular organism is an individual. It is a specific individual, not a mathematical unit, like a unit of force.

Where the individual begins, life begins. The two are inseparable, life and individuality. And also, where the individual begins, the unconscious, which is the specific life-motive, also begins. We are trying to trace the unconscious to its source. And we find that this source, in all the higher organisms, is the first ovule cell from which an individual organism arises. At the moment of conception, when a procreative male nucleus fuses with the nucleus of the female germ, at that moment does a new unit of life, of consciousness, arise in the universe. Is it not obvious? The unconscious has no other source than this, this first fused nucleus of the ovule.

Useless to talk about the unconscious as if it were a homogeneous force like electricity. You can only deal with the unconscious when you realize that in every individual organism an individual nature, an individual consciousness, is spontaneously created at the moment of conception. We say created. And by created we mean spontaneously appearing in the universe, out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. It is true that an individual is also generated. By the fusion of two nuclei, male and female, we understand the process of generation. And from the process of generation we may justly look for a new unit, according to the law of cause and effect. As a natural or automatic result of the process of generation we may look for a new unit of existence. But the nature of this new unit must derive from the natures of the parents, also by law. And this we deny. We deny that the nature of any new creature derives from the natures of its parents. The nature of the infant does not follow from the natures of its parents. The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents, something which could never be derived from the natures of all the existent individuals or previous individuals. There is in the nature of the infant something entirely new, underived, underivable, something which is, and which will forever remain, causeless. And this something is the unanalyzable, indefinable reality of individuality. Every time at the moment of conception of every higher organism an individual nature incomprehensibly arises in the universe, out of nowhere. Granted the whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution, still the individual is not explained. The individual unit of consciousness and being which arises at the conception of every higher organism arises by pure creation, by a process not susceptible to understanding, a process which takes place outside the field of mental comprehension, where mentality, which is definitely limited, cannot and does not exist.

This causeless created nature of the individual being is the same as the old mystery of the divine nature of the soul. Religion was right and science is wrong. Every individual creature has a soul, a specific individual nature the origin of which cannot be found in any cause-and-effect process whatever. Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion. There is no assignable cause, and no logical reason, for individuality. On the contrary, individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance even of reason.