Psychoanalysis and the unconscious

by D. H. Lawrence

The great magnetic or dynamic center of first-consciousness acts powerfully at the solar plexus. Here the child knows beyond all knowledge. It does not see with the eyes, it cannot perceive, much less conceive. Nothing can it apprehend; the eyes are a strange plasmic, nascent darkness. Yet from the belly it knows, with a directness of knowledge that frightens us and may even seem abhorrent. The mother, also, from the bowels knows her child—as she can never, never know it from the head. There is no thought nor speech, only direct, ventral gurglings and cooings. From the passional nerve-center of the solar plexus in the mother passes direct, unspeakable effluence and intercommunication, sheer effluent contact with the palpitating nerve-center in the belly of the child. Knowledge, unspeakable knowledge interchanged, which must be diluted by eternities of materialization before they can come to expression.

It is like a lovely, suave, fluid, creative electricity that flows in a circuit between the great nerve-centers in mother and child. The electricity of the universe is a sundering force. But this lovely polarized vitalism is creative. It passes in a circuit between the two poles of the passional unconscious in the two now separated beings. It establishes in each that first primal consciousness which is the sacred, all-containing head-stream of all our consciousness.

But this is not all. The flux between mother and child is not all sweet unison. There is as well the continually widening gap. A wonderful rich communion, and at the same time a continually increasing cleavage. If only we could realize that all through life these are the two synchronizing activities of love, of creativity. For the end, the goal, is the perfecting of each single individuality, unique in itself—which cannot take place without a perfected harmony between the beloved, a harmony which depends on the at-last-clarified singleness of each being, a singleness equilibrized, polarized in one by the counter-posing singleness of the other.

So the child. In its wonderful unison with the mother it is at the same time extricating itself into single, separate, independent existence. The one process, of unison, cannot go on without the other process, of purified severance. At first the child cleaves back to the old source. It clings and adheres. The sympathetic center of unification, or at least unison, alone seems awake. The child wails with the strange desolation of severance, wails for the old connection. With joy and peace it returns to the breast, almost as to the womb.

But not quite. Even in sucking it discovers its new identity and power. Its own new, separate power. It draws itself back suddenly; it waits. It has heard something? No. But another center has flashed awake. The child stiffens itself and holds back. What is it, wind? Stomach-ache? Not at all. Listen to some of the screams. The ears can hear deeper than eyes can see. The first scream of the ego. The scream of asserted isolation. The scream of revolt from connection, the revolt from union. There is a violent anti-maternal motion, anti-everything. There is a refractory, bad-tempered negation of everything, a hurricane of temper. What then? After such tremendous unison as the womb implies, no wonder there are storms of rage and separation. The child is screaming itself rid of the old womb, kicking itself in a blind paroxysm into freedom, into separate, negative independence.

So be it, there must be paroxysms, since there must be independence. Then the mother gets angry too. It affects her, though perhaps not as badly as it affects outsiders. Nothing acts more direct on the great primal nerve-centers than the screaming of an infant, this blind screaming negation of connections. It is the friction of irritation itself. Everybody is implicated, just as they would be if the air were surcharged with electricity. The mother is perhaps less affected because she understands primarily, or because she is polarized directly with the child. Yet she, too, must be angry, in her measure, inevitably.

It is a blind, almost mechanistic effort on the part of the new organism to extricate itself from cohesion with the circumambient universe. It applies direct to the mother. But it affects everybody. The great centers of response vibrate with a maddening, sometimes unbearable friction. What centers? Not the great sympathetic plexus this time, but its corresponding voluntary ganglion. The great ganglion of the spinal system, the lumbar ganglion, negatively polarizes the solar plexus in the primal psychic activity of a human individual. When a child screams with temper, it sends out from the lumbar ganglion violent waves of frictional repudiation, extraordinary. The little back has an amazing power once it stiffens itself. In the lumbar ganglion the unconscious now vibrates tremendously in the activity of sundering, separation. Mother and child, polarized, are primarily affected. Often the mother is so sure of her possession of the child that she is almost unmoved. But the child continues, till the frictional response is roused in the mother, her anger rises, there is a flash, an outburst like lightning. And then the storm subsides. The pure act of sundering is effected. Each being is clarified further into its own single, individual self, further perfected, separated.

Hence a duality, now, in primal consciousness in the infant. The warm rosy abdomen, tender with chuckling unison, and the little back strengthening itself. The child kicks away, into independence. It stiffens its spine in the strength of its own private and separate, inviolable existence. It will admit now of no trespass. It is awake now in a new pride, a new self-assertion. The sense of antagonistic freedom is aroused. Clumsy old adhesions must be ruthlessly fused. And so, from the lumbar ganglion the fiery-tempered infant asserts its new, blind will.

And as the child fights the mother fights. Sometimes she fights to keep her refractory child, and sometimes she fights to kick him off, as a mare kicks off her too-babyish foal. It is the great voluntary center of the unconscious flashing into action. Flashing from the deep lumbar ganglion in the mother to the newly-awakened, corresponding center in the child goes the swift negative current, setting each of them asunder in clean individuality. So long as the force meets its polarized response all is well. When a force flashes and has no response, there is devastation. How weary in the back is the nursing mother whose great center of repudiation is suppressed or weak; how a child droops if only the sympathetic unison is established.

So, the polarity of the dynamic consciousness, from the very start of life! Direct flowing and flashing of two consciousness-streams, active in the bringing forth of an individual being. The sweet commingling, the sharp clash of opposition. And no possibility of creative development without this polarity, this dual circuit of direct, spontaneous, honest interchange. No hope of life apart from this. The primal unconscious pulsing in its circuits between two beings: love and wrath, cleaving and repulsion, inglutination and excrementation. What is the good of inventing “ideal” behavior? How order the path of the unconscious? For let us now realize that we cannot, even with the best intentions, proceed to order the path of our own unconscious without vitally deranging the life-flow of those connected with us. If you disturb the current at one pole, it must be disturbed at the other. Here is a new moral aspect to life.