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Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious

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"Extraordinary. Certainly a landmark in the history of psychoanalysis."--Kenneth Rexroth
This volume features two profound essays by one of the English language's most famous and controversial authors. D. H. Lawrence wrote Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious in the early 1920s, during his most productive period. Initially intended as a response to psychoanalytic criticism of his novel Sons and Lovers, these works progressed into a counterproposal to the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the incest motive. They also voice Lawrence's concepts of education, marriage, and social and political action.
"This pseudo-philosophy of mine," explained Lawrence, "was deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The absolute need one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man." With these two essays, the author articulates his insights into the mental struggle to rationalize and reconcile the polarity that exists between emotional and intellectual identities. Critical to understanding Lawrence's other works, they offer a bold synthesis of literary theory and criticism of Freudian psychology.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1923

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About the author

D.H. Lawrence

2,272 books4,255 followers
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
Profile Image for Warwick.
Author 1 book15.4k followers
November 20, 2025
There are good books and there are bad books. And then there are books like this – a book so excruciatingly objectionable that it retrospectively fills me with scorn and embarrassment for its author, much of whose fiction I have previously enjoyed very much. If I had been in charge of DH Lawrence's estate, I would have attempted to have all copies destroyed on the grounds that it is fatal to his reputation. Unfortunately, I have now read it and think he's a fucking moron.

Among his pearls of wisdom are such grand statements as

I do not believe in evolution


…so it's no surprise that a lack of scientific understanding is the cornerstone of his plan for society, set out here as a response to the new science of psychoanalysis. Knowledge about the mind is something Lawrence does not welcome, along with any other kind of factual knowledge.

Let all schools be closed at once […] Let no child learn to read


he suggests, which sounds a bit like a joke, or an exaggeration for comic effect. It's not. ‘A child mustn’t understand things,’ Lawrence insists. ‘They should never be told that the earth is round.’ Nor is it just children he hopes to keep in a state of uninformed magical thinking.

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write – never.


He puts this in italics; it's very important to him. It seems a curious policy for a professional author, but then he doesn't think much of the ‘great mass’ of humanity, who, in Lawrence's opinion, are becoming too intellectual and losing touch with their raw animal nature. A bit later we get this:

The mass of mankind should never be acquainted with the scientific biological facts of sex: never.


People aren't ready to know how things really work. They're better off, in Lawrence's view, falling back into traditional conventions and instincts on how to behave and interact with the world, hence such dreary exhortations as:

men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. […] Wives, do the same to your husbands.


All of this would merely be unbelievably crass and feeble-minded, but it's made so much worse by the self-confident pseudoscience Lawrence dresses it up in. He says, for example, that ‘a child’s bottom is made occasionally to be spanked’ – well, corporal punishment was hardly a fringe activity in the 1920s. But Lawrence justifies it by asserting that ‘the spanker transfers his wrath to the great will-centres in the child, and these will-centres react intensely, are vivified and educated’.

You can't argue against this kind of thing, because it's totally meaningless. Unfortunately the entire book is based on this kind of ‘reasoning’, which consists of finding silly words to buttress Lawrence's heartfelt and dispiriting opinions. In opposition to the psychological approach, he offers instead a crackpot vision of man as governed by various ‘poles of dynamic consciousness and being’, primarily the ‘lumbar ganglion’, which, he says, ‘negatively polarizes the solar plexus in the primal psychic activity of a human individual’. Fucking what!?

He talks about Atlantis. He says the sun is made up of the souls of dead people. He drifts into phrenology:

a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature […] while a long nose derives from the centre of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion […] A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation…



The nose of an idiot

If we are generous and squint hard, we can see what Lawrence is getting at under all his anxious prevarications. He worries about what he elsewhere calls the ‘cerebralisation of feeling’; he is desperately trying to claim a reality beyond thought, a world of being, not knowing, which is central to his sensibility. And in fiction, it can be a powerful instinct.

But in non-fiction, the attempt to put such impulses into words is not only futile, it is stupid. I use the word in a precise sense. Where it ultimately leads politically becomes only too clear as Lawrence distils his contempt for general understanding down to a few bold statements. Civilisation, he says,

must be a system of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader.


Uh-oh. We’ve happily become allergic to terms like that nowadays, but back in the 20s it was still an idea that seemed attractive to some. ‘Leaders – this is what mankind is craving for,’ Lawrence says. Well, mankind would soon get them.

As this perhaps suggests, there is a fascinating historicity to Lawrence’s arguments – the fear of mechanisation, the alarm at psychology, the sense of accelerating scientific and political disaster. Many of these feelings have modern parallels. But that’s not enough to save this dismal, regressive, anti-intellectual tract from being a wholly enraging experience to read.
Profile Image for Lobstergirl.
1,940 reviews1,446 followers
August 12, 2023

It's D. H. Lawrence, so guaranteed to be deranged. Some snippets of his wisdom:

"Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got a face."

"When a parent gives his boy a beating, there is a living passionate interchange."

"So it is just criminal to make a child too loving. No child should be induced to love too much. It means derangement and death at last."

"The nose is one of the greatest indicators of character."

"Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a few technical training establishments, nothing more. Let humanity lie fallow, for two generations at least. Let no child learn to read, unless it learns by itself, out of its own individual persistent desire."

"There should be no effort made to teach children to think, to have ideas."

"...to save the children as far as possible, elementary education should be stopped at once."

"The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and write - never."

"Then keep the girls apart from any familiarity or being 'pals' with the boys. The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible."

"Leaders - this is what mankind is craving for.
But men must be prepared to obey, body and soul, once they have chosen the leader."

"...boys and girls should be kept apart..."

"The mass of mankind should never be acquainted with the scientific biological facts of sex: never. The mystery must remain in its dark secrecy, and its dark, powerful dynamism."

"Oh, parents, see that your children get their dinners and clean sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them one single grain, and don't let anybody else love them. Give them their dinners and leave them alone. You've already loved them to perdition. Now leave them alone, to find their own way out."

"It has taken a Jew [Einstein] to knock the last centre-pin out of our ideally spinning universe. The Jewish intelligence for centuries has been picking holes in our ideal system - scientific and sociological. Very good thing for us. ...But the Jewish mind insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions."
Profile Image for Jake.
940 reviews55 followers
June 16, 2020
Good old DH. This one is different. Instead of gut level fiction, it is non-fiction and is about psychology. Now you probably know the gist of his arguments if you've read his fiction. But, he got pretty crazy and I liked it. Some of it was true, like his debunking of Freudian psychology and all that Oedipus stuff. Lots of it was BS, but interesting BS. In fact he sounded a bit like someone's (more literate) crazy uncle or Boomer coworker ranting on Facebook a couple of times. But, I still liked it.
Profile Image for Ted J. Gibbs.
114 reviews4 followers
November 1, 2020
Lawrence really outs himself as a fucking idiot in this one
Profile Image for M. Sarki.
Author 20 books240 followers
December 5, 2021
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/ps...

I have spent most of this summer of 2012 with D.H.Lawrence. It began with reading a book by Geoff Dyer Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence and went on to daily morning meditations with four to six pages of this book of the unconscious and four to six pages of his triple travelogue, D. H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy; Sea and Sardinia; Etruscan Places which I am still enjoying a few pages of every morning before sitting down to write. But this particular book was of most importance to me in my study of Lawrence and it has proven, for the most part, a disappointment. It would have been hard for me as well to have been a man and to not have been a chauvinist in the 1920's. I am afraid his opinions and beliefs are riddled with this idea of man's superiority over women. He, at least, believed that man should have a higher purpose in order to keep his woman at his side. The so-called facts of Lawrence's ideas of the unconscious were for the most part discarded by me. I quickly began to be only interested in what he thought and believed in, of which elements, formed and made him the man he was. Concurrently I am also reading his Selected Letters by Boulton and Cambridge before plunging into the biographies by others and also some of the fiction he wrote. If nothing else, this book will help me further understand the things Lawrence has to say as I complete the reading of his letters to both friend and foe, and his fiction will be uncolored a bit with some of his now-known-by-me blacks and whites.

In these two books Lawrence often acted silly and taunting, especially in the second book of this collection. On the other hand his Selected Letters depict a very serious man, thoughtful and well-read. This latter piece of this two-part book was a mumble jumble of ideas and beliefs that today would seem out-of-date and archaic. But I do not hold this book against him. Lawrence was certainly brave and had the courage to fight back against his fearful detractors and despotic critics. During this time his books were banned and unpopular. He lived meagerly and relied on the generosity of others. He seemed almost desperate in his attempts to sound out his warring and his self-perceived-as-superior views. I garnered little from reading these two small books and almost wish I hadn't. His letters are remarkable though, but these thoughts are not. The unconscious is an important subject to me and my poetry. I have always maintained I have attempted (especially in my early work) to write from the unconscious to the unconscious. I was hoping to get some answers from Lawrence and perhaps some tips on how to better tap into this amazing source we all have inside us. Or how we can gainfully use this uncommon source to compose, in addition to such poetic lines as my own, She wore a tattered wiesenboden the color of a schooper.
1 review
August 27, 2019
In the history of bad ideas, 'Fantasia of the Unconscious' will surely have its own chapter.
209 reviews3 followers
May 27, 2020
This...now this, is something. It has meaning. Its almost living. It IS.

Hyperbolic, prophetic and prescient, sarcastic, laugh out loud funny, deadly serious, ridiculous, profound, it is Lawrence through and through. In fact, it is written in such a way, that I feel he is in the room ranting at me, or laughing at me, or scolding me, or inspiring me. So many moods, but all in one book.

I am sure this is not read much now, and god help us what the modern academics and liberals, etc think of this because of his intentional offensiveness. They dont, and wont ever get it. They never will, as they are not able to be themselves. This is Lawrence being himself. And while some things he says (and I really feel he is speaking not writing here), are nonsense, many are really really profound on a deep level. They might be uncomfortable at times, but they are purely distilled and free from additives, hehe.

Profile Image for August.
79 reviews1 follower
February 14, 2015
Read this first essay as a stand alone book, "psychoanalysis and the unconscious." It was a different edition than what is shown here. I was pleasantly surprised with his nonfiction writing, although one should know what to expect as far as content and prose balance in order to avoid needless disappointment. It's beautifully written and a nice break from some of the stale texts from the early 20th century on psychoanalysis.
13 reviews2 followers
January 15, 2026
For those looking to learn anything about psychoanalysis, do not bother with this book unless you are very good at shifting through the dirt for little nuggets of gold. But for those who wish to see Lawrence's soul laid bare, this book is great. Wish I could say the same about Lawrence, who has some unhinged opinions, even for his time.
Still, Lawrence writes for the soul. His words are strikingly poetic and written from the heart. His views may be crazy, but they make you feel. And for that he deserves some credit.
Profile Image for Josh Clement.
206 reviews4 followers
March 4, 2026
Randomly plucked from library shelf.

I have a soft spot for someone pulling out a pen and pretty much ranting. This is professional, unhinged riffing, a "beautiful bunch of ideas" that touch on marriage, sex, child development, the moon, the sun, poison gas.

I found myself half-agreeing with everything here. He's directionally on the right track with his push against ego and will and self-consciousness. But seems to always want to take his prescription way too far, saying things like "always let fly, tooth and nails and never repent."

This edgelordy style requires some patience and not to be taken too seriously, or you'll arrive on the epilogue (if you make it that far) with a blistering headache.
Profile Image for Beka Sukhitashvili.
Author 9 books211 followers
November 30, 2022
"საკმარისია ფსიქოანალიზის სატყუარა ჩავყლაპოთ, რომ ამორალობის ანკესზე აღმოვჩნდებით"... და კიდევ მრავალი ასეთი ფრაზა, რომელთაც აქ აღარ მოვიყვან, უბრალოდ ადამიანი შესაძლოა ნამდვილად აღშფოთებული იყო როდესაც ამ ესსეს წერდა, ანუ 1922 წელს მირ იგვლივ შარლატანა ფსიქოლოგებით, მაგრამ წიგნში მხოლოდ ფროიდს და იუნგს რომ ახსენებ და მეტს არავის... და თან საერთოდ რას ემყარება მისი მსჯელობა და განხილვები.

ამ სფეროში ახლა იმდენი ცოდნა გვაქვს, ძალიან გამიკვირდა ამ გამომცემლობამ საჭიროდ რატომ ჩათვალა ამ წიგნის თარგმნა? აი, არავითარი ღირებულება აქვს ახლა, 2022 წელს.

მეორე ესსე გაცილებით საინტერესო იყო.
33 reviews
January 23, 2024
Tried to get into it but just couldn’t. Psychoanalysis of the unconscious was a lot better written yet still there never was a path to follow or a plane of thought. It felt like just random thoughts on a paper with no real connection no basis no proof no nothing throughout the whole book.
145 reviews
February 9, 2024
First DNF of the year. Lawrence has some pretty bonkers thoughts but not in a fun way so I gave up. Really weird book to get for my birthday.
Profile Image for Paula.
33 reviews
November 15, 2014
Me niego a ponerle una puntuación, porque el viaje emocional que en este libro se produce - de las lágrimas, por reir, a las lágrimas por carcajada - poco tiene que ver con el propósito original de esta obra. No es ficción, si no un ensayo que intenta proporcionar una definición de subconsciente distinta, más cercana a su realidad, en contraste a la forma de entenderlo de las corrientes de psicoanálisis capitaneadas por Freud.

En resumen, que el autor de Sons and Lovers y Lady Chatterley's Lover pone a caldo a los seguidores del psicoanálisis de lalalalala entonces y plantea su propia teoría. Para partirse la caja y lo que haga falta, porque si a Freud se le fue la pinza en algunos puntos - o todos - este tiene también sus cositas. Aunque igualmente se entreven puntos que, pese a no estar del todo acertados en su explicación, la idea subyacente mola.

Vale, creo que me ha gustado. Pero...Que no, que no lo puntúo, leñes xD
Profile Image for Luisa.
286 reviews11 followers
June 1, 2015
"L'odio non è, in verità, il contrario dell'amore. La vera forza contraria all'amore è l'individualismo." Vale la pena leggerlo solo per questa frase.
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