D. H. Lawrence: The Artist As Psychologist

by Daniel J. Schneider

At a time when many critics view D. H. Lawrence as a man driven by irrational compulsions and see his fiction as the direct expression of psychic instabilities, Daniel J. Schneider argues that there is a healthy, detached Lawrence whose art is the product of prolonged and important meditations on psychology in relation to the moral and religious needs of our age. Schneider has written the first comprehensive study of the principles of Lawrence's psychology, presenting a systematic analysis of the problems Lawrence confronted as he sought to work his psychological laws into fiction. In a detailed examination of Lawrence's writings, Schneider reveals how Lawrence's thinking about human behavior is grounded in nineteenth-century materialism as formulated by such scientists and philosophers as Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, and as supplemented by the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. Working with these ideas, Lawrence developed his laws of psychology and sought to create novels whose purpose is scientific, didactic, and mimetic. This study examines the major problems Lawrence encountered in seeking this unique fusion, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the novels in light of Lawrence's complex aims. Schneider emphasizes Lawrence's prolonged effort to define the nature of psychic health and his often unrecognized detachment in carrying out this inquiry. Finally, Schneider compares Lawrence's psychology with a number of twentieth-century psychologies, and concludes that Lawrence's psychology is a unique blend of "hormic" and of existential psychologies, as current as R. D. Laing's or Erik Erikson's; like Fromm, Lawrence uses history, sociology, and religion to interpret psychic phenomena.

338 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1984