Psychoanalysis and the unconscious
Date: 2022-10-24T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Psychoanalysis

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Title: Psychoanalysis and the unconscious

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Release date: October 24, 2022 [eBook #69219]
Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Thomas Seltzer, 1921

Credits: Steve Mattern, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS ***

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
BY
D. H. LAWRENCE
NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1921

Copyright, 1921, by

Thomas Seltzer, Inc.

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I. Psychoanalysis vs. Morality 9

II. The Incest Motive and Idealism 26

III. The Birth of Consciousness 45

IV. The Child and His Mother 64

V. The Lover and the Beloved 83

VI. Human Relations and the Unconscious 102

CHAPTER I
PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY

Psychoanalysis has sprung many surprises on us, performed more than one volte face before our indignant eyes. No sooner had we got used to the psychiatric quack who vehemently demonstrated the serpent of sex coiled round the root of all our actions, no sooner had we begun to feel honestly uneasy about our lurking complexes, than lo and behold the psychoanalytic gentleman reappeared on the stage with a theory of pure psychology. The medical faculty, which was on hot bricks over the therapeutic innovations, heaved a sigh of relief as it watched the ground warming under the feet of the professional psychologists.

This, however, was not the end. The ears of the ethnologist began to tingle, the philosopher felt his gorge rise, and at last the moralist knew he must rush in. By this time psychoanalysis had become a public danger. The mob was on the alert. The Œdipus complex was a household word, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-table chat. Amateur analyses became the vogue. “Wait till you’ve been analyzed,” said one man to another, with varying intonation. A sinister look came into the eyes of the initiates—the famous, or infamous, Freud look. You could recognize it everywhere, wherever you went.

Psychoanalysts know what the end will be. They have crept in among us as healers and physicians; growing bolder, they have asserted their authority as scientists; two more minutes and they will appear as apostles. Have we not seen and heard the ex cathedra Jung? And does it need a prophet to discern that Freud is on the brink of a Weltanschauung—or at least a Menschanschauung, which is a much more risky affair? What detains him? Two things. First and foremost, the moral issue. And next, but more vital, he can’t get down to the rock on which he must build his church.

Let us look to ourselves. This new doctrine—it will be called no less—has been subtly and insidiously suggested to us, gradually inoculated into us. It is true that doctors are the priests, nay worse, the medicine-men of our decadent society. Psychoanalysis has made the most of the opportunity.

First and foremost the issue is a moral issue. It is not here a matter of reform, new moral values. It is the life or death of all morality. The leaders among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand. Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man. Let us fling the challenge, and then we can take sides in all fairness.

The psychoanalytic leaders know what they are about, and shrewdly keep quiet, going gently. Yet, however gently they go, they set the moral stones rolling. At every step the most innocent and unsuspecting analyst starts a little landslide. The old world is yielding under us. Without any direct attack, it comes loose under the march of the psychoanalyst, and we hear the dull rumble of the incipient avalanche. We are in for a debâcle.

But at least let us know what we are in for. If we are to rear a serpent against ourselves, let us at least refuse to nurse it in our temples or to call it the cock of Esculapius. It is time the white garb of the therapeutic cant was stripped off the psychoanalyst. And now that we feel the strange crackling and convulsion in our moral foundations, let us at least look at the house which we are bringing down over our heads so blithely.

Long ago we watched in frightened anticipation when Freud set out on his adventure into the hinterland of human consciousness. He was seeking for the unknown sources of the mysterious stream of consciousness. Immortal phrase of the immortal James! Oh stream of hell which undermined my adolescence! The stream of consciousness! I felt it streaming through my brain, in at one ear and out at the other. And again I was sure it went round in my cranium, like Homer’s Ocean, encircling my established mind. And sometimes I felt it must bubble up in the cerebellum and wind its way through all the convolutions of the true brain. Horrid stream! Whence did it come, and whither was it bound? The stream of consciousness!

And so, who could remain unmoved when Freud seemed suddenly to plunge towards the origins? Suddenly he stepped out of the conscious into the unconscious, out of the everywhere into the nowhere, like some supreme explorer. He walks straight through the wall of sleep, and we hear him rumbling in the cavern of dreams. The impenetrable is not impenetrable, unconsciousness is not nothingness. It is sleep, that wall of darkness which limits our day. Walk bang into the wall, and behold the wall isn’t there. It is the vast darkness of a cavern’s mouth, the cavern of anterior darkness whence issues the stream of consciousness.

With dilated hearts we watched Freud disappearing into the cavern of darkness, which is sleep and unconsciousness to us, darkness which issues in the foam of all our day’s consciousness. He was making for the origins. We watched his ideal candle flutter and go small. Then we waited, as men do wait, always expecting the wonder of wonders. He came back with dreams to sell.

But sweet heaven, what merchandise! What dreams, dear heart! What was there in the cave? Alas that we ever looked! Nothing but a huge slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and a myriad repulsive little horrors spawned between sex and excrement.

Is it true? Does the great unknown of sleep contain nothing else? No lovely spirits in the anterior regions of our being? None! Imagine the unspeakable horror of the repressions Freud brought home to us. Gagged, bound, maniacal repressions, sexual complexes, fæcal inhibitions, dream-monsters. We tried to repudiate them. But no, they were there, demonstrable. These were the horrid things that ate our souls and caused our helpless neuroses.

We had felt that perhaps we were wrong inside, but we had never imagined it so bad. However, in the name of healing and medicine we prepared to accept it all. If it was all just a result of illness, we were prepared to go through with it. The analyst promised us that the tangle of complexes would be unravelled, the obsessions would evaporate, the monstrosities would dissolve, sublimate, when brought into the light of day. Once all the dream-horrors were translated into full consciousness, they would sublimate into—well, we don’t quite know what. But anyhow, they would sublimate. Such is the charm of a new phrase that we accepted this sublimation process without further question. If our complexes were going to sublimate once they were surgically exposed to full mental consciousness, why, best perform the operation.

Thus analysis set off gaily on its therapeutic course. But like Hippolytus, we ran too near the sea’s edge. After all, if complexes exist only as abnormalities which can be removed, psychoanalysis has not far to go. Our own horses ran away with us. We began to realize that complexes were not just abnormalities. They were part of the stock-in-trade of the normal unconscious. The only abnormality, so far, lies in bringing them into consciousness.

This creates a new issue. Psychoanalysis, the moment it begins to demonstrate the nature of the unconscious, is assuming the rôle of psychology. Thus the new science of psychology proceeds to inform us that our complexes are not just mere interlockings in the mechanism of the psyche, as was taught by one of the first and most brilliant of the analysts, a man now forgotten. He fully realized that even the psyche itself depends on a certain organic, mechanistic activity, even as life depends on the mechanistic organism of the body. The mechanism of the psyche could have its hitches, certain parts could stop working, even as the parts of the body can stop their functioning. This arrest in some part of the functioning psyche gave rise to a complex, even as the stopping of one little cog-wheel in a machine will arrest a whole section of that machine. This was the origin of the complex-theory, purely mechanistic. Now the analyst found that a complex did not necessarily vanish when brought into consciousness. Why should it? Hence he decided that it did not arise from the stoppage of any little wheel. For it refused to disappear, no matter how many psychic wheels were started. Finally, then, a complex could not be regarded as the result of an inhibition.

Here is the new problem. If a complex is not caused by the inhibition of some so-called normal sex-impulse, what on earth is it caused by? It obviously refuses to sublimate—or to come undone when exposed and prodded. It refuses to answer to the promptings of normal sex-impulse. You can remove all possible inhibitions of the normal sex desire, and still you cannot remove the complex. All you have done is to make conscious a desire which previously was unconscious.

This is the moral dilemma of psychoanalysis. The analyst set out to cure neurotic humanity by removing the cause of the neurosis. He finds that the cause of neurosis lies in some unadmitted sex desire. After all he has said about inhibition of normal sex, he is brought at last to realize that at the root of almost every neurosis lies some incest-craving, and that this incest-craving is not the result of inhibition of normal sex-craving. Now see the dilemma—it is a fearful one. If the incest-craving is not the outcome of any inhibition of normal desire, if it actually exists and refuses to give way before any criticism, what then? What remains but to accept it as part of the normal sex-manifestation?

Here is an issue which analysis is perfectly willing to face. Among themselves the analysts are bound to accept the incest-craving as part of the normal sexuality of man, normal, but suppressed, because of moral and perhaps biological fear. Once, however, you accept the incest-craving as part of the normal sexuality of man, you must remove all repression of incest itself. In fact, you must admit incest as you now admit sexual marriage, as a duty even. Since at last it works out that neurosis is not the result of inhibition of so-called normal sex, but of inhibition of incest-craving. Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity. Therefore the inhibition of incest-craving is wrong, and this wrong is the cause of practically all modern neurosis and insanity.

Psychoanalysis will never openly state this conclusion. But it is to this conclusion that every analyst must, willy-nilly, consciously or unconsciously, bring his patient.

Trigant Burrow says that Freud’s unconscious does but represent our conception of conscious sexual life as this latter exists in a state of repression. Thus Freud’s unconscious amounts practically to no more than our repressed incest impulses. Again, Burrow says that it is knowledge of sex that constitutes sin, and not sex itself. It is when the mind turns to consider and know the great affective-passional functions and emotions that sin enters. Adam and Eve fell, not because they had sex, or even because they committed the sexual act, but because they became aware of their sex and of the possibility of the act. When sex became to them a mental object—that is, when they discovered that they could deliberately enter upon and enjoy and even provoke sexual activity in themselves, then they were cursed and cast out of Eden. Then man became self-responsible; he entered on his own career.

Both these assertions by Burrow seem to us brilliantly true. But must we inevitably draw the conclusion psychoanalysis draws? Because we discover in the unconscious the repressed body of our incest-craving, and because the recognition of desire, the making a mental objective of a certain desire causes the introduction of the sin motive, the desire in itself being beyond criticism or moral judgment, must we therefore accept the incest-craving as part of our natural desire and proceed to put it into practice, as being at any rate a lesser evil than neurosis and insanity?

It is a question. One thing, however, psychoanalysis all along the line fails to determine, and that is the nature of the pristine unconscious in man. The incest-craving is or is not inherent in the pristine psyche. When Adam and Eve became aware of sex in themselves, they became aware of that which was pristine in them, and which preceded all knowing. But when the analyst discovers the incest motive in the unconscious, surely he is only discovering a term of humanity’s repressed idea of sex. It is not even suppressed sex-consciousness, but repressed. That is, it is nothing pristine and anterior to mentality. It is in itself the mind’s ulterior motive. That is, the incest-craving is propagated in the pristine unconscious by the mind itself, even though unconsciously. The mind acts as incubus and procreator of its own horrors, deliberately unconsciously. And the incest motive is in its origin not a pristine impulse, but a logical extension of the existent idea of sex and love. The mind, that is, transfers the idea of incest into the affective-passional psyche, and keeps it there as a repressed motive.

This is as yet a mere assertion. It cannot be made good until we determine the nature of the true, pristine unconscious, in which all our genuine impulse arises—a very different affair from that sack of horrors which psychoanalysts would have us believe is source of motivity. The Freudian unconscious is the cellar in which the mind keeps its own bastard spawn. The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived from the very God who bade them be not conscious of it—it was not spawn produced by secondary propagation from the mental consciousness itself.

CHAPTER II
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM

It is obvious we cannot recover our moral footing until we can in some way determine the true nature of the unconscious. The word unconscious itself is a mere definition by negation and has no positive meaning. Freud no doubt prefers it for this reason. He rejects subconscious and preconscious, because both these would imply a sort of nascent consciousness, the shadowy half-consciousness which precedes mental realization. And by his unconscious he intends no such thing. He wishes rather to convey, we imagine, that which recoils from consciousness, that which reacts in the psyche away from mental consciousness. His unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which, though mental, ideal in its nature, yet is unwilling to expose itself to full recognition, and so recoils back into the affective regions and acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and usually destructive. The whole body of our repressions makes up our unconscious.

The question lies here: whether a repression is a primal impulse which has been deterred from fulfilment, or whether it is an idea which is refused enactment. Is a repression a repressed passional impulse, or is it an idea which we suppress and refuse to put into practice—nay, which we even refuse to own at all, a disowned, outlawed idea, which exists rebelliously outside the pale?

Man can inhibit the true passional impulses and so produce a derangement in the psyche. This is a truism nowadays, and we are grateful to psychoanalysis for helping to make it so. But man can do more than this. Finding himself in a sort of emotional cul de sac, he can proceed to deduce from his given emotional and passional premises conclusions which are not emotional or passional at all, but just logical, abstract, ideal. That is, a man finds it impossible to realize himself in marriage. He recognizes the fact that his emotional, even passional, regard for his mother is deeper than it ever could be for a wife. This makes him unhappy, for he knows that passional communion is not complete unless it be also sexual. He has a body of sexual passion which he cannot transfer to a wife. He has a profound love for his mother. Shut in between walls of tortured and increasing passion, he must find some escape or fall down the pit of insanity and death. What is the only possible escape? To seek in the arms of the mother the refuge which offers nowhere else. And so the incest-motive is born. All the labored explanations of the psychoanalysts are unnecessary. The incest motive is a logical deduction of the human reason, which has recourse to this last extremity, to save itself. Why is the human reason in peril? That is another story. At the moment we are merely considering the origin of the incest motive.

The logical conclusion of incest is, of course, a profound decision in the human soul, a decision affecting the deepest passional centers. It rouses the deepest instinctive opposition. And therefore it must be kept secret until this opposition is either worn away or persuaded away. Hence the repression and ultimate disclosure.

Now here we see the secret working of the process of idealism. By idealism we understand the motivizing of the great affective sources by means of ideas mentally derived. As for example the incest motive, which is first and foremost a logical deduction made by the human reason, even if unconsciously made, and secondly is introduced into the affective, passional sphere, where it now proceeds to serve as a principle for action.

This motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substituting of the mechanical principle.

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.

Having established so much, we can really approach the unconscious. By the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalyzable, undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact, soul would be a better word. By the unconscious we do mean the soul. But the word soul has been vitiated by the idealistic use, until nowadays it means only that which a man conceives himself to be. And that which a man conceives himself to be is something far different from his true unconscious. So we must relinquish the ideal word soul.

If, however, the unconscious is inconceivable, how do we know it at all? We know it by direct experience. All the best part of knowledge is inconceivable. We know the sun. But we cannot conceive the sun, unless we are willing to accept some theory of burning gases, some cause-and-effect nonsense. And even if we do have a mental conception of the sun as a sphere of blazing gas—which it certainly isn’t—we are just as far from knowing what blaze is. Knowledge is always a matter of whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing in full, and never a matter of mental conception merely. This is indeed the point of all full knowledge: that it is contained mainly within the unconscious, its mental or conscious reference being only a sort of extract or shadow.

It is necessary for us to know the unconscious, or we cannot live, just as it is necessary for us to know the sun. But we need not explain the unconscious, any more than we need explain the sun. We can’t do either, anyway. We know the sun by beholding him and watching his motions and feeling his changing power. The same with the unconscious. We watch it in all its manifestations, its unfolding incarnations. We watch it in all its processes and its unaccountable evolutions, and these we register.

For though the unconscious is the creative element, and though, like the soul, it is beyond all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet in its processes of self-realization it follows the laws of cause and effect. The processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the working out of this incomprehensible self-realization of the individual unconscious. The great laws of the universe are no more than the fixed habits of the living unconscious.

What we must needs do is to try to trace still further the habits of the true unconscious, and by mental recognition of these habits break the limits which we have imposed on the movement of the unconscious. For the whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious. We have to try to recognize the true nature and then leave the unconscious itself to prompt new movement and new being—the creative progress.

What we are suffering from now is the restriction of the unconscious within certain ideal limits. The more we force the ideal the more we rupture the true movement. Once we can admit the known, but incomprehensible, presence of the integral unconscious; once we can trace it home in ourselves and follow its first revealed movements; once we know how it habitually unfolds itself; once we can scientifically determine its laws and processes in ourselves: then at last we can begin to live from the spontaneous initial prompting, instead of from the dead machine-principles of ideas and ideals. There is a whole science of the creative unconscious, the unconscious in its law-abiding activities. And of this science we do not even know the first term. Yes, when we know that the unconscious appears by creation, as a new individual reality in every newly-fertilized germ-cell, then we know the very first item of the new science. But it needs a super-scientific grace before we can admit this first new item of knowledge. It means that science abandons its intellectualist position and embraces the old religious faculty. But it does not thereby become less scientific, it only becomes at last complete in knowledge.

CHAPTER III
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

It is useless to try to determine what is consciousness or what is knowledge. Who cares anyhow, since we know without definitions. But what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness. And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of our life, of all life.

We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or to a nettle, its own peculiar and integral consciousness. This throws us at once out of the ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap-consciousness. But let us not jump too far in one bound. Let us refrain from taking a sheer leap down the abyss of consciousness, down to the invertebrates and the protococci. Let us cautiously scramble down the human declivities. Or rather let us try to start somewhere near the foot of the calvary of human consciousness. Let us consider the child in the womb. Is the fœtus conscious? It must be, since it carries on an independent and progressive self-development. This consciousness obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cerebral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebration. And yet it is an integral, individual consciousness, having its own single purpose and progression. Where can it be centered, how can it operate, before even nerves are formed? For it does steadily and persistently operate, even spinning the nerves and brain as a web for its own motion, like some subtle spider.

What is the spinning spider of the first human consciousness—or rather, where is the center at which this consciousness lies and spins? Since there must be a center of consciousness in the tiny fœtus, it must have been there from the very beginning. There it must have been, in the first fused nucleus of the ovule. And if we could but watch this prime nucleus, we should no doubt realize that throughout all the long and incalculable history of the individual it still remains central and prime, the source and clue of the living unconscious, the origin. As in the first moment of conception, so to the end of life in the individual, the first nucleus remains the creative-productive center, the quick, both of consciousness and of organic development.

And where in the developed fœtus shall we look for this creative-productive quick? Shall we expect it in the brain or in the heart? Surely our own subjective wisdom tells us, what science can verify, that it lies beneath the navel of the folded fœtus. Surely that prime center, which is the very first nucleus of the fertilized ovule, lies situated beneath the navel of all womb-born creatures. There, from the beginning, it lay in its mysterious relation to the outer, active universe. There it lay, perfectly associated with the parent body. There it acted on its own peculiar independence, drawing the whole stream of creative blood upon itself, and, spinning within the parental blood-stream, slowly creating or bodying forth its own incarnate amplification. All the time between the quick of life in the fœtus and the great outer universe there exists a perfect correspondence, upon which correspondence the astrologers based their science in the days before mental consciousness had arrogated all knowledge unto itself.

The fœtus is not personally conscious. But then what is personality if not ideal in its origin? The fœtus is, however, radically, individually conscious. From the active quick, the nuclear center, it remains single and integral in its activity. At this center it distinguishes itself utterly from the surrounding universe, whereby both are modified. From this center the whole individual arises, and upon this center the whole universe, by implication, impinges. For the fixed and stable universe of law and matter, even the whole cosmos, would wear out and disintegrate if it did not rest and find renewal in the quick center of creative life in individual creatures.

And since this center has absolute location in the first fertilized nucleus, it must have location still in the developed fœtus, and in the mature man. And where is this location in the unborn infant? Beneath the burning influx of the navel. Where is it in the adult man? Still beneath the navel. As primal affective center it lies within the solar plexus of the nervous system.

We do not pretend to use technical language. But surely our meaning is plain even to correct scientists, when we assert that in all mammals the center of primal, constructive consciousness and activity lies in the middle front of the abdomen, beneath the navel, in the great nerve center called the solar plexus. How do we know? We feel it, as we feel hunger or love or hate. Once we know what we are, science can proceed to analyze our knowledge, demonstrate its truth or its untruth.

We all of us know what it is to handle a newborn, or at least a quite young infant. We know what it is to lay the hand on the round little abdomen, the round, pulpy little head. We know where is life, where is pulp. We have seen blind puppies, blind kittens crawling. They give strange little cries. Whence these cries? Are they mental exclamations? As in a ventriloquist, they come from the stomach. There lies the wakeful center. There speaks the first consciousness, the audible unconscious, in the squeak of these infantile things, which is so curiously and indescribably moving, reacting direct upon the great abdominal center, the preconscious mind in man.

There at the navel, the first rupture has taken place, the first break in continuity. There is the scar of dehiscence, scar at once of our pain and splendor of individuality. Here is the mark of our isolation in the universe, stigma and seal of our free, perfect singleness. Hence the lotus of the navel. Hence the mystic contemplation of the navel. It is the upper mind losing itself in the lower first-mind, that which is last in consciousness reverting to that which is first.

A mother will realize better than a philosopher. She knows the rupture which has finally separated her child into its own single, free existence. She knows the strange, sensitive rose of the navel: how it quivers conscious; all its pain, its want for the old connection; all its joy and chuckling exultation in sheer organic singleness and individual liberty.

The powerful, active psychic center in a new child is the great solar plexus of the sympathetic system. From this center the child is drawn to the mother again, crying, to heal the new wound, to re-establish the old oneness. This center directs the little mouth which, blind and anticipatory, seeks the breast. How could it find the breast, blind and mindless little mouth? But it needs no eyes nor mind. From the great first-mind of the abdomen it moves direct, with an anterior knowledge almost like magnetic propulsion, as if the little mouth were drawn or propelled to the maternal breast by vital magnetism, whose center of directive control lies in the solar plexus.

In a measure, this taking of the breast re-instates the old connection with the parent body. It is a strange sinking back to the old unison, the old organic continuum—a recovery of the pre-natal state. But at the same time it is a deep, avid gratification in drinking in the sustenance of a new individuality. It is a deep gratification in the exertion of a new, voluntary power. The child acts now separately from its own individual center and exerts still a control over the adjacent universe, the parent body.

So the warm life-stream passes again from the parent into the aching abdomen of the severed child. Life cannot progress without these ruptures, severances, cataclysms; pain is a living reality, not merely a deathly. Why haven’t we the courage for life-pains? If we could depart from our old tenets of the mind, if we could fathom our own unconscious sapience, we should find we have courage and to spare. We are too mentally domesticated.

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.

CHAPTER IV
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER

In asserting that the seat of consciousness in a young infant is in the abdomen, we do not pretend to suggest that all the other conscious-centers are utterly dormant. Once a child is born, the whole nervous and cerebral system comes awake, even the brain’s memories begin to glimmer, recognition and cognition soon begin to take place. But the spontaneous control and all the prime developing activity derive from the great affective centers of the abdomen. In the solar plexus is the first great fountain and issue of infantile consciousness. There, beneath the navel, lies the active human first-mind, the prime unconscious. From the moment of conception, when the first nucleus is formed, to the moment of death, when this same nucleus breaks again, the first great active center of human consciousness lies in the solar plexus.

The movement of development in any creature is, however, towards a florescent individuality. The ample, mature, unfolded individual stands perfect, perfect in himself, but also perfect in his harmonious relation to those nearest him and to all the universe. Whilst only the one great center of consciousness is awake, in the abdomen, the infant has no separate existence, his whole nature is contained in the conjunction with the parent. As soon as the complementary negative pole arouses the voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion, there is at once a retraction into independence and an assertion of singleness. The back strengthens itself.

But still the circuit of polarity, dual as it is, positive and negative from the positive-sympathetic and the negative-voluntary poles, still depends on the duality of two beings—it is still extra-individual. Each individual is vitally dependent on the other, for the life circuit.

Let us consider for a moment the kind of consciousness manifested at the two great primary centers. At the solar plexus the new psyche acts in a mode of attractive vitalism, drawing its objective unto itself as by vital magnetism. Here it drinks in, as it were, the contiguous universe, as during the womb-period it drank from the living continuum of the mother. It is darkly self-centered, exultant and positive in its own existence. It is all-in-all to itself, its own great subject. It knows no objective. It only knows its own vital potency, which potency draws the external object unto itself, subjectively, as the blood-stream was drawn into the fœtus, by subjective attraction. Here the psyche is to itself the All. Blindly self-positive.

This is the first mode of consciousness for every living thing—fascinating in all young things. The second half of the same mode commences as soon as direct activity sets up in the lumbar ganglion. Then the psyche recoils upon itself, in its first reaction against continuity with the outer universe. It recoils even against its own mode of assimilatory unison. Even it must break off, interrupt the great psychic-assimilation process which goes on at the sympathic center. It must recoil clean upon itself, break loose from any attachment whatsoever. And then it must try its power, often playfully.

This reaction is still subjective. When a child stiffens and draws away, when it screams with pure temper, it takes no note of that from which it recoils. It has no objective consciousness of that from which it reacts, the mother principally. It is like a swimmer endlessly kicking the water away behind him, with strong legs vividly active from the spinal ganglia. Like a man in a boat pushing off from the shore, it merely thrusts away, in order to ride free, ever more free. It is a purely subjective motion, in the negative direction.

After our long training in objectivation, and our epoch of worship of the objective mode, it is perhaps difficult for us to realize the strong, blind power of the unconscious on its first plane of activity. It is something quite different from what we call egoism—which is really mentally derived—for the ego is merely the sum-total of what we conceive ourselves to be. The powerful pristine subjectivity of the unconscious on its first plane is, on the other hand, the root of all our consciousness and being, darkly tenacious. Here we are grounded, say what we may. And if we break the spell of this first subjective mode, we break our own main root and live rootless, shiftless, groundless.

So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious, where the self is all-in-all unto itself, active in strong desirous psychic assimilation or in direct repudiation of the contiguous universe; this first plane of psychic activity, polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion of each individual but established in a circuit with the corresponding poles of another individual: this is the first scope of life and being for every human individual, and is beyond question. But we must again remark that the whole circuit is established between two individuals—that neither is a free thing-unto-itself—and that the very fact of established polarity between the two maintains that correspondence between the individual entity and the external universe which is the clue to all growth and development. The pure subjectivity of the first plane of consciousness is no more selfish than the pure objectivity of any other plane. How can it be? How can any form of pure, balanced polarity between two vital individuals be in any sense selfish on the part of one individual? We have got our moral values all wrong.

Save for healthy instinct, the moralistic human race would have exterminated itself long ago. And yet man must be moral, at the very root moral. The essence of morality is the basic desire to preserve the perfect correspondence between the self and the object, to have no trespass and no breach of integrity, nor yet any refaulture in the vitalistic interchange.

As yet we see the unconscious active on one plane only and entirely dependent on two individuals. But immediately following the establishment of the circuit of the powerful, subjective, abdominal plane comes the quivering of the whole system into a new degree of consciousness. And two great upper centers are awake.

The diaphragm really divides the human body, psychically as well as organically. The two centers beneath the diaphragm are centers of dark subjectivity, centripetal, assimilative. Once these are established, in the thorax the two first centers of objective consciousness become active, with ever-increasing intensity. The great thoracic sympathetic plexus rouses like a sun in the breast, the thoracic ganglion fills the shoulders with strength. There are now two planes of primary consciousness—the first, the lower, the subjective unconscious, active beneath the diaphragm, and the second upper, objective plane, active above the diaphragm, in the breast.

Let us realize that the subjective and objective of the unconscious are not the same as the subjective and the objective of the mind. Here we have no concepts to deal with, no static objects in the shape of ideas. We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. We are spared that hateful thing-in-itself, the idea, which is at once so all-important and so nothing. We are on straightforward solid ground; there is no abstraction.

The unconscious subjectivity is, in its positive manifestation, a great imbibing, and in its negative, a definite blind rejection. What we call an unconscious rejection. This subjectivity embraces alike creative emotion and physical function. It includes alike the sweet and untellable communion of love between the mother and child, the irrational reaction into separation between the two, and also the physical functioning of sucking and urination. Psychic and physical development run parallel, though they are forever distinct. The child sucking, the child urinating, this is the child acting from the great subjective centers, positive and negative. When the child sucks, there is a sympathetic circuit between it and the mother, in which the sympathetic plexus in the mother acts as negative or submissive pole to the corresponding plexus in the child. In urination there is a corresponding circuit in the voluntary centers, so that a mother seems gratified, and is gratified, inevitably, by the excremental functioning of her child. She experiences a true polar reaction.

Child and mother have, in the first place, no objective consciousness of each other, and certainly no idea of each other. Each is a blind desideratum to the other. The strong love between them is effectual in the great abdominal centers, where all love, real love, is primarily based. Of that reflected or moon-love, derived from the head, that spurious form of love which predominates to-day, we do not speak here. It has its root in the idea: the beloved is a mental objective, endlessly appreciated, criticized, scrutinized, exhausted. This has nothing to do with the active unconscious.

Having realized that the unconscious sparkles, vibrates, travels in a strong subjective stream from the abdominal centers, connecting the child directly with the mother at corresponding poles of vitalism, we realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not involved. The first relationship is neither personal nor biological—a fact which psychoanalysis has not succeeded in grasping.

For example. A child screams with terror at the touch of fur; another child loves the touch of fur, and purrs with pleasure. How now? Is it a complex? Did the father have a beard?

It is possible. But all-too-human. The physical result of rubbing fur is to set up a certain amount of frictional electricity. Frictional electricity is one of the sundering forces. It corresponds to the voluntary forces exerted at the lower spinal ganglia, the forces of anger and retraction into independence and power. An over-sympathetic child will scream with fear at the touch of fur; a refractory child will purr with pleasure. It is a reaction which involves even deeper things than sex—the primal constitution of the elementary psyche. A sympathetically overbalanced child has a horror of the electric-frictional force such as is emitted from the fur of a black cat, creature of rapacity. The same delights a fierce-willed child.

But we must admit at the same time that from earliest days a child is subject to the definite conscious psychic influences of its surroundings and will react almost automatically to a conscious-passional suggestion from the mother. In this way personal sex is prematurely evoked, and real complexes are set up. But these derive not from the spontaneous unconscious. They are in a way dictated from the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if involuntarily. Again they are a result of mental subjectivity, self-consciousness—so different from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious.

To return, however, to the pure unconscious. When the upper centers flash awake, a whole new field of consciousness and spontaneous activity is opened out. The great sympathetic plexus of the breast is the heart’s mind. This thoracic plexus corresponds directly in the upper man to the solar plexus in the lower. But it is a correspondence in creative opposition. From the sympathetic center of the breast as from a window the unconscious goes forth seeking its object, to dwell upon it. When a child leans its breast against its mother it becomes filled with a primal awareness of her—not of itself desiring her or partaking of her—but of her as she is in herself. This is the first great acquisition of primal objective knowledge, the objective content of the unconscious. Such knowledge we call the treasure of the heart. When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor. For by consciousness they meant, as usual, objective consciousness only. And from the cardiac plexus goes forth that strange effluence of the self which seeks and dwells upon the beloved, lovingly roving like the fingers of an infant or a blind man over the face of the treasured object, gathering her mould into itself and transferring her mould forever into its own deep unconscious psyche. This is the first acquiring of objective knowledge, sightless, unspeakably direct. It is a dwelling of the child’s unconscious within the form of the mother, the gathering of a pure, eternal impression. So the soul stores itself with dynamic treasures; it verily builds its own tissue of such treasure, the tissue of the developing body, each cell stored with creative dynamic content.

The breasts themselves are as two eyes. We do not know how much the nipples of the breast, both in man and woman, serve primarily as poles of vital conscious effluence and connection. We do not know how the nipples of the breast are as fountains leaping into the universe, or as little lamps irradiating the contiguous world, to the soul in quest.

But certainly from the passional conscious-center of the breast goes forth the first joyous discovery of the beloved, the first objective discovery of the contiguous universe, the first ministration of the self to that which is beyond the self. So, functionally, the mother ministers with the milk of her breast. But this is a yielding to the great lower plexus, the basic solar plexus. It is the breast as part also of the alimentary system—a special thing.

In sucking the hands also come awake. It is strange to notice the pictures by the old masters of the Madonna and Child. Sometimes the strange round belly of the Infant seems the predominant mystery-center, and sometimes from the tiny breast it is as if a delicate light glowed, the light of love. As if the breast should illumine the outer world in its seeking administering love. As if the breast of the Infant glimmered its light of discovery on the adoring Mother, and she bowed, submissive to the revelation.

The little hands and arms wave, circulate, trying to touch, to grasp, to know. To grasp in caress, not to reive. To grasp in order to identify themselves with the cherished discovery, to realize the beloved. To cherish, to realize the beloved. To administer the outward-seeking self to the beloved. We give this the exclusive name of love. But it is indeed only the one direction of love, the outgoing from the lovely center of the breast—the nipples seeking, the hands delicately, caressively exploring, the eyes at last waking to perception. The eyes, the hands, these wake and are alert from the center of the breast. But the ears and feet move from the deep lower centers—the recipient ears, imbibing vibrations, the feet which press the resistant earth, controlled from the powerful lower ganglia of the spine. And thus great scope of activity opens, in the hands that wave and explore, the eyes that try to perceive, the legs, the little knees that thrust, thrust away, the small feet that curl and twinkle upon themselves, ready for the obstinate earth.

And so, also a wholeness is established within the individual. The two fields of consciousness, the first upper and the first lower, are based upon a correspondence of polarity. The first great complex circuit is now set up within the individual, between the upper and lower centers. The individual consciousness has now its own integral independent existence and activity, apart from external connection. It has its right to be alone.

CHAPTER V
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED

Consciousness develops on successive planes. On each plane there is the dual polarity, positive and negative, of the sympathetic and voluntary nerve centers. The first plane is established between the poles of the sympathetic solar plexus and the voluntary lumbar ganglion. This is the active first plane of the subjective unconscious, from which the whole of consciousness arises.

Immediately succeeding the first plane of subjective dynamic consciousness arises the corresponding first plane of objective consciousness, the objective unconscious, polarized in the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion, in the breast. There is a perfect correspondence in difference between the first abdominal and the first thoracic planes. These two planes polarize each other in a fourfold polarity, which makes the first great field of individual, self-dependent consciousness.

Each pole of the active unconscious manifests a specific activity and gives rise to a specific kind of dynamic or creative consciousness. On each plane, the negative voluntary pole complements the positive sympathetic pole, and yet the consciousness originating from the complementary poles is not merely negative versus positive, it is categorically different, opposite. Each is pure and perfect in itself.

But the moment we enter the two planes of corresponding consciousness, lower and upper, we find a whole new range of complements. The upper, dynamic-objective plane is complementary to the lower, dynamic-subjective. The mystery of creative opposition exists all the time between the two planes, and this unison in opposition between the two planes forms the first whole field of consciousness. Within the individual the polarity is fourfold. In a relation between two individuals the polarity is already eightfold.

Now before we can have any sort of scientific, comprehensive psychology we shall have to establish the nature of the consciousness at each of the dynamic poles—the nature of the consciousness, the direction of the dynamic-vital flow, the resultant physical-organic development and activity. This we must do before we can even begin to consider a genuine system of education. Education now is widely at sea. Having ceased to steer by the pole-star of the mind, having ceased to aim at the cramming of the intellect, it veers hither and thither hopelessly and absurdly. Education can never become a serious science until the human psyche is properly understood. And the human psyche cannot begin to be understood until we enter the dark continent of the unconscious. Having begun to explore the unconscious, we find we must go from center to center, chakra to chakra, to use an old esoteric word. We must patiently determine the psychic manifestation at each center, and moreover, as we go, we must discover the psychic results of the interaction, the polarized interaction between the dynamic centers both within and without the individual.

Here is a real job for the scientist, a job which eternity will never see finished though even to-morrow may see it well begun. It is a job which will at last free us from the most hateful of all shackles, the shackles of ideas and ideals. It is a great task of the liberators, those who work forever for the liberation of the free spontaneous psyche, the effective soul.

In these few chapters we hope to hint at the establishment of the first field of the unconscious—at the nature of the consciousness manifested at each pole—and at the already complex range of dynamic polarity between the various poles. So far we have given the merest suggestion of the nature of the first plane of the unconscious and have attempted the opening of the second or upper plane. We profess no scientific exactitude, particularly in terminology. We merely wish intelligibly to open a way.

To balance the solar plexus wakes the great plexus of the breast. In our era this plexus is the great planet of our psychic universe. In the previous sympathetic era the flower of the universal blossomed in the navel. But since Egypt the sun of creative activity beams from the breast, the heart of the supreme Man. This is to us the source of light—the loving heart, the Sacred Heart. Against this we contrast the devouring darkness of the lower man, the devouring whirlpool beneath the navel. Even theosophists don’t realize that the universal lotus really blossoms in the abdomen—that our lower man, our dark, devouring whirlpool, was once the creative source, in human estimation.

But in calling the heart the sun, the source of light, we are biologically correct even. For the roots of vision are in the cardiac plexus. But if we were to consider the heart itself, not its great nerve plexus, we should have to go further than the nervous system. If we had to consider the whole lambent blood-stream, we should have to descend too deep for our unpractised minds. Suffice it here to hint that the solar plexus is the first and main clue to the great alimentary-sexual activity in man, an activity at once functional and creatively emotional, whilst the cardiac plexus is first and main clue to the respiratory system and the active-productive manifestations. The mouth and nostrils are gates to each great center, upper and lower—even the breasts have this duality. Yet the clue to respiration and hand activity and vision is in the breast, while the clue to alimentation and passion and sex is in the lower centers. The duality goes so far and is so profound. And the polarity! The great organs, as well as the lymphatic glands, depend each on its own specific center of the unconscious; each is derived from a specific dynamic conscious-clue, what we might almost call a soul-cell. The inherent unconscious, or soul, is the first nucleus subdivided, and from its own subdivisions produced, from its own still-creative constellated nuclei, the organs, glands, nerve-centers of the human organism. This is our answer to materialism and idealism alike. The nuclear unconscious brought forth organs and consciousness alike. And the great nuclei of the unconscious still lie active in the great living nerve-centers, which nerve centers, from the original solar-plexus to the conclusive brain, form one great chain of dual polarity and amplified consciousness.

All this is a mere incoherent stammering, broken first-words. To return to the direct path of our progress. It is not merely a metaphor, to call the cardiac plexus the sun, the Light. It is metaphor in the first place, because the conscious effluence which proceeds from this first upper center in the breast goes forth and plays upon its external object, as phosphorescent waves might break upon a ship and reveal its form. The transferring of the objective knowledge to the psyche is almost the same as vision. It is root-vision. It happens before the eyes open. It is the first tremendous mode of apprehension, still dark, but moving towards light. It is the eye in the breast. Psychically, it is basic objective apprehension. Dynamically, it is love, devotional, administering love.

Now we make already a discrimination between the two natures, even of this first upper consciousness. First from the breast flows the devotional, self-outpouring of love, love which gives its all to the beloved. And back again returns to the ingathered objective consciousness, the first objective content of the psyche.

This argues the dual polarity. From the positive pole of the cardiac plexus flows out that effluence which we call selfless love. It is really self-devoting love, not self-less. This is the one form of love we recognize. But from the strong ganglion of the shoulders proceeds the negative circuit, which searches and explores the beloved, bringing back pure objective apprehension, not critical, in the mental sense, and yet passionally discriminative.

Let us discriminate between the two upper poles. From the sympathetic heart goes forth pure administering, like sunbeams. But from the strong thoracic center of the shoulders is exerted a strong rejective force, a force which, pressing upon the object of attention, in the mode of separation, succeeds in transferring to itself the impression of the object to which it has attended. This is the other half of devotional love—perfect knowledge of the beloved.

Now this knowledge in itself argues a contradistinction between the lover and the beloved. It is the very mould of the contradistinction. It is the impress upon the lover of that which was separate from him, resistant to him, in the beloved. Objective knowledge is always of this kind—a knowledge based on unchangeable difference, a knowledge truly of the gulf that lies between the two beings nearest to each other.

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.

CHAPTER VI
HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

The aim of this little book is merely to establish the smallest foothold in the swamp of vagueness which now goes by the name of the unconscious. At last we form some sort of notion what the unconscious actually is. It is that active spontaneity which rouses in each individual organism at the moment of fusion of the parent nuclei, and which, in polarized connection with the external universe, gradually evolves or elaborates its own individual psyche and corpus, bringing both mind and body forth from itself. Thus it would seem that the term unconscious is only another word for life. But life is a general force, whereas the unconscious is essentially single and unique in each individual organism; it is the active, self-evolving soul bringing forth its own incarnation and self-manifestation. Which incarnation and self-manifestation seems to be the whole goal of the unconscious soul: the whole goal of life. Thus it is that the unconscious brings forth not only consciousness, but tissue and organs also. And all the time the working of each organ depends on the primary spontaneous-conscious center of which it is the issue—if you like, the soul-center. And consciousness is like a web woven finally in the mind from the various silken strands spun forth from the primal center of the unconscious.

But the unconscious is never an abstraction, never to be abstracted. It is never an ideal entity. It is always concrete. In the very first instance, it is the glinting nucleus of the ovule. And proceeding from this, it is the chain or constellation of nuclei which derive directly from this first spark. And further still it is the great nerve-centers of the human body, in which the primal and pristine nuclei still act direct. The nuclei are centers of spontaneous consciousness. It seems as if their bright grain were germ-consciousness, consciousness germinating forever. If that is a mystery, it is not my fault. Certainly it is not mysticism. It is obvious, demonstrable scientific fact, to be verified under the microscope and within the human psyche, subjectively and objectively, both. Of course, the subjective verification is what men kick at. Thin-minded idealists cannot bear any appeal to their bowels of comprehension.

We can quite tangibly deal with the human unconscious. We trace its source and centers in the great ganglia and nodes of the nervous system. We establish the nature of the spontaneous consciousness at each of these centers; we determine the polarity and the direction of the polarized flow. And from this we know the motion and individual manifestation of the psyche itself; we also know the motion and rhythm of the great organs of the body. For at every point psyche and functions are so nearly identified that only by holding our breath can we realize their duality in identification—a polarized duality once more. But here is no place to enter the great investigation of the duality and polarization of the vital-creative activity and the mechanico-material activity. The two are two in one, a polarized quality. They are unthinkably different.

On the first field of human conscious—the first plane of the unconscious—we locate four great spontaneous centers, two below the diaphragm, two above. These four centers control the four greatest organs. And they give rise to the whole basis of human consciousness. Functional and psychic at once, this is their first polar duality.

But the polarity is further. The horizontal division of the diaphragm divides man forever into his individual duality, the duality of the upper and lower man, the two great bodies of upper and lower consciousness and function. This is the horizontal line.

The vertical division between the voluntary and the sympathetic systems, the line of division between the spinal system and the great plexus-system of the front of the human body, forms the second distinction into duality. It is the great difference between the soft, recipient front of the body and the wall of the back. The front of the body is the live end of the magnet. The back is the closed opposition. And again there are two parallel streams of function and consciousness, vertically separate now. This is the vertical line of division. And the horizontal line and the vertical line form the cross of all existence and being. And even this is not mysticism—no more than the ancient symbols used in botany or biology.

On the first field of human consciousness, which is the basis of life and consciousness, are the four first poles of spontaneity. These have their fourfold polarity within the individual, again figured by the cross. But the individual is never purely a thing-by-himself. He cannot exist save in polarized relation to the external universe, a relation both functional and psychic-dynamic. Development takes place only from the polarized circuits of the dynamic unconscious, and these circuits must be both individual and extra-individual. There must be the circuit of which the complementary pole is external to the individual.

That is, in the first place there must be the other individual. There must be a polarized connection with the other individual—or even other individuals. On the first field there are four poles in each individual. So that the first, the basic field of extra-individual consciousness contains eight poles—an eightfold polarity, a fourfold circuit. It may be that between two individuals, even mother and child, the polarity may be established only fourfold, a dual circuit. It may be that one circuit of spontaneous consciousness may never be fully established. This means, for a child, a certain deficiency in development, a psychic inadequacy.

So we are again face to face with the basic problem of human conduct. No human being can develop save through the polarized connection with other beings. This circuit of polarized unison precedes all mind and all knowing. It is anterior to and ascendant over the human will. And yet the mind and the will can both interfere with the dynamic circuit, an idea, like a stone wedged in a delicate machine, can arrest one whole process of psychic interaction and spontaneous growth.

How then? Man doth not live by bread alone. It is time we made haste to settle the bread question, which after all is only the A B C of social economies, and proceeded to devote our attention to this much more profound and vital question: how to establish and maintain the circuit of vital polarity from which the psyche actually develops, as the body develops from the circuit of alimentation and respiration. We have reached the stage where we can settle the alimentation and respiration problems almost off-hand. But woe betide us, the unspeakable agony we suffer from the failure to establish and maintain the vital circuits between ourselves and the effectual correspondent, the other human being, other human beings, and all the extraneous universe. The tortures of psychic starvation which civilized people proceed to suffer, once they have solved for themselves the bread-and-butter problem of alimentation, will not bear thought. Delicate, creative desire, sending forth its fine vibrations in search of the true pole of magnetic rest in another human being or beings, how it is thwarted, insulated by a whole set of India-rubber ideas and ideals and conventions, till every form of perversion and death-desire sets in! How can we escape neuroses? Psychoanalysis won’t tell us. But a mere shadow of understanding of the true unconscious will give us the hint.

The amazingly difficult and vital business of human relationship has been almost laughably underestimated in our epoch. All this nonsense about love and unselfishness, more crude and repugnant than savage fetish-worship. Love is a thing to be learned, through centuries of patient effort. It is a difficult, complex maintenance of individual integrity throughout the incalculable processes of interhuman-polarity. Even on the first great plane of consciousness, four prime poles in each individual, four powerful circuits possible between two individuals, and each of the four circuits to be established to perfection and yet maintained in pure equilibrium with all the others. Who can do it? Nobody. Yet we have all got to do it, or else suffer ascetic tortures of starvation and privation or of distortion and overstrain and slow collapse into corruption. The whole of life is one long, blind effort at an established polarity with the outer universe, human and non-human; and the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is our own fault.

The actual evolution of the individual psyche is a result of the interaction between the individual and the outer universe. Which means that just as a child in the womb grows as a result of the parental blood-stream which nourishes the vital quick of the fœtus, so does every man and woman grow and develop as a result of the polarized flux between the spontaneous self and some other self or selves. It is the circuit of vital flux between itself and another being or beings which brings about the development and evolution of every individual psyche and physique. This is a law of life and creation, from which we cannot escape. Ascetics and voluptuaries both try to dodge this main condition, and both succeed perhaps for a generation. But after two generations all collapses. Man doth not live by bread alone. He lives even more essentially from the nourishing creative flow between himself and another or others.

This is the reality of the extra-individual circuits of polarity, those established between two or more individuals. But a corresponding reality is that of the internal, purely individual polarity—the polarity within a man himself of his upper and lower consciousness, and his own voluntary and sympathetic modes. Here is a fourfold interaction within the self. And from this fourfold reaction within the self results that final manifestation which we know as mind, mental consciousness.

The brain is, if we may use the word, the terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is a creative flux into a certain fixed cypher. It prints off, like a telegraph instrument, the glyphs and grafic representations which we call percepts, concepts, ideas. It produces a new reality—the ideal. The idea is another static entity, another unit of the mechanical-active and materio-static universe. It is thrown off from life, as leaves are shed from a tree, or as feathers fall from a bird. Ideas are the dry, unliving, inscutient plumage which intervenes between us and the circumambient universe, forming at once an insulator and an instrument for the subduing of the universe. The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not a creative reality.

Once the mind is awake, being in itself a finality, it feels very assured. “The word became flesh, and began to put on airs,” says Norman Douglas wittily. It is exactly what happens. Mentality, being automatic in its principle like the machine, begins to assume life. It begins to affect life, to pretend to make and unmake life. “In the beginning was the Word.” This is the presumptuous masquerading of the mind. The Word cannot be the beginning of life. It is the end of life, that which falls shed. The mind is the dead end of life. But it has all the mechanical force of the non-vital universe. It is a great dynamo of super-mechanical force. Given the will as accomplice, it can even arrogate its machine-motions and automatizations over the whole of life, till every tree becomes a clipped tea-pot and every man a useful mechanism. So we see the brain, like a great dynamo and accumulator, accumulating mechanical force and presuming to apply this mechanical force-control to the living unconscious, subjecting everything spontaneous to certain machine-principles called ideals or ideas.

And the human will assists in this humiliating and sterilizing process. We don’t know what the human will is. But we do know that it is a certain faculty belonging to every living organism, the faculty for self-determination. It is a strange faculty of the soul itself, for its own direction. The will is indeed the faculty which every individual possesses from the very moment of conception, for exerting a certain control over the vital and automatic processes of his own evolution. It does not depend originally on mind. Originally it is a purely spontaneous control-factor of the living unconscious. It seems as if, primarily, the will and the conscience were identical, in the pre-mental state. It seems as if the will were given as a great balancing faculty, the faculty whereby automatization is prevented in the evolving psyche. The spontaneous will reacts at once against the exaggeration of any one particular circuit of polarity. Any vital circuit—a fact known to psychoanalysis. And against this automatism, this degradation from the spontaneous-vital reality into the mechanic-material reality, the human soul must always struggle. And the will is the power which the unique self possesses to right itself from automatism.

Sometimes, however, the free psyche really collapses, and the will identifies itself with an automatic circuit. Then a complex is set up, a paranoia. Then incipient madness sets in. If the identification continues, the derangement becomes serious. There may come sudden jolts of dislocation of the whole psychic flow, like epilepsy. Or there may come any of the known forms of primary madness. The second danger is that the will shall identify itself with the mind and become an instrument of the mind. The same process of automatism sets up, only now it is slower. The mind proceeds to assume control over every organic-psychic circuit. The spontaneous flux is destroyed, and a certain automatic circuit substituted. Now an automatic establishment of the psyche must, like the building of a machine, proceed according to some definite fixed scheme, based upon certain fixed principles. And it is here that ideals and ideas enter. They are the machine-plan and the machine-principles of an automatized psyche.

So, humanity proceeds to derange itself, to automatize itself from the mental consciousness. It is a process of derangement, just as the fixing of the will upon any other primary process is a derangement. It is a long, slow development in madness. Quite justly do the advanced Russian and French writers acclaim madness as a great goal. It is the genuine goal of self-automatism, mental-conscious supremacy.

True, we must all develop into mental consciousness. But mental-consciousness is not a goal; it is a cul-de-sac. It provides us only with endless appliances which we can use for the all-too-difficult business of coming to our spontaneous-creative fullness of being. It provides us with means to adjust ourselves to the external universe. It gives us further means for subduing the external, materio-mechanical universe to our great end of creative life. And it gives us plain indications of how to avoid falling into automatism, hints for the applying of the will, the loosening of false, automatic fixations, the brave adherence to a profound soul-impulse. This is the use of the mind—a great indicator and instrument. The mind as author and director of life is anathema.

So, the few things we have to say about the unconscious end for the moment. There is almost nothing said. Yet it is a beginning. Still remain to be revealed the other great centers of the unconscious. We know four: two pairs. In all there are seven planes. That is, there are six dual centers of spontaneous polarity, and then the final one. That is, the great upper and lower consciousness is only just broached—the further heights and depths are not even hinted at. Nay, in public it would hardly be allowed us to hint at them. There is so much to know, and every step of the progress in knowledge is a death to the human idealism which governs us now so ruthlessly and vilely. It must die, and we will break free. But what tyranny is so hideous as that of an automatically ideal humanity?

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Table of Contents

- PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
- CONTENTS
- CHAPTER I PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY
- CHAPTER II THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM
- CHAPTER III THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS
- CHAPTER IV THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER
- CHAPTER V THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED

- CHAPTER VI HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE