PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 AND THE 
 
 UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE 
 
PAULINE FORE MOFFITT 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 GENERAL LIBRARY, BERKELEY 
 
 
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 AMEEICA 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY 9 
 II. THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEAL- 
 ISM 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 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 AND THE 
 
 UNCONSCIOUS 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS 
 
 and the 
 
 UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 vehe- 
 mently 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 
 
 9 
 
I O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 of relief as it watched the ground warming 
 under the feet of the professional psycholo- 
 gists. 
 
 This, however, was not the end. The ears 
 of the ethnologist began to tingle, the phil- 
 osopher 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 QEdipus com- 
 plex was a household word, the incest motive 
 a commonplace of tea-table chat. Amateur 
 analyses became the vogue. "Wait till youVe 
 been analyzed," said one man to another, with 
 varying intonation. A sinister look came into 
 the eyes of the initiates the famous, or in- 
 famous, 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 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY 1 1 
 
 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 in- 
 oculated 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 is- 
 sue. It is not here a matter of reform, new 
 
1 2 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 moral values. It is the life or death of all 
 morality. The leaders among the psycho- 
 analysts know what they have in hand. Prob- 
 ably most of their followers are ignorant, and 
 therefore pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts 
 to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is out, un- 
 der 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 debacle. 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS VS. MORALITY 13 
 
 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 antici- 
 pation 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. Im- 
 mortal phrase of the immortal James! Oh 
 stream of hell which undermined my adoles- 
 cence! 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 
 
14 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 went round in my cranium, like Homer's 
 Ocean, encircling my established mind. And 
 sometimes I felt it must bubble up in the cere- 
 bellum and wind its way through all the con- 
 volutions 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 con- 
 scious into the unconscious, out of the every- 
 where 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 nothing- 
 ness. 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 dark- 
 ness of a cavern's mouth, the cavern of an- 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY 15 
 
 terior darkness whence issues the stream of 
 consciousness. 
 
 With dilated hearts we watched Freud dis- 
 appearing into the cavern of darkness, which 
 is sleep and unconsciousness to us, darkness 
 which issues in the foam of all our day's con- 
 sciousness. He was making for the origins. 
 We watched his ideal candle flutter and go 
 small. Then we waited, as men do wait, al- 
 ways 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! Noth- 
 ing 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! Im- 
 
1 6 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 agine the unspeakable horror of the repres- 
 sions Freud brought home to us. Gagged, 
 bound, maniacal repressions, sexual com- 
 plexes, faecal 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 medi- 
 cine 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 un- 
 ravelled, 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 con- 
 sciousness, they would sublimate into well, 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY 17 
 
 we don't quite know what. But anyhow, they 
 would sublimate. Such is the charm of a new 
 phrase that we accepted this sublimation proc- 
 ess without further question. If our com- 
 plexes were going to sublimate once they were 
 surgically exposed to full mental conscious- 
 ness, 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 role of psy- 
 
1 8 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 chology. 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 func- 
 tioning. This arrest in some part of the func- 
 tioning 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 van- 
 ish when brought into consciousness. Why 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY 19 
 
 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 in- 
 hibitions 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 psychoanal- 
 ysis. The analyst set out to cure neurotic hu- 
 manity by removing the cause of the neurosis. 
 
20 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 in- 
 hibition 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 re- 
 fuses 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 ana- 
 lysts 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 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS VS. MORALITY 21 
 
 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 nor- 
 mal 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 prac- 
 tically 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 uncon- 
 scious 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 re- 
 
22 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 pressed 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-pas- 
 sional 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? Be- 
 cause we discover in the unconscious the re- 
 pressed body of our incest-craving, and be- 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS VS. MORALITY 23 
 
 cause 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 judg- 
 ment, must we therefore accept the incest-crav- 
 ing 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, psy- 
 choanalysis all along the line fails to deter- 
 mine, and that is the nature of the pristine un- 
 conscious in man. The incest-craving is or is 
 not inherent in the pristine psyche. When 
 Adam and Eve became aware of sex in them- 
 selves, 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 re- 
 pressed idea of sex. It is not even suppressed 
 
24 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 in- 
 cubus and procreator of its own horrors, de- 
 liberately unconsciously. And the incest mo- 
 tive 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 psychoana- 
 lysts would have us believe is source of mo- 
 tivity. The Freudian unconscious is the cellar 
 
PSYCHOANALYSIS vs. MORALITY 25 
 
 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 de- 
 rived 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 nega- 
 tion 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 conscious- 
 ness, the shadowy half-consciousness which 
 precedes mental realization. And by his un- 
 conscious he intends no such thing. He wishes 
 rather to convey, we imagine, that which re- 
 coils from consciousness, that which reacts in 
 the psyche away from mental consciousness. 
 
 26 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 27 
 
 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 repres- 
 sion is a primal impulse which has been de- 
 terred from fulfilment, or whether it is an 
 idea which is refused enactment. Is a repres- 
 sion 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 grate- 
 
28 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 ful to psychoanalysis for helping to make it so. 
 But man can do more than this. Finding him- 
 self 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 com- 
 munion is not complete unless it be also sexual. 
 He has a body of sexual passion which he can- 
 not 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 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 29 
 
 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 hu- 
 man 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 de- 
 cision 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 dis- 
 closure. 
 
 Now here we see the secret working of the 
 process of idealism. By idealism we under- 
 stand the motivizing of the great affective 
 
30 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 con- 
 sciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, 
 creative life, and the substituting of the 
 mechanical principle. 
 
 It is obvious that the ideal becomes a me- 
 chanical principle, if it be applied to the af- 
 fective 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 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 31 
 
 ideal peoples are the most completely ma- 
 identical with pure materialism, and the most 
 terial. Ideal and material are identical. The 
 ideal is but the god in the machine the little, 
 fixed, machine principle which works the hu- 
 man 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 con- 
 clusion of our ideals, when these ideals have 
 to be carried into passional effect. And ideal- 
 ism has no escape from logic. And once he 
 has built himself in the shape of any ideal, 
 
32 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 pls-aller as a means of escape, we 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 33 
 
 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 psychoana- 
 lysis 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 
 
34 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 elec- 
 tricity is a homogeneous force, conceivable 
 apart from any incorporation. But life is in- 
 conceivable 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 re- 
 ligions. 
 
 The beginning of life is in the beginning of 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 35 
 
 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 indi- 
 vidual. It is a specific individual, not a math- 
 ematical unit, like a unit of force. 
 
 Where the individual begins, life begins. 
 The two are inseparable, life and individu- 
 ality. And also, where the individual begins, 
 the unconscious, which is the specific life-mo- 
 tive, 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 or- 
 ganism arises. At the moment of conception, 
 when a procreative male nucleus fuses with 
 
36 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 the nucleus of the female germ, at that mo- 
 ment 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 conscious- 
 ness, 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 nlhllo nihll 
 fit. It is true that an individual is also gen- 
 erated. By the fusion of two nuclei, male and 
 female, we understand the process of genera- 
 tion. 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 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 37 
 
 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 permuta- 
 tion-and-combination of elements contained 
 in the natures of the parents. There is in the 
 nature of the infant that which is utterly un- 
 known in the natures of the parents, something 
 which could never be derived from the natures 
 of all the existent individuals or previous in- 
 dividuals. There is in the nature of the infant 
 something entirely new, underived, underiv- 
 able, something which is, and which will for- 
 ever remain, causeless. And this something 
 is the unanalyzable, indefinable reality of in- 
 
38 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 dividuality. Every time at the moment of 
 conception of every higher organism an indi- 
 vidual 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 be- 
 ing 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 indi- 
 vidual 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 na- 
 ture the origin of which cannot be found 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 39 
 
 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 de- 
 fiance even of reason. 
 
 Having established so much, we can really 
 approach the unconscious. By the uncon- 
 scious 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 him- 
 
40 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 self 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 inconceiv- 
 able, 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 burn- 
 ing 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 cer- 
 tainly isn't we are just as far from knowing 
 what blaze is. Knowledge is always a matter 
 of whole experience, what St. Paul calls know- 
 ing in full, and never a matter of mental con- 
 ception merely. This is indeed the point of 
 all full knowledge: that it is contained mainly 
 within the unconscious, its mental or conscious 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 41 
 
 reference being only a sort of extract or 
 shadow. 
 
 It is necessary for us to know the uncon- 
 scious, or we cannot live, just as it is necessary 
 for us to know the sun. But we need not ex- 
 plain the unconscious, any more than we need 
 explain the sun. We can't do either, anyway. 
 We know the sun by beholding him and watch- 
 ing 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 work- 
 
42 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 ing out of this incomprehensible self-realiza- 
 tion 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 up- 
 on the unconscious. We have to try to recog- 
 nize the true nature and then leave the uncon- 
 scious itself to prompt new movement and new 
 being the creative progress. 
 
 What we are suffering from now is the re- 
 striction of the unconscious within certain 
 ideal limits. The more we force the ideal the 
 
THE INCEST MOTIVE AND IDEALISM 43 
 
 more we rupture the true movement. Once 
 we can admit the known, but incomprehen- 
 sible, 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 proc- 
 esses 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 crea- 
 tion, 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 
 
44 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 means that science abandons its intellectualist 
 position and embraces the old religious fac- 
 ulty. But it does not thereby become less sci- 
 entific, 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 defini- 
 tions. But what we fail to know, yet what we 
 must know, is the nature of the pristine con- 
 sciousness 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 con- 
 
 45 
 
46 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 sciousness. 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 de- 
 clivities. Or rather let us try to start some- 
 where near the foot of the calvary of human 
 consciousness. Let us consider the child in 
 the womb. Is the foetus conscious? It must 
 be, since it carries on an independent and 
 progressive self-development. This conscious- 
 ness obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cere- 
 bral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebra- 
 tion. And yet it is an integral, individual con- 
 sciousness, 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, 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 47 
 
 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 hu- 
 man consciousness or rather, where is the 
 center at which this consciousness lies and 
 spins? Since there must be a center of con- 
 sciousness in the tiny foetus, 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 his- 
 tory of the individual it still remains central 
 and prime, the source and clue of the living 
 unconscious, the origin. As in the first mo- 
 ment of conception, so to the end of life in the 
 individual, the first nucleus remains the crea- 
 tive-productive center, the quick, both of con- 
 sciousness and of organic development. 
 
 And where in the developed foetus shall we 
 
48 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 foetus. 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 re- 
 lation to the outer, active universe. There it 
 lay, perfectly associated with the parent body. 
 There it acted on its own peculiar indepen- 
 dence, 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 
 foetus and the great outer universe there ex- 
 ists a perfect correspondence, upon which cor- 
 respondence the astrologers based their sci- 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 49 
 
 ence in the days before mental consciousness 
 had arrogated all knowledge unto itself. 
 
 The foetus is not personally conscious. But 
 then what is personality if not ideal in its 
 origin? The foetus is, however, radically, in- 
 dividually conscious. From the active quick, 
 the nuclear center, it remains single and in- 
 tegral in its activity. At this center it dis- 
 tinguishes 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 impli- 
 cation, 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 
 
50 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 location still in the developed foetus, 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 lan- 
 guage. 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 un- 
 truth. 
 
 We all of us know what it is to handle a new- 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 51 
 
 born, 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 crawl- 
 ing. 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 aud- 
 ible unconscious, in the squeak of these in- 
 fantile things, which is so curiously and inde- 
 scribably 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 uni- 
 
52 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 verse, 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 phil- 
 osopher. She knows the rupture which has 
 finally separated her child into its own single, 
 free existence. She knows the strange, sensi- 
 tive rose of the navel: how it quivers con- 
 scious; all its pain, its want for the old con- 
 nection; all its joy and chuckling exultation 
 in sheer organic singleness and individual lib- 
 erty. 
 
 The powerful, active psychic center in a new 
 child is the great solar plexus of the sym- 
 pathetic system. From this center the child 
 is drawn to the mother again, crying, to heal 
 the new wound, to re-establish the old oneness. 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 53 
 
 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 al- 
 most like magnetic propulsion, as if the little 
 mouth were drawn or propelled to the mater- 
 nal 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 recov- 
 ery 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 sepa- 
 rately from its own individual center and ex- 
 
54 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 erts 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 sapi- 
 ence, 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 plas- 
 mic, nascent darkness. Yet from the belly it 
 knows, with a directness of knowledge that 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 55 
 
 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, unspeak- 
 able 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 materializa- 
 tion before they can come to expression. 
 
 It is like a lovely, suave, fluid, creative elec- 
 tricity that flows in a circuit between the great 
 nerve-centers in mother and child. The elec- 
 tricity 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 sepa- 
 
56 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 rated beings. It establishes in each that first 
 primal consciousness which is the sacred, all- 
 containing head-stream of all our conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 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 won- 
 derful 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 crea- 
 tivity. 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 single- 
 ness of each being, a singleness equilibrized, 
 polarized in one by the counter-posing single- 
 ness of the other. 
 
 So the child. In its wonderful unison with 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 57 
 
 the mother it is at the same time extricating 
 itself into single, separate, independent ex- 
 istence. 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 sud- 
 denly; 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 
 
58 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 the ego. The scream of asserted isolation. 
 The scream of revolt from connection, the re- 
 volt from union. There is a violent anti- 
 maternal motion, anti-everything. There is a 
 refractory, bad-tempered negation of every- 
 thing, 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 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 59 
 
 implicated, just as they would be if the air 
 were surcharged with electricity. The mother 
 is perhaps less affected because she under- 
 stands 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 uni- 
 verse. It applies direct to the mother. But 
 it affects everybody. The great centers of re- 
 sponse vibrate with a maddening, sometimes 
 unbearable friction. What centers? Not the 
 great sympathetic plexus this time, but its cor- 
 responding 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 in- 
 dividual. When a child screams with temper, 
 it sends out from the lumbar ganglion violent 
 
60 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 waves of frictional repudiation, extraordi- 
 nary. 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 sun- 
 dering is effected. Each being is clarified fur- 
 ther into its own single, individual self, fur- 
 ther perfected, separated. 
 
 Hence a duality, now, in primal conscious- 
 ness 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 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 61 
 
 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 as- 
 serts 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 
 
62 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 conscious- 
 ness, from the very start of life! Direct flow- 
 ing 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 excrementa- 
 tion. What is the good of inventing "ideal" 
 behavior? How order the path of the uncon- 
 scious? For let us now realize that we cannot, 
 
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 63 
 
 even with the best intentions, proceed to order 
 the path of our own unconscious without 
 vitally deranging the life-flow of those con- 
 nected 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 con- 
 scious-centers are utterly dormant. Once a 
 child is born, the whole nervous and cerebral 
 system comes awake, even the brain's memo- 
 ries begin to glimmer, recognition and cogni- 
 tion soon begin to take place. But the spon- 
 taneous 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 con- 
 sciousness. There, beneath the navel, lies the 
 active human first-mind, the prime uncon- 
 scious. From the moment of conception, when 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 65 
 
 the first nucleus is formed, to the moment of 
 death, when this same nucleus breaks again, 
 the first great active center of human con- 
 sciousness lies in the solar plexus. 
 
 The movement of development in any crea- 
 ture is, however, towards a florescent indi- 
 viduality. The ample, mature, unfolded indi- 
 vidual 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 sepa- 
 rate 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 
 
66 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 pri- 
 mary 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, ex- 
 ultant 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 ex- 
 ternal object unto itself, subjectively, as the 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 67 
 
 blood-stream was drawn into the foetus, 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 re- 
 coils upon itself, in its first reaction against 
 continuity with the outer universe. It recoils 
 even against its own mode of assimilatory uni- 
 son. 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 f rom.any attach- 
 ment 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 
 
68 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 from which it recoils. It has no objective 
 consciousness of that from which it reacts, the 
 mother principally. It is like a swimmer end- 
 lessly 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 di- 
 rection. 
 
 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 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 69 
 
 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 un- 
 conscious, where the self is all-in-all unto it- 
 self, active in strong desirous psychic assimila- 
 tion 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 an- 
 other 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 estab- 
 
70 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 lished 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 sub- 
 jectivity 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 hu- 
 man 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 correspond- 
 ence 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 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 71 
 
 plane only and entirely dependent on two in- 
 dividuals. But immediately following the 
 establishment of the circuit of the powerful, 
 subjective, abdominal plane comes the quiver- 
 ing 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 be- 
 come 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, ac- 
 tive beneath the diaphragm, and the second 
 
72 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 upper, objective plane, active above the dia- 
 phragm, in the breast. 
 
 Let us realize that the subjective ana ob- 
 jective 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 ab- 
 straction. 
 
 The unconscious subjectivity is, in its posi- 
 tive manifestation, a great imbibing, and in its 
 negative, a definite blind rejection. What we 
 call an unconscious rejection. This subjec- 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 73 
 
 tivity 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 phys- 
 ical functioning of sucking and urination. 
 Psychic and physical development run par- 
 allel, 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. 
 
74 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 Child and mother have, in the first place, no 
 objective consciousness of each other, and cer- 
 tainly no idea of each other. Each is a blind 
 desideratum to the other. The strong love 
 between them is effectual in the great ab- 
 dominal 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 ap- 
 preciated, criticized, scrutinized, exhausted. 
 This has nothing to do with the active uncon- 
 scious. 
 
 Having realized that the unconscious 
 sparkles, vibrates, travels in a strong subjec- 
 tive stream from the abdominal centers, con- 
 necting the child directly with the mother at 
 corresponding poles of vitalism, we realize 
 that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 75 
 
 nothing in the least conceptual, and hence 
 nothing in the least personal, since personality, 
 like the ego, belongs to the conscious or men- 
 tal-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 suc- 
 ceeded 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 f rictional electricity. Fric- 
 tional electricity is one of the sundering 
 forces. It corresponds to the voluntary forces 
 exerted at the lower spinal ganglia, the forces 
 
76 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 of anger and retraction into independence and 
 power. An over-sympathetic child will 
 scream with fear at the touch of fur; a re- 
 fractory child will purr with pleasure. It is 
 a reaction which involves even deeper things 
 than sex the primal constitution of the ele- 
 mentary psyche. A sympathetically overbal- 
 anced child has a horror of the electric-fric- 
 tional 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 sur- 
 roundings and will react almost automatically 
 to a conscious-passional suggestion from the 
 mother. In this way personal sex is prema- 
 turely evoked, and real complexes are set up. 
 But these derive not from the spontaneous un- 
 conscious. They are in a way dictated from 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 77 
 
 the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if 
 involuntarily. Again they are a result of 
 mental subjectivity, self-consciousness so dif- 
 ferent from the primal subjectivity of the un- 
 conscious. 
 
 To return, however, to the pure uncon- 
 scious. When the upper centers flash awake, 
 a whole new field of consciousness and spon- 
 taneous activity is opened out. The great 
 sympathetic plexus of the breast is the heart's 
 mind. This thoracic plexus corresponds di- 
 rectly 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 un- 
 conscious 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 her- 
 
78 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 self. This is the first great acquisition of 
 primal objective knowledge, the objective con- 
 tent of the unconscious. Such knowledge we 
 call the treasure of the heart. When the an- 
 cients 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 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 79 
 
 itself with dynamic treasures; it verily builds 
 its own tissue of such treasure, the tissue of the 
 developing body, each cell stored with crea- 
 tive 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 pri- 
 marily 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 con- 
 tiguous 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 min- 
 isters with the milk of her breast. But this is 
 a yielding to the great lower plexus, the basic 
 
8o PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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. Some- 
 times the strange round belly of the Infant 
 seems the predominant mystery-center, and 
 sometimes from the tiny breast it is as if a deli- 
 cate 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, sub- 
 missive 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 discov- 
 ery, to realize the beloved. To cherish, to 
 realize the beloved. To administer the out- 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER 8 1 
 
 ward-seeking self to the beloved. We give 
 this the exclusive name of love. But it is in- 
 deed only the one direction of love, the out- 
 going from the lovely center of the breast 
 the nipple? 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 vi- 
 brations, 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 them- 
 selves, ready for the obstinate earth. 
 
 And so, also a wholeness is established with- 
 in the individual. The two fields of conscious- 
 
82 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 ness, 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 sym- 
 pathetic and voluntary nerve centers. The 
 first plane is established between the poles of 
 the sympathetic solar plexus and the volun- 
 tary 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 con- 
 sciousness, the objective unconscious, polarized 
 in the cardiac plexus and the thoracic gan- 
 glion, in the breast. There is a perfect cor- 
 
 83 
 
84 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 respondence 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 mani- 
 fests a specific activity and gives rise to a 
 specific kind of dynamic or creative conscious- 
 ness. 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 dif- 
 ferent, 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 com- 
 plementary to the lower, dynamic-subjective. 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 85 
 
 The mystery of creative opposition exists all 
 the time between the two planes, and this uni- 
 son 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 po- 
 larity is already eightfold. 
 
 Now before we can have any sort of scien- 
 tific, 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 de- 
 velopment 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 cram- 
 ming of the intellect, it veers hither and thither 
 hopelessly and absurdly. Education can never 
 
86 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 become a serious science until the human 
 psyche is properly understood. And the hu- 
 man psyche cannot begin to be understood un- 
 til we enter the dark continent of the uncon- 
 scious. Having begun to explore the uncon- 
 scious, 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 LOVER AND THE BELOVED 87 
 
 the free spontaneous psyche, the effective soul. 
 
 In these few chapters we hope to hint at the 
 establishment of the first field of the uncon- 
 scious 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 
 
88 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 esti- 
 mation. 
 
 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 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 89 
 
 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 manifesta- 
 tions. The mouth and nostrils are gates to 
 each great center, upper and lower even the 
 breasts have this duality. Yet the clue to res- 
 piration and hand activity and vision is in the 
 breast, while the clue to alimentation and pas- 
 sion 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 de- 
 rived from a specific dynamic conscious-clue, 
 what we might almost call a soul-cell. The 
 inherent unconscious, or soul, is the first nu- 
 cleus subdivided, and from its own subdi- 
 visions produced, from its own still-creative 
 constellated nuclei, the organs, glands, nerve- 
 
90 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 meta- 
 phor, to call the cardiac plexus the sun, the 
 Light. It is metaphor in the first place, be- 
 cause 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 al- 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 91 
 
 most 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 ap- 
 prehension. Dynamically, it is love, devo- 
 tional, administering love. 
 
 Now we make already a discrimination be- 
 tween 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 conscious- 
 ness, 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 pro- 
 
92 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 ceeds the negative circuit, which searches and 
 explores the beloved, bringing back pure ob- 
 jective apprehension, not critical, in the men- 
 tal 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 de- 
 votional love perfect knowledge of the be- 
 loved. 
 
 Now this knowledge in itself argues a con- 
 tradistinction between the lover and the be- 
 loved. It is the very mould of the contra- 
 distinction. It is the impress upon the lover 
 of that which was separate from him, resistant 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 93 
 
 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 near- 
 est 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 trans- 
 fusion 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 mem- 
 ory. It is a great objective flux, a streaming 
 forth of the self in blissful departure, like sun- 
 beams 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 
 
94 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 of enthusiasts. But living beings are kept in- 
 tegral by the activity of the great negative 
 pole. From the thoracic ganglion also the 
 unconscious goes forth in its quest of the be- 
 loved. But what does it go to seek? Real ob- 
 jective knowledge. It goes to find out the 
 wonders which itself does not contain and to 
 transfer these wonders, as by impress, into it- 
 self. 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 dis- 
 covering the beloved. For what is the be- 
 loved? She is that which I myself am not. 
 Knowing the breach between us, the unclose- 
 able gulf, I in the same breath realize her 
 features. In the first mode of the upper con- 
 sciousness there is perfect surpassing of all 
 sense of division between the self and the be- 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 95 
 
 loved. In the second mode the very discovery 
 of the features of the beloved contains the full 
 realization of the irreparable, or unsurpass- 
 able, 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 su- 
 preme 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 dis- 
 cerning. So plainly is the child looking across 
 
96 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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-cen- 
 tering 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 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 97 
 
 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 un- 
 fathomable and inscrutable objective, outside 
 herself, never to be grasped or included in her- 
 self. She seizes as it were a sudden and final, 
 objective impression of him. And the conclu- 
 sive 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 ap- 
 
98 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 palling. 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 knowl- 
 edge 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 conscious- 
 ness the outgoing, the sheer and unspeakable 
 bliss of the sense of union, communion, at-one- 
 ness with the beloved and then the comple- 
 mentary objective realization of the beloved, 
 the realization of that which is apart, differ- 
 ent. This realization is like riches to the ob- 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED 99 
 
 jective 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 im- 
 agination, a man may in his time add on to 
 himself the whole of the universe, by increas- 
 ing 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 devel- 
 oping unconscious, but a process in the devel- 
 opment 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 
 
100 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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, sepa- 
 ratist control, the other for the pure sym- 
 pathetic. The individual psyche divided 
 against itself divides the world against itself, 
 and an unthinkable progress of calamity en- 
 sues 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 
 
THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED IOI 
 
 love, subjective-abdominal and objective-de- 
 votional, both. And there must be the two- 
 fold passional circuit of separatist realization, 
 the lower, vital self-realization, and the up- 
 per, intense realization of the other, a realiza- 
 tion which includes a recognition of abysmal 
 otherness. To stress any one mode, any one 
 interchange, is to hinder all, and to cause cor- 
 ruption 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, gradu- 
 ally 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 
 
 102 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS 103 
 
 in each individual organism; it is the active, 
 self-evolving soul bringing forth its own in- 
 carnation and self-manifestation. Which in- 
 carnation and self-manifestation seems to be 
 the whole goal of the unconscious soul: the 
 whole goal of life. Thus it is that the uncon- 
 scious brings forth not only consciousness, but 
 tissue and organs also. And all the time the 
 working of each organ depends on the pri- 
 mary 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 un- 
 conscious. 
 
 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 
 
104 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 ger- 
 minating 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 object- 
 ively, both. Of course, the subjective veri- 
 fication is what men kick at. Thin-minded 
 idealists cannot bear any appeal to their bow- 
 els 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 spon- 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS 1 05 
 
 taneous 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 identifi- 
 cation 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 dia- 
 phragm, two above. These four centers con- 
 trol the four greatest organs. And they give 
 
106 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 rise to the whole basis of human conscious- 
 ness. Functional and psychic at once, this is 
 their first polar duality. 
 
 But the polarity is further. The horizontal 
 division of the diaphragm divides man for- 
 ever 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 di- 
 vision 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, recipi- 
 ent 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 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS 1 07 
 
 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 iri 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 indi- 
 vidual, 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 func- 
 tional 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 com- 
 plementary pole is external to the individual. 
 
 That is, in the first place there must be the 
 
108 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 con- 
 sciousness 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 be- 
 ing 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 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS 109 
 
 the human will. And yet the mind and the 
 will can both interfere with the dynamic cir- 
 cuit, an idea, like a stone wedged in a 
 delicate machine, can arrest one whole proc- 
 ess 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 pro- 
 found 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 res- 
 piration problems almost off-hand. But woe 
 betide us, the unspeakable agony we suffer 
 from the failure to establish and maintain the 
 
1 10 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 vital circuits between ourselves and the ef- 
 fectual correspondent, the other human be- 
 ing, other human beings, and all the extra- 
 neous universe. The tortures of psychic star- 
 vation which civilized people proceed to suf- 
 fer, once they have solved for themselves the 
 bread-and-butter problem of alimentation, 
 will not bear thought. Delicate, creative de- 
 sire, sending forth its fine vibrations in search 
 of the true pole of magnetic rest in another 
 human being or beings, how it is thwarted, in- 
 sulated 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 understand- 
 ing of the true unconscious will give us the 
 hint. 
 
 The amazingly difficult and vital business 
 of human relationship has been almost laugh- 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS III 
 
 ably underestimated in our epoch. All this 
 nonsense about love and unselfishness, more 
 crude and repugnant than savage fetish-wor- 
 ship. 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 inter- 
 human-polarity. Even on the first great plane 
 of consciousness, four prime poles in each in- 
 dividual, four powerful circuits possible be- 
 tween 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 tor- 
 tures of starvation and privation or of distor- 
 tion and overstrain and slow collapse into cor- 
 ruption. The whole of life is one long, blind 
 effort at an established polarity with the outer 
 universe, human and non-human; and the 
 
112 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 foetus, so does 
 every man and woman grow and develop as a 
 result of the polarized flux between the spon- 
 taneous 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 indi- 
 vidual psyche and physique. This is a law of 
 life and creation, from which we cannot es- 
 cape. Ascetics and voluptuaries both try to 
 dodge this main condition, and both succeed 
 perhaps for a generation. But after two gen- 
 erations all collapses. Man doth not live by 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS 113 
 
 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 indi- 
 vidual 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 conscious- 
 ness. 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, con- 
 
1 14 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 cepts, ideas. It produces a new reality the 
 ideal. The idea is another static entity, an- 
 other unit of the mechanical-active and ma- 
 terio-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 inter- 
 venes between us and the circumambient uni- 
 verse, forming at once an insulator and an in- 
 strument 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 be- 
 came 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 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS 115 
 
 the Word." This is the presumptuous mas- 
 querading 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 ma- 
 chine-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 humili- 
 ating and sterilizing process. We don't know 
 what the human will is. But we do know that 
 
1 1 6 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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 origi- 
 nally on mind. Originally it is a purely spon- 
 taneous control-factor of the living uncon- 
 scious. 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 cir- 
 cuit a fact known to psychoanalysis. And 
 against this automatism, this degradation from 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS II J 
 
 the spontaneous-vital reality into the me- 
 chanic-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 derange- 
 ment becomes serious. There may come sud- 
 den 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 
 
1 1 8 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 flux is destroyed, and a certain automatic cir- 
 cuit substituted. Now an automatic establish- 
 ment of the psyche must, like the building of 
 a machine, proceed according to some definite 
 fixed scheme, based upon certain fixed prin- 
 ciples. 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 conscious- 
 ness. 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 su- 
 premacy. 
 
 True, we must all develop into mental con- 
 sciousness. But mental-consciousness is not a 
 
HUMAN RELATIONS 119 
 
 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 crea- 
 tive 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 
 
120 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 
 
 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? 
 

 S