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Ian compares D. H. Lawrence's and Freud's concepts of the unconscious. In contrast to Freud, freedom for Lawrence lies not with consciousness but with unimpeded expression. Drawing on Lacanian theory, Ian examines The Plumed Serpent in detail. In the novel, Lawrence created "a religion of the unconscious in which characters solemnly ritualize their own symbolic embodiment." The "drive to representation," the expression of the unconscious, is so intense in The Plumed Serpent as to become "a literary pathology" manifesting itself as obsessive acts and fetishism. The author states that "if The Plumed Serpent is a ritual of embodiment, then in it character plays the role of fetish." The characters embody and represent the phallus. The novel is "a symbolic ritual of loss and reconstitution whose aim is not only to deny and asseverate the loss of the phallus, but ultimately to expand a two-sided relationship into a three-sided one." "In language, metaphor and fiction, Lawrence sacrifices and reconstitutes … his own symbolic phallus." Ian concludes that Lawrence unites the signified and the signifier in such a way that they will never be put asunder.