Freud and Lawrence

No modern writer presents such formidable problems to the Freudian critic as does Lawrence. Unlike the work of other “psychological” writers, Lawrence's work defies the Freudian categories. Indeed, Lawrence's psychology has its own laws which are irreducible to the laws of Freudian psychology. As literary critic, Lawrence often performs “hyper-interpretation,” the word that Freud assigned to his brief study of Hamlet.1 Lawrence, like Freud, looks beneath the surface of literary works to find unspoken psychological motives. But even in the criticism the resemblance is external. Where Freudian criticism tends to reduce a work to a meaning that seems to compromise its original value for us, Lawrence's criticism (Studies in Classic American Literature is a beautiful instance)2 recreates the work, releasing its most vital tendencies. Lawrence, of course, recognized the stature of the man he frequently attacked. It is an interesting-and by no means anomalous-fact that despite his hostility to Freudian theories Lawrence heightened the Oedipal drama in Sons and Lovers after he had read Freud for the first time.*

Lawrence's quarrel with Freud throws unexpected light on the complex nature of Freud's achievement-and for that matter on his own. In two “treatises” that Lawrence wrote on psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence confronts Freud in a rather unexpected way.3 Unlike Freud's disciples who broke with their master in order to revise doctrine, Lawrence is in no way predetermined in his thought by a previous commitment. He is neither revisionist nor innovator. His approach to the subject is altogether independent and idiosyncratic. Since some of the fundamental assumptions of Lawrence and Freud