Rieff Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic by 1973

Author:1973
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7. The Therapeutic as Mythmaker: Lawrence's True Christian Philosophy

The purest religion is the most refined Epicurism. He, who in the smallest given time can enjoy most of what he never shall repent, and what furnishes enjoyments, still more unexhausted, still less changeable – is the most religious and the most voluptuous of men.

True Christian philosophy.

– Blake, Marginalia

David Herbert Lawrence spent much of his creative energies contriving a second faith, 115 something to succeed what he considered false Christian philosophy and its successor, the sterile rationalism of science. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and again in Fantasia of the Unconscious, 116 Lawrence made his main efforts to explain that second faith, otherwise expressed in his art. As doctrinal counterpoints, these two books together take on the importance, if not the excellence, of his art. Each is a heaven of an idea, a vision, significantly like those of the psychologizing prophets examined above, of man at last released from his inwardness.

When first proposed in 1921, Lawrence's doctrinal externalizations of man inside-out were laughed away by the reviewers, without exception; what scant notice Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious received was good-humored, treating it as a bizarre and often incomprehensible new testament in the religion of Sex, ardent to supersede the then not very old testament of psychoanalysis. In the first few pages it does appear that Freud is cast down quickly to the role of Judas, fingering the gentle Jesus of an Unconscious for the police forces of civilization, leaving Lawrence alone in his true discipleship. The attack on Freud is not incidental to the presentation of his own doctrine. Lawrence saw in psychoanalysis yet another turning of man in upon himself, worse than religiosity, precisely because it aspired to a scientific discipline of inwardness. Yet Lawrence failed to credit this discipline with the results for which it was practiced; the turning outward that signified freedom from inwardness, was defined by Freud as the resolution of neurosis. The quarrel Lawrence picked with Freud was more on means than ends. Both sought the end of the division between inner and outer life from which derived the characteristic cultures of commitment with its attendant illnesses of inwardness, as men clung to some mean idea that would help them get out of themselves. For Lawrence, the first healthy step was to stop having so many "ideas," false escapes, by way of which the poor thinkers were driven further in upon themselves. The world of "ideas," Freud's included, was the symptom of the disease at the root of our culture – false efforts at self-cure.

After Lawrence found out how completely his presentation had been misunderstood, he immediately tried again – belligerently, even somewhat peevishly. "I stick to the solar plexus," he announced, thus challenging the "dear reader" of the second volume with the fact that his message is the same as in the first.

Only the "few" will understand, he proclaims, in an unhappy effort to appeal to the snobbishness of his readers. Apparently very few even pretended

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