D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis

273 Pages·2020·3.714 MB·English

by  John Turner

D. H. Lawrence and
Psychoanalysis
This book opens out a wholly new field of enquiry within a familiar
subject: it offers a detailed – yet eminently readable – historical investi-
gation, of a kind never yet undertaken, of the impact of psychoanalysis
(at a crucial moment of its history) on the thinking and writing of D.H.
Lawrence. It considers the impact on his writing, through his relation-
ship with Frieda Weekley, of the maverick Austrian analyst Otto Gross;
it situates the great works of 1911–21 in relation to the controversial is-
sues at stake in the Freud-Jung quarrel, about which his good friend, the
English psychoanalyst David Eder, kept him informed; and it explores
his sympathy with the maverick American analyst Trigant Burrow. It is
a study to interest a literary audience by its close reading of Lawrence’s
texts, and a psychoanalytic audience by its detailed consideration of the
contribution made to contemporary debate by three comparatively ne-
glected analytic thinkers.
John Turner was formerly Senior Lecturer in English at Swansea Uni-
versity. He has written a book on Wordsworth, a guide to Macbeth and
co-authored two further books on Shakespeare. He has written widely
on D.H. Lawrence and contributed essays on Winnicott to the Inter-
national Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is currently preparing, with
Gottfried Heuer, a translation of selected works by Otto Gross.
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116 D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis
John Turner
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D. H. Lawrence and
Psychoanalysis
John Turner
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of John Turner to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-41615-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-47344-0 (ebk)
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Contents
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
1 The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross 1
2 Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism 31
3 The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound 65
4 Women in Love: Death of the Father 110
5 Mapping the Bodily Unconscious 151
6 Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria 195
Conclusion: In Search of the True Self: Trigant
Burrow and Lawrence (1925–28) 239
Index 251

Preface
The aim of this book is to provide the first full-length study of the works
of D.H. Lawrence in the context of contemporary debates within the
psychoanalytic movement. It focusses on the years 1912–21 when those
debates were at their most intense and most immediately within the
range of his attention, and it reads the four major novels of that period –
Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Aaron’s Rod – to
assess the extent of their impact upon him. There have been a number of
essays on the theoretical similarities and differences between Lawrence
and Freud, and a smaller number on the question of his alignment with
Jung; but such discussion has always taken place at an ideological level,
unperturbed by the historical reality of the day-to-day issues that were
exciting and perplexing the protagonists themselves. During these years
Lawrence was as well placed as any English writer of his generation to
know what was going on in the psychoanalytic world, and was even
anxious to make his own contribution to it. For all his cavalier impa-
tience with other people’s opinions, he was quick to run with new ideas,
to see what he could make of them – especially when those ideas struck
home to the heart of his emotional life, as they did in the questions of
erotic emancipation, incestuous feeling, creative living and the traumas
caused by its repression. These were all live issues in psychoanalytic cir-
cles of the time, and it is the detailed history of Lawrence’s interactions
with those circles in these ongoing areas of concern that I wish to open
up in my book and make available for future critical discussion.
Lawrence had three main points of contact with the psychoanalytic
movement. First, there was the maverick Austrian analyst Otto Gross,
whose views about sexual and political freedom made such a lasting im-
pression on Frieda Weekley and her sister Else Jaffe. The importance of
Gross’s ideas for Lawrence, as transmitted by Frieda and her German
family, has been greatly undervalued; they had an emotional impact that
went as deep as his marriage, lasting throughout the period covered by
this book, and they provoked fresh thinking about sexual morality, the
meaning of relationship and the nature of patriarchy. Second, there was
his London circle of friends: David Eder, his wife Edith, his sister-in-law
Barbara Low and, more peripherally, Ernest Jones. At the very moment
of his introduction to Lawrence, Eder was in the process of supplanting