This volume features two profound essays by one of the English language's most famous and controversial authors. D. H. Lawrence wrote Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious in the early 1920s, during his most productive period. Initially intended as a response to psychoanalytic criticism of his novel Sons and Lovers, these works progressed into a counterproposal to the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the incest motive. They also voice Lawrence's concepts of education, marriage, and social and political action."This pseudo-philosophy of mine," explained Lawrence, "was deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The absolute need one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man." With these two essays, the author articulates his insights into the mental struggle to rationalize and reconcile the polarity that exists between emotional and intellectual identities. Critical to understanding Lawrence's other works, they offer a bold synthesis of literary theory and criticism of Freudian psychology.Fantasia of the Unconscious represents Lawrence's deliberate effort to set straight the record on his observations made in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. These he admits to be somewhat biased, even irresponsibly and "jeeringly" made. Again, it is unfortunate that while his novels and poems receive so much critical attention, his expository writings remain marginal or relegated to an almost secondary status in terms of critical importance. For it is here that Lawrence actually states the guiding principles, and philosophy, that shaped his life and his art, defiantly situating himself as an opponent of "mental understanding." Even though he is by this time far removed from his days as a schoolteacher, Lawrence still considers education to be a primary objective of his work, and he is prepared to discuss at length his ideas on how education can lead to a true apprehension of the aesthetic experience. "We don't want to educate children so that they understand," he says. "Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most people. I don't even want my child to know, much less to understand
About the Author: David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the cano The fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner at Brinsley Colliery, and Lydia (née Beardsall), a former pupil teacher who, owing to her family's financial difficulties, had to do manual work in a lace factory, Lawrence spent his formative years in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. The house in which he was born, in Eastwood, 8a Victoria Street, is now the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum. His working-class background and the tensions between his parents provided the raw material for a number of his early works. Lawrence would return to this locality and often wrote about nearby Underwood, calling it; "the country of my heart," as a setting for much of his fiction. Despite common misconception he is not related to T.E. Lawrence.nical "great tradition" of the English novel.