D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis

John Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000054217
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book opens out a wholly new field of enquiry within a familiar subject: it offers a detailed – yet eminently readable – historical investigation, 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 relationship with Frieda Weekley, of the maverick Austrian analyst Otto Gross; it situates the great works of 1911-20 in relation to the controversial issues 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 neglected analytic thinkers.

1 The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross

I “Not I, But the Wind…”: The Meeting of Lawrence and Frieda Weekley

One Sunday early in 1912 D. H. Lawrence went to lunch with Ernest Weekley, the Professor of Modern Languages at Nottingham University, hoping for help in finding a job as Lektor in a German university; and there he met and fell in love with the professor’s wife, Frieda Weekley, the second daughter of the minor German aristocrat, Friedrich Baron von Richthofen. It was perhaps the most significant meeting in the lives of either; and it was almost certainly the moment when Lawrence first became acquainted with psychoanalysis, a topic that would absorb him for the next ten years, shaping both his fiction and his non-fiction and culminating in the publication of the two increasingly critical studies, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922).

The actual date of Lawrence’s meeting with Frieda is uncertain. She thought it in April; but this is almost certainly wrong and, in the Cambridge biography of Lawrence, John Worthen set out the available evidence, weighed it and convincingly settled upon 3 March 1912 as the likeliest date.¹ Before lunch Lawrence and Frieda talked for half an hour together in the sitting-room and, over 20 years later, in her autobiography “Not I, But the Wind…”, Frieda left an account of their discussion. Although written so much after the event and unconfirmed by any other source,² it carries conviction. Lovers tend to remember their first meetings. Even if not an accurate factual record of what actually passed between them, it is reliable as a guide to the kind of story that Lawrence and Frieda liked to tell themselves about the meaning and origins of their relationship. In anthropological language, it is Frieda’s version of the myth of origin of their relationship, such as lovers like to tell, containing a charter of the values that they live by; and the fact that Frieda’s account begins in the present tense makes clear that, as in myth, the narrative has implications that transcend the ‘historical’ moment it ostensibly describes.

I see him before me as he entered the house. A long thin figure, quick straight legs, light, sure movements. He seemed so obviously simple. Yet he arrested my attention. There was something more than met the eye. What kind of a bird was this?

The half-hour before lunch the two of us talked in my room, French windows open, curtains fluttering in the spring wind, my children playing on the lawn.

He said he had finished with his attempts at knowing women. I was amazed at the way he fiercely denounced them. I had never before heard anything like it. I laughed, yet I could tell he had tried very hard, and had cared. We talked about Oedipus and understanding leaped through our words.³

The open French windows and the curtains fluttering in the spring wind create a liminal moment as moving as any in Lawrence’s fiction; already here the breeze is playing across the boundaries of her life, admitting childhood echoes of freedom into the staidness of her sitting-room, bringing new life. In Lawrence’s own words, from the poem where Frieda found the title for her autobiography, ‘A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time’ (Poems 204); and here, in this sense of a new personal life which is simultaneously the inauguration of a new historical period, we find the heart of their shared mythology, their celebration of the infectious spontaneity and creativity that they each valued in their emotional and sexual lives, and whose absence from psychoanalytic discourse would eventually lie at the heart of Lawrence’s critique.

‘We talked of Oedipus and understanding leaped through our words’: Frieda had been wrong about the date, and may just possibly have been wrong about the topic. Perhaps she was running together the many conversations about Oedipus that she did have with Lawrence during the next few months. Yet it is easy to imagine how the conversation she describes might have unfolded. Why do you want to go abroad? You’re a writer? What are you writing? This last question, addressed to the fierce young man who in early March was engaged on that draft of Sons and Lovers now known as ‘Paul Morel’ III, might well have provoked a conversation about Oedipus. But if so, each partner to the conversation would have approached the subject differently; for whilst Lawrence had almost certainly never heard of psychoanalysis, Frieda would have been able to talk familiarly and enthusiastically about it. The conversation must have attracted and astonished him in equal measure. As John Worthen says,

they may have been discussing psychoanalysis or they may have been discussing Sophocles; few Nottingham wives would have been able to do both, and fewer still would have been prepared to do so in the sitting-room before Sunday lunch.⁴

His comment is too cautious; in 1912 there would have been very few women in England able to do so. In taking on Frieda, Lawrence immediately found that he would have to take on Freud as well.

“Not I, But the Wind…” is discreet about the primary source of Frieda’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, but its personal origins are clear. ‘I had just met a remarkable disciple of Freud’, she writes, who had awakened her out of the somnambulism of conventional life into ‘the consciousness of my own proper self’. But he had left her ‘full of undigested theories’:

Fanatically I believed that if only sex were “free” the world would straightaway turn into a paradise. I suffered and struggled at outs with society, and felt absolutely isolated. The process left me unbalanced. I felt alone. What could I do, when there were so many millions who thought differently from me? But I couldn’t give in, I couldn’t submit. It wasn’t that I felt hostile, only different. I could not accept society. And then Lawrence came.⁵

That ‘remarkable disciple of Freud’ was the maverick psychoanalyst and apostle of free love, Otto Gross, with whom Frieda had had an affair in 1907; and this was the line of descent – Freud, Gross, Frieda – that initially informed Lawrence’s views of psychoanalysis and would always continue to influence it. Since the publication of Martin Green’s pioneering book The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love in 1974, the importance of Gross to Frieda’s life and to her subsequent relationship with Lawrence has been widely recognised. The fact that, in her autobiography, she says she had only ‘just met’ Gross when she got to know Lawrence – the two events were actually five years apart – suggests the close connexion between the two men in her mind. In Green’s words, Gross’s world-view was the ‘ideological dowry’ that Frieda brought to Lawrence;⁶ and it was a dowry, moreover, that had been enriched by a further brief affair in 1911 with the anarchist painter Ernst Frick, who was one of Gross’s closest friends and followers and who must have ensured that Gross’s legacy was still fresh in her mind when she met Lawrence in the spring of 1912.⁷

The story of her love for Lawrence which she tells in “Not I, But the Wind…”, however – that they fell in love and eloped to Germany after six weeks of knowing one another – is a tale for public consumption only. The real situation was more complicated than that. It is one of the achievements of John Worthen’s biography D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 that the story of those first weeks has been clarified. We can now see the struggle that Lawrence had to ‘win’ Frieda, if that is the right word, and to prevent her from going back to her husband after the brief summer affair she intended. Since writing his biography, however, Worthen has gone further still. In the light of letters newly come to light, he has convincingly argued that Frieda went to Germany with Lawrence in 1912 not primarily to have an affair with him but to set herself up as a free woman ‘as her sisters were free, and Frieda Gross was free, and the people she knew in Ascona were free’.⁸ Her affair with Frick was the catalyst, and one very real possibility in her mind in the spring of 1912 was finally to launch herself upon the kind of life that Otto Gross had offered her five years before. To Frieda in this mood Lawrence must have seemed, as John Worthen puts it, ‘an old unreconstructed male, demanding partnership and commitment and monogamy’.⁹ It was not only the influence of her husband and children pulling her back to the security of family-life in Nottingham that he had to resist; it was also the counter-influence of Gross as it worked through her German friends and family, drawing her forward into an adventurous new life of erotic freedom.

Frieda’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, in other words, was not primarily intellectual but acutely personal; it was bound up with strong feelings for a past lover, admiration for present friends and hopes for an immediate future. The priority given in her text to Gross bears witness to the priority that his ideas still occupied in her life in 1912; and this had implications for Lawrence too. The triangular template that was shaping the autobiographical fiction of ‘Paul Morel’ was about to shape real life. Not only was he in love with a married woman; he was in love with a married woman still enamoured of the ideas and life-style preached by her former lover. Frieda took Gross’s letters to Germany with her in May 1912 and, whilst this might have been partly to safeguard them from her husband, it was also because they were important to her in themselves as corroboration of the kind of woman that she aspired to be. Later she even sent some of Gross’s letters to her husband to justify her decision to stay with Lawrence. In taking on Frieda, Lawrence did not only have to take on Freud but also Otto Gross. He was Gross’s successor whom, in 1912, Frieda described to her German friends as ‘rather like Otto’.¹⁰ Lawrence was well aware of his situation and, in 1916 in Twilight in Italy, he even made a coded reference to himself as the son of Otto Gross – the oedipal son, that is, who had to slay the father in order to win the mother. Although he would meet the intellectual challenge of psychoanalysis later, its full meaning for him can only be understood as an inseparable part of the story of his marriage. Otto Gross was a ghostly presence in his bed whom he would try many times to exorcise. That initial conversation about Oedipus recurred in many different forms, as Lawrence grappled with the implications of everything that Frieda had learned from Gross and her German friends; and it is with Gross that we must begin.

II Otto Gross: Early Life (1877–1907)

Otto Gross was born in the Steiermark in Austria on 17 March 1877. He was thus two years older than Frieda, eight years older than Lawrence. The most obviously powerful figure in the young Otto’s life was his extrovert and energetic father, Hans Gross, who was a living epitome of the patriarchy of fin-de-siècle Europe. A paterfamilias at home and an internationally famous criminologist by profession, he made a successful academic career out of exploiting new scientific methods to catch criminals and to weed out those whom he thought degenerate – ‘the tramp, the revolutionary, the habitual thief, the pederast’, as Martin Green lists them.¹¹ He founded and edited a criminological journal (Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik); he wrote a successful Handbook for Examining Magistrates; he founded the Criminological Institute at Graz and, according to Green, by a life-time of hard work he became the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The ‘New Ethic’ of Otto Gross
• 2 Sons and Lovers: Triangles of Antagonism
• 3 The Rainbow: Oedipus Unbound
• 4 Women in Love: Death of the Father
• 5 Mapping the Bodily Unconscious
• 6 Aaron’s Rod: Lawrence’s Studies on Hysteria
• Conclusion: In Search of the True Self: Trigant Burrow and Lawrence (1925–28)
• Index