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D. H. Lawrence and Ontological Insecurity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
R. D. Laing's concept of ontological insecurity and Erik Erikson's analysis of identity confusion contribute to an understanding of Lawrence's characterization in The Rainbow and Women in Love. Will Brangwen's fear in The Rainbow that he will dissolve into nothingness without Anna is typical of individuals suffering from ontological insecurity. This anxiety ramifies into webs of mutually contradictory feelings. For example, Will's fantasy of merging with Anna clashes with his fear of losing his identity through absorption into hers. Anna embodies for Will an unconscious fantasy of his mother; this displacement is the root of the contradictions and conflicts in which he becomes entangled. As Anna fights against Will's unconscious desire to maintain a mother-son symbiosis in his marriage, Will rages against her because she represents the mother from whom he unconsciously wishes to be free, even while clinging to her. This fantasy system proliferates into role and identity confusions. Will wishes to be absolute master of his home and child-servant of his wife's matriarchy. Simultaneously in his relationship with his little girl, Ursula, he is an affectionate father, a sadistically destructive sensualist, and a child seeking parental support. These dissonant impulses and roles exacerbate Will's sense of his unreality, incoherence, and general impotence.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974
References
Note 1 in page 162 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (New York: Viking, 1932), p. 200. Hereafter cited in text as Letters.
Note 2 in page 162 The Divided Self (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), pp. 39–54. Laing uses the word “ontological” “because it appears to be the best adverbial or adjectival derivative of ‘being’ ” (p. 39). And “being” in this context means very simply “all that a man is,” as he experiences himself and as others experience him (p. 20). A line from Lawrence's poem “Manifesto” epitomizes his own concern with “ontological insecurity”: “This ache for being is the ultimate hunger.” From The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, 2 vols. (New York: Viking, 1967), i, 265. In contrast with many psychoanalytic theorists Laing uses very little technical jargon. Apart from a few phrases and terms such as “ontological insecurity,” “engulfment,” “implosion,” and “depersonalization,” and a few clumsy adaptations of phraseology from the existentialist philosophers Sartre and Heidegger, the language in which he analyzes mental illness derives very largely from his patients' descriptions of their experiences. In its freedom from technical jargon his experiential language lends itself readily to the elucidation of literature.
Note 3 in page 162 The Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 183. Hereafter cited in text. Sons and Lovers (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 420.
Note 4 in page 162 The Problem of Anxiety, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 76–78.
Note 5 in page 162 In Women in Love Lawrence represents the breakdown of mental control that leads to Hermione Roddice's attempt to kill Rupert Birkin, as follows: “Her whole mind was a chaos, darkness breaking in upon it, and herself struggling to gain control with her will, as a swimmer struggles with the swirling water,” Women in Love (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 97. In The Rainbow Will's uncle, Tom Brangwen, drowns in a flood during the night. Tom has always dreaded the chaos and the darkness in himself. All through his life, paradoxically, drinking has released him from this fear while bringing him into contact with the darkness of his own unconscious. In his last drinking bout the liquor befuddles his reflective consciousness and seems to cripple his defenses against an unconscious inclination toward death. In the blinding darkness of the night, Tom is drawn into the depths of the flood, as if by an undertow from the interior darkness that he has been unable to comprehend and control.
Note 6 in page 162 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Bantam, 1959), pp. 33–34.
Note 7 in page 162 The Crown, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 40, 41.
Note 8 in page 162 The Self and Others: Further Studies in Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock, 1961), p. 119.
Note 9 in page 162 Erik H. Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,” in Identity and Anxiety, ed. Maurice Stein et al. (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), p. 63.
Note 10 in page 162 D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York : Viking, 1960), p. 143.
Note 11 in page 162 Laing, The Self and Others, p. 84. In The Self and Others Laing defines fantasy as “a basic mode of experiencing oneself in relation to others, and others in relation to oneself” (p. 24). In the development of each person it is “probably the first mode of experience to arise, insofar as it . . . probably . . . antedates reflective awareness” (p. 24). As such it grows out of the mental life of infants, in which the distinctions between the self and the external world are not well defined. Most people are unconscious of the fantasies of fantasy systems that play a large part in their experience. Even if they are conscious of the content of a fantasy, such as the idea that one person may fill himself with the “life-warmth” of another person, they are likely to be unaware that this is a fantasy, or, as Laing puts it, that fantasy is the “modality of [their] experience” (p. 22). The phrase “unconscious phantasy” in Laing's writings refers not to the processes of the Freudian unconscious, which are altogether removed from direct experience, but to “a mode of experience” of which a person is not “reflectively aware” (p. 7), as an animal or an infant is not reflectively aware of most of its experience. For Laing's distinctions among fantasy, dream, and imagination see his brilliant analysis of Raskolnikov's dream of the horse-beating, in The Self and Others (pp. 50–56).
Note 12 in page 163 “Education of the People,” in Phoenix, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 639. 13 See the discussion of the terms “fantasy” and “unconscious,” n. 11.
Note 14 in page 163 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 262.