T H E S I S

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sions then is Freud’s theory of the unconscious. It is too much
for Lawrence that Freud goes into the impenetrable darkness of
the unconscious and comes back with “repulsive little horrors’1
of sex and its repressions. Lawrence’s argument is that by con-
'sciously exploring the unconscious, Freud ’creates’1 the repressed
’dirty secrets** that he finds there. In self-contradiction,
Lawrence says that the repressed secrets should be kept in the
unconscious, but he fights for sex fully and openly.
Freud slowly developed his theories of the unconscious
throughout his life. Very frequently, in each book, at the end
of every chapter, he returned to the subject, confirming or reviewing
previous ideas, with an outstanding accurateness and
based on clinical cases. Nevertheless, Lawrence deliberately
says: ’Freud’s unconscious amounts practically to no more than
our repressed incest impulses®H(PAU 206) But Freud’s unconscious
is not only this, for Freud points out
“that mental processes are essentially unconscious, and
that those which are conscious are merely isolated acts
and parts of the whole psychic entity*”(GIP 25)
On the other hand, ’repressed incest impulses” are only a small
part of the mental excitations which, being originally unconscious,
usually do not have admittance into consciousness. Freud
remarked that mental organization was still a mystery and Law-
/
rence agrees with him when he finds the unconscious a mystery too*
They differ in the way they approach the mystery:
“We are trying to trace the unconscious to its source. And
we find that this source, in all the higher organisms, is
the first ovule cell from which an individual arises.”
(PAH 213)