Language and the Unconscious: The Radical Metaphoricity of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious II

Abstract

Lawrence is implicating the psyche and the body in his representation of emotional experience and human consciousness. The planes, plexuses and centres of feeling initially set out in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious are ambivalently present in the body, and this is very much the point. Lawrence’s own grounding of the instinctual life in the configuration of planes, plexuses and ganglia — the upper and lower centres of psychic activity — insists on being taken both literally and metaphorically. Although we are asked to treat the ‘biology’ literally, as we now expect, it ultimately works metaphorically. Crucially, Lawrence’s insistence on the literal dissolves the very distinction on which it rests. The ‘solar’ plexus, for instance, exists and gets its name from its resemblance to the sun inasmuch as it is a structure of nerves and ganglia radiating from a central network of nerves, but as a metaphor it has a special status of which Lawrence is particularly conscious.