“The shimmer is inside really”. D. H. Lawrence’s Resurrection Myth and Wilfred’s Bion’s Transformations in “O”
Abstract
I analyse D. H. Lawrence’s hostility to the application of Freudian theory to literature in his critical writings alongside the aesthetic theories he develops in his novels Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Man Who Died which are centred around the Christian mystery of the resurrection. Lawrence develops a life-affirming, reader-response theory of art with parallels to psychoanalysis and Christian theology. Employing the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, specifically Klein’s writings on projective identification, the paranoid-schizoid and reparative positionalities and Bion’s epistemophilic concept of a transcendent position, “O”, I review second-wave feminist criticisms of Lawrence to posit that Lawrence develops gender epistemologically as a reparative model of communication. In response to Paul Ricœur’s notion of the hermeneutics of suspicion, I consider Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Kleinian article on ‘paranoid reading’ to conclude that Lawrence aimed to represent a reparative relationship between art and criticism, reader and text. Freudian and feminist criticism often performs a “paranoid reading” of his works, an “error” Lawrence was sensitive to. Kleinian-Bionian psychoanalytic methodology aids in restoring Lawrence’s oeuvre to the spirit in which he intended it to be read whilst exposing the psychopathological foundations of his enterprise.
Downloads
References
Bion, W. R. (1962). “A Theory of Thinking”. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 43: 1–10; https://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Bion-W.-A-theory-of-thinking-The-PsychoAnalytic-Study-of-Thinking.pdf.
Klein, M. (1998). Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works 1921-1945. Introduction by Hanna Segal. Vintage: London.
Lawrence, D. H. (2007). Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Introduction by David Ellis. Wordsworth Classics: Hertfordshire.
Lawrence, D. H. (1966). Sons and Lovers. Penguin Books: Middle-sex.
Lawrence, D. H. (1982). The Man Who Died in Love Among the Hay-stacks and Other Stories. Penguin Books: Suffolk.
Secondary
Abel-Hirsch, N. (2016). Bion, alpha-function and the unconscious mind. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 32(2): 215–225.
Altick, R. D. (1957). The English Common Reader, A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Foreword by Jonathan Rose. 2nd ed. Ohio State University Press: Chicago.
Banerjee, R. (2012). The Search for Pan: Difference and Morality in D. H. Lawrence's “St Mawr” and “The Woman Who Rode Away”. The D.H. Lawrence Review, 37(1): 65–89; http://www.jstor.org/stable/44235698.
Bion, W. R. (2013). Attacks on Linking. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 82(2): 285–300; https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2013.00029.x.
Bion, W. R. (2020). Container and Contained; http://cpor.org/otc/Bion(1985)ContainerAndContained.pdf (Accessed: October 27, 2020).
Catholicism.org. “The Fire of Pentecost”; https://catholicism.org/the-fire-of-pentecost.html (Accessed: November 24, 2020).
Dawson, P. (2019). Fictional Minds and Female Sexuality: The Con-sciousness Scene from Pamela to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ELH, 86(1) (Spring): 161–188; https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2019.0006.
de Beauvoir, S. (1997). The Second Sex. Vintage: London.
Encyclopedia. Container-Contained; https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/container-contained (Accessed: 26 No-vember, 2020).
Encyclopedia. Linking, Attacks On; https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/linking-attacks (Accessed: 26 Novem-ber, 2020).
Freud, S. (1985). Psychopathic Characters on the Stage. Art and Lit-erature. Translated by James Strachey. Edited by Albert Dickson. London: Penguin Books.
Frye, N. (1978). The Secular Scripture. A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Grotstein, J. S. (2004): The Seventh Servant: The Implications of a Truth Drive in Bion's theory of “O”. The International Journal of Psy-choanalysis, 85(5): 1081–1101. 10.1516/JU9M-1TK1-54QJ-LWTP.
Hebron, S. (2020). John Keats and “negative capability”; https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/john-keats-and-negative-capability (Accessed: November 24, 2020).
Jung, C. G. (1973). Psychology and Literature. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. Routledge: London.
Kuttner, A.B. (1916). "Sons and lovers", A Freudian Appreciation. Psychoanalytic review, 3 (July): 295–317.
Lawrence, D. H. (1950). Aaron’s Rod. Introduction by Richard Alding-ton. Penguin Books: Middlesex.
Lawrence, D. H. (1968). A Selection from Phoenix. Edited by A. A. H. Inglis. Peregrine Books: Middlesex.
Lawrence, D. H. (2007). Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoa-nalysis and The Unconscious. Introduction by David Ellis. Wordsworth Classics: Hertfordshire.
Lawrence, D. H. (1972). John Thomas and Lady Jane. The Second Version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Penguin Books: Middlesex.
Lawrence, D. H. (2020). “Resurrection”. Poetry Nook; https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/resurrection-45 (Accessed: 7 December, 2020).
Lawrence, D. H. (1978). The Rainbow. Penguin Books: Middlesex.
Lawrence, D. H. (1970). Women in Love. Penguin Books: Middlesex.
Lawrence, D. H. (1982). The Man Who Died in Love Among the Hay-stacks and Other Stories. Penguin Books: Suffolk.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (1979). General Editor James T. Boul-ton. Vol 1. 1901-1913. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Lyon, J. (2005). The Review of English Studies, New Series, 56(227): 807–809; http://www.jstor.org/stable/3661265 (Accessed: Septem-ber 22, 2020).
Millet, K. (1985). Sexual Politics. Virago Press Ltd: London.
Moore, H., T. (1972). Lady Chatterley’s Predecessor. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/27/archives/john-thomas-and-lady-jane-by-dh-lawrence-372-pp-new-york-the-viking.html (August 27, 1972).
Morrison, B. (2013). Sons and Lovers: A Century On. The Guardian, May 25, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/25/sons-lovers-dh-lawrence-blake-morrison.
Mortland, D. E. (1971). The Conclusion of “Sons and Lovers”: A Re-consideration. Studies in the Novel 3(3): 305–315. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29531470.
Panichas, G. A. (1964). D. H. Lawrence’s Concept of the Risen Lord. The Christian Scholar 47(1): 56–65; http://www.jstor.org/stable/41177365 (Accessed: December 7, 2020).
Psychology. “Modules on Freud: IV Neurosis”; https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/freud4.html. (Accessed 25 November, 2020).
Ragachewskaya, M. (2015). War Trauma and Madness in the Fiction of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Études Lawrenciennes 46: 1–42. https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.239.
Rolph, C. H. and Robertson, G. (1961). The Trial of Lady Chatterley. Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd. London: Penguin Books.
Sedgwick, E.K. (1997). Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You. Series Q: 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822382478-001.
Spender, S., ed. by (1973). D. H. Lawrence. Novelist, Poet, Prophet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Steinberg, B. (2019). Civitarese on O: Bion’s Pragmatic and “Aes-thetic- Intersubjective” Theory of Truth, the Growth of the Mind, and Therapeutic Action: Discussion of “Bion’s O and His Pseudo-Mystical Path”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 29(4): 418–426. 10.1080/10481885.2019.1632659.
The Melanie Klein Trust - “Paranoid-Schizoid Posi-tion”;https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/theory/paranoid-schizoid-position/. (Accessed: November 24, 2020)
The Melanie Klein Trust - “Wilfred Bion”; https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/writers/wilfred-bion/ (Accessed: November 24, 2020).
Therapy Summit. “Wilfred Bion and the Importance of Not Knowing”; https://www.therapysummit.com/article/part-3-wilfred-bion-and-the-importance-of-not-knowing/ (Accessed: October 27, 2020).
Thurston, L. (2009). "Ourselves: Beckett, Bion and Beyond”. Journal of Modern Literature 32(3): 121–143; http://www.jstor.org/stable/25511822.
Watson, G. (1985). The Real Meaning of Lawrence’s Advice to the Literary Critic. University of Toronto Quarterly 55(1): 1–20; muse.jhu.edu/article/514895.
White, R. S. (2011). Bion and Mysticism: The Western Tradition. American Imago, 68(2): 213–240. doi:10.1353/aim.2011.0027.
Wordsworth, W. (1994). The Tables Turned. The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth. Introduction by Antonia Till. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions.
Copyrights for articles published in Critical Hermeneutics are retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal.
Critical Hermeneutics is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY 3.0
. With the licence CC-BY, authors retain the copyright, allowing anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contribution (edited version), on condition that credit is properly attributed to its author and that Critical Hermeneutics is mentioned as its first venue of publication.
