The introduction/The Unconscious, from Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr, eds. The Modern Tradition, Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. 1965.
Unreason and Reason
The Freudian Unconscious
Liberation of the Unconscious
The Unconscious - Introduction
As behind recorded history we encounter primitive man in his natural habitat,^ so beneath the public man we eventually come to something equally primitive: the unconscious mind. The unconscious is nature-in-man, the basic stuff behind human consciousness, as prehistoric man stands behind the history of culture. If modern historicism exemplifies a shift of emphasis from the world of Being to the world of Becoming, the modern conception of the Unconscious implies an even more drastic shift of perspective. The traditional primacy of ideas over feeling, purpose over instinct, reason over energy, is hereby questioned and often repudiated.
Goethe in his autobiography describes a primal, undifferentiated force that he calls the Demoniac. This is an energy not reducible to rational and moral categories but cutting across them as the warp the woof. It seems to lie at a point where inorganic matter, organic nature, and the human mind come together. Knowable only as the mutual contradiction of all the principles we ordinarily assume, the Demoniac is both seductive and terrifying. Goethe at once recognized and drew back from it, he says, by depicting it in his art. William Blake's response to a similar discovery is less cautious. He takes the fact of irrational energy to mean the collapse of old and false rational distinctions between body and soul, physical evil and spiritual good. For Blake active energy is the essence of the undivided body-soul, and the famous faculty of reason, instead of being its opposite and master, is merely the outward bound of energy; indeed, reason or "the Devourer" exists only in terms of the "Prolific" energy it measures.^
In Schopenhauer's world of will and idea, the irrational "will to live," ceaselessly striving and suffering, is the primary reality of human experience.^ Schopenhauer argues that we have attributed too much significance to "ideas": thought and knowledge are secondary functions of man. Unable to alter the drive of the will, reason can only modify the particular forms in [p. 539] which desire is expressed. To Schopenhauer the scene of the will's activity is always bleak, for when it is struggling to sustain itself, it is in pain; and when it is without an object for which to struggle, it suffers from ennui. Pain and boredom are the two poles between which man oscillates, whether he be civilized or uncivilized.
Nietzsche's dialetic of Apollo and Dionysus, though derived from Schopenhauer's scheme of idea and will, is cast on a different plane and presented in a somewhat different spirit. These are two "art-gods,"^ and there is joyful affirmation in both--in the visions of Apollo and the rhapsodies of Dionysus--as well as in the interplay of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles. Apollo is the god of shapely appearances, of individuality, and of ethical measure. His world is associated with Olympus, with mountaintops, with sunlight, with stability, with idealistic dreams, while the world of Dionysus is pictured in terms of lower, chthonic powers, forests, darkness, dynamic excess, drunkenness. The personal nobility for which Apollo strives has for counterpart the self-forgetfulness that Dionysus offers; the former culminates in the rapturous illusion of transcendence, the latter in the agonized ecstasy of death. The two appear in Greek history with now one, now the other, triumphant. In Greek tragedy, Nietzsche thinks, they conjoin in a moment of supreme artistic achievement. But his headiest praise goes to Dionysus, the "genius of the heart," the god of dynamic existence, who reconciles man with nature, who is strong, evil, profound, and beautiful.^
Although Freud's conception of the unconscious was developed without any direct dependence on such forerunners as Goethe, Blake, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, he spoke in an era that had long been preparing for the revelation he brought. In one sense, it is true, Freud is a strong exponent of reason and of the practical values of the daylight world of consciousness. He holds to a faith that objective science can describe the irrational depths of man and to some extend re-orient the blind mechanisms of instinct. But in another sense Freud confirms and extends the irrationalistic bent of his predecessors, for the mind he describes has almost none of the features traditionally associated with human thought. Perception and consciousness, whereby we are in contact with external reality, occupy only a tiny territory on the outskirts of the psyche, which is largely either "preconscious" or unconscious. The unconscious realm, in turn, is largely made up of what Freud calls the Id, a sea of amoral, instinctual energy. The Ego, which reaches up from the unconscious into the preconscious, was originally a part of the Id, a cortical layer, but has gradually attained a little independence from it and even [p. 540] some imperfect control over it. A third subconscious area is that of the Super-Ego, which is a prolongation of parental influence and a defender of moral sanctions. The Ego must perilously mediate between the perceptual world without and the Id and Super-Ego within; it must try to extend its own jurisdiction by adjustments with the Super-Ego and by extending itself as it can through the Id. "Where Id was," says Freud in a modern proverb, "there shall Ego be."
But the Id is not to be envisaged as a single force; there are two instincts struggling within it. One is the love [and life] instinct which Freud for a time calls Eros but later prefers to call by the more general name of "libido." Against this is ranged the destructive death-wish, the desire of the living thing to revert to an inorganic state or to turn aggressively against others. The first is an impulse to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them, while the second would undo all. Freud suggests that they are not unlike the old forces of attraction and repulsion. In dreams the instincts, both libidinal and destructive, meet directly with the repressive operation of the Ego and Super-Ego; here we have the clearest instance of a confrontation that is always going on in us, the same that gives rise to neurotic disorders of personality. The dream fulfills instinctual wishes by compromise; it deflects, dilutes, or realigns the conflict within the latent dream-thoughts. The most fundamental instinctual pattern, according to Freud, is the Oedipus complex, wherein both of the prime instincts are equally at work. In men, the libido is turned toward the mother, the destructive urge toward the father; in women, the reverse is true. The guilt-feelings bound up with the complex, Freud suggests, may be the original basis and the sustaining force of human society.^
Thomas Mann pays tribute to Freud as prophet of a modern humanism that is no less humane for being disillusioned.^ He achieves this pre-eminence by devotion to psychological truth, by articulating the uncomfortable notion that disease is an all-important clue to human nature, and by demolishing the old view of man as a distinctively rational being. In pointed contrast is D.H. Lawrence's denunciation of the Freudian outlook.^ Lawrence dismisses the Freudian unconscious as a grotesque figment of the conscious mind, and he substitutes his own unscientific, intuitive account of the deeper psyche. If the unconscious is not distorted by abstract ideas, it is seen to have a complex balance and creative function. It is not an inescapable tragic burden but an inexhaustible source of human good.^
In Tzara's Dadaist pronouncements, the attack on consciousness is part of [p. 541] a large-scale assault on all forms of established order. Knowledge is merely the sound "boom," and everyone is entitled to his own "boomboom"; the nub of life is subjectivity, which is not so much chaos, though Tzara admiringly calls it that, as a joyful spontaneity. We should express ourselves in a disconnected series of acts and words like lyrical cries out of the "inexhaustible and uncontrollable" unconscious. Dadaism verges over into the more elaborate program of Surrealism. As Breton explains, the surrealist breaks through the "provoking insanities of 'realism'" --conventional forms and presuppositions--into subjective truth. He systematically liberates his thought from the control of reason inside the mind and society outside. Breton's program calls for social as well as artistic revolution, though the emphasis is artistic. By whatever means--chiefly by automatic writing and imitation of dreams--the individual must strive to achieve surreality, the absolute of the unconscious.^ [p. 542]
[The introduction/The Unconscious, from Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr, eds. The Modern Tradition, Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. 1965.]
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