Lawrence, Freud and Masturbation

Author(s): JAMES C. COWAN

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , March 1995, Vol. 28, No. 1 (March
1995), pp. 69-98
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24782212

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Lawrence, Freud and Masturbation

JAMES C. COWAN

and for several generations he was known as such; but he

DH. Lawrence
was a creaturethought of himself
of his time in proclaiming as a sexual liberator,
the harmful
consequences of masturbation. Sigmund Freud and others in the
early psychoanalytic movement were also opposed to masturbation,
although their views were not monolithic and were stated in scien
tific rather than moralistic terms. Lawrence saw masturbation as a

personal and cultural vice that functionally hampered the develop

ment of dynamic, relational sexuality, and that led to self-absorbed,
mental analysis. Freud saw masturbation as a widespread childhood
habit that, if not given up, became the etiology of neurasthenia as
well as contributing to other pathological conditions. Their per
spectives on the subject—Lawrence's cultural, Freud's scientific—
intersect at a transitional point in social and cultural history when
Victorian attitudes were changing but had not yet fully given way to
modern ones. Taylor Stoehr comments that "Lawrence's attitude
toward masturbation, although in one sense an attack on nineteenth
century practice, is also very much indebted to official Victorian
opinion on the subject. It is not surprising therefore that Lawrence
sometimes sounds like the generation of prigs he despised for their
anti-sexuality" (111).
In the following essay, I will first examine Lawrence's discur
sive statements on masturbation in comparison with those of
Freud and other early psychoanalytic theorists. Second, I will
discuss Lawrence's own masturbatory experience and fantasies—
insofar as these can be reconstructed from his poetic and discur
sive statements—in the light of Freud's theories of ego defenses
and masochism.

Mosaic 28/1
0027-1276-95/069030301,50©Mosaic

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70 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

sexual themes, Lawrence, in Fantasia of the Unconscious,

For a iswriter
surprisinglywho
moralistichad
in hisendured soon much
recommendations sex censure for his
education: "After puberty, a child may as well be told the
simple and necessary facts of sex," he says grudgingly; "As
things stand, the parent may as well do it. But briefly, coldly,
and with as cold a dismissal as possible." The stated purpose of
this strategy is to avoid dragging the subject into consciousness,
as if the urgency of the drive had not driven it there already. He
recommends that the father tell the boy that the change he is
experiencing means that he is "going to be a man" and later
marry a woman and get children. "But in the meantime, leave
yourself alone....I know what is happening to you. And I know
you get excited about it. But you needn't. Other men have all
gone through it. So don't you go creeping off by yourself and
doing things on the sly. It won't do you any good" (146). The
strong implication is that it will do him considerable harm.
As Lawrence's model sex-education lecture continues, the
father ostensibly encourages the boy's masculine identification
with him, but in a manner so prohibitive and so lacking in
empathie attunement that he emerges less as a viable role model
than as an omniscient Old Testament God whose prohibition
only makes the forbidden fruit more enticing:

I know what you'll do, because we've all been through it. I know
the thing will keep coming on you at night. But remember that I
know. Remember. And remember that 1 want you to leave yourself
alone. I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it myself.
You've got to go through these years, before you find a woman
you want to marry, and whom you can marry. I went through them
myself, and got myself worked up a good deal more than was good
for me. (146)

The uncharacterist
Lawrence recommends here, with its view of the child as a
"sly," "secretive," and "unmanly" miscreant and the repeated
formula "Remember that I know," is akin to the kind of "Poi
sonous Pedagogy" on masturbation that Alice Miller found to
be so damaging to children in 19th-century Germany. Even so,
Lawrence's proposed method of sex education gives the son
greater access to the father than Freud's practice of sending his
sons to another doctor for an explanation of the facts of life.

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James C. Cowan 71

Although morally Freud was more tolerant of masturbation than

Lawrence was, medically he considered it a symptom. Thus,
"when one of his adolescent sons came to him with worries
about masturbation, Freud responded by warning the boy very
much against it. An estrangement between father and son en
sued" (Roazen 41).
In Lawrence's warning, there is also an additional element in
the father's direction to the son: "Always try to contain your
self, and be a man. That's the only thing. Always try and be
manly, and quiet in yourself' (Fantasia 146-47). Although on a
conscious level this injunction refers to psychological mastery
in the containment of impulses, its subtext suggests that behind
Lawrence's negative judgment of masturbation is a view of
semen as both the carrier and the symbolic equivalent of the life
force or soul, and hence not to be wasted.
The cultural milieu in which Lawrence grew to manhood
conditioned his negative attitude toward masturbation. This
climate, of course, included the puritanical position of Robert
S. S. Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement. The
section on masturbation in the Boy Scout Manual was headed
"Conservation." Although he was not a Boy Scout, Lawrence's
language in insisting that the boy be "manly" and "contain"
himself until he is ready "to marry a woman later on, and get
children" parallels the official Baden-Powell line in Rovering
to Success, published in the same year as Fantasia (1922), that
masturbation "just checks that semen getting its full chance of
making you the strong manly man you would otherwise be. You
are throwing away the seed that has been handed down to you
as a trust instead of keeping it and ripening it for bringing a son
to you later on." Nothing Lawrence says, however, carries the
threat of Baden-Powell's warning: "The usual consequence is
that you sap your health and brain just at the critical time when
you would otherwise be gaining the height of manly health"
(qtd. in MacDonald 431n35).
Lawrence's view of the body has something of the Old Tes
tament conception in which, as Mary Douglas describes it, "the
ideal of holiness was given an external, physical expression in
the wholeness of the body seen as a perfect container" (qtd. in
Davis 123). In the New Testament, Jesus refers to his body as
the temple to be destroyed and raised again in three days (John
2:19, 21); and St. Paul declares: "If any man defile the temple

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72 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy,
which temple ye are" (1 Cor. 3:17). Lawrence conceived of the
body as containing the soul and providing fuel for the soul's
flame, burning between body and spirit in the triad of man's
being ("Man" 389). It was important, therefore, to preserve the
integrity of the body as container of the life force. Lawrence
reinforces the lesson by repetition: "I've been as bad and prob
ably worse than you. And the only thing I want of you is to be
manly. Try and be manly, and quiet in yourself." He concludes:
"That is about as much as a father can say to a boy, at puberty"
(Fantasia 147).
The issue for Lawrence is how the bodily fluid carrying the
life force is to be emitted. For him, the sacramental significance
of sexual intercourse lies in the emission of soul in union with
the other. He might have agreed with St. Thomas Aquinas's
statement, "It is good for each person to attain his end, whereas
it is bad for him to swerve away from his proper end," but not
with Aquinas's definition of the "proper end" as procreation.
According to Aquinas, "Every emission of semen, in such a
way that generation cannot follow, is contrary to the good for
man. And if this is done deliberately, it must be a sin" (qtd. in
Davis 168). To Lawrence, in contrast, the sexual act "is not for
the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown"
(Study 53). When Mellors ejaculates, in Lady Chatterley's Lover,
"as his seed sprang in her, his soul sprang towards her too, in
the creative act that is far more than procreative" (279). Lawrence
presents Connie's subsequent pregnancy as incidental to the
real creative process of expressing the soul, pressing it outward
through ejaculation in sexual union with the unknown other:
"There's the baby, but that is a side issue," Mellors says (300).
One reason for Lawrence's opposition to masturbation, then, is
that it habituates the known rather than "leaping off into the
unknown."

In Pornography and Obscenity, Lawrence spells out his case

against pornography by associating it with masturbation: the
inevitable and "pernicious" effect of pornography, including
the soft-core "pornography" of popular fiction and films, is "an
invariable stimulant to the vice of self-abuse, onanism, mastur
bation." The strictures of the "grey ones" against sexual inter
course only encourage young men and women to masturbate
separately, since the sex drive must have some outlet. Clergy

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James C. Cowan 73

men and teachers sometimes honestly "commend masturbation

as the solution of an otherwise insoluble sex problem" (178).
The same "moral guardians," while accepting the pornographic
titillation of popular literature, hypocritically "censor all open
and plain portrayal of sex" (179).
"Is masturbation so harmless, though?" Lawrence asks. The
first reason he gives for answering no is that it produces shame:
"there is no boy or girl who masturbates without feeling a sense
of shame, anger, and futility," which only "deepens as the years
go on, into a suppressed rage." The second reason is that it is
addictive: "The one thing that it seems impossible to escape
from, once the habit is formed, is masturbation. It goes on and
on, on into old age, in spite of marriage or love affairs or
anything else" (179).
Lawrence's view that masturbation is a habit seemingly im
possible to break unknowingly echoes an earlier analogous
statement by Sigmund Freud in a letter to his friend Wilhelm
Fliess (22 December 1897): "The insight has dawned on me that
masturbation is the one major habit, the 'primary addiction,'
and it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other
addictions—to alcohol, morphine, tobacco, and the like—come
into existence" (Complete Letters 287). Three decades later, in
"Dostoevsky and Parricide," Freud sees Dostoevsky's compul
sive gambling as a replacement for the primary addiction of
masturbation: "the emphasis laid upon the passionate activity of
the hands betrays this derivation" (21:193).'
Lawrence's view that masturbation leads to depletion of vi
tality and causes shame also directly parallels Freud's view that
"it has a harmful effect not only by producing neurasthenic
symptoms, but also because it keeps the patients under the
weight of what they feel to be a disgraceful secret" (3:275). It
follows that in treating neurasthenia, the physician has the
responsibility of inducing the patient to give up the habit:

Left to himself, the masturbator is accustomed, whenever something

happens that depresses him, to return to his convenient form of
satisfaction. Medical treatment, in this instance, can have no other
aim than to lead the neurasthenic, who has now recovered his
strength, back to normal sexual intercourse. For sexual need, when
once it has been aroused and has been satisfied for any length of
time, can no longer be silenced; it can only be displaced along
another path. (3:275-76)

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74 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

Pressing his argument to its logical conclusion, Freud says: "If

masturbation is the cause of neurasthenia in youth, and if, later
on, it acquires aetiological significance for anxiety neurosis as
well, by reason of the reduction of potency which it brings about,
then the prevention of masturbation in both sexes is a task that
deserves more attention than it has hitherto received." Freud
maintains that "it is positively a matter of public interest that men
should enter upon sexual relations with full potency" (3:278).
Lawrence's views on masturbation also have affinities with

the theories of other early psychoanalysts. In his contribution to

the 1912 discussions on masturbation in the Vienna Psychoana
lytic Society, Sândor Ferenczi presents a clear distinction be
tween dynamic sex and the kind of sex that Lawrence would
call "sex in the head." Ferenczi theorizes that "normal coitus
and masturbation are processes that are to be estimated differ
ently not only psychologically, but also physiologically":

With onanism the normal fore-pleasure is absent, whereas the

share taken by the phantasy is enormously increased....When a
satisfying sexual object is gazed at, touched, kissed, embraced, the
optic, tactile, oral, and muscular erogenous zones are actively
excited, and they automatically pass over a part of this excitation
to the genital zone...the phantasy is only secondarily drawn into
sympathetic enjoyment. With onanism, however, all the sense
organs are silent, and the conscious phantasy, together with the
genital stimulation, have to procure the whole sum of excitation.
(188-89)

The effect of this forcible retention of a mental picture "during

a sexual act that normally is almost unconscious" is the fatigue
and depletion symptomatic of neurasthenia. In sexual inter
course with a satisfying object, however, the pleasure radiates
physiologically throughout the body rather than being localized
mentally in a fantasy image:

Through the stimulation of the erogenous zones in coitus a state of

preparedness of the genital organ is aroused in the first place; in
the friction that succeeds, the genito-spinal reflex then plays the
chief part; it ends in a summation of genital stimuli, and finally—
synchronously with ejaculation—in an explosive radiation of the
excitation over the whole body...[with] the sensual pleasure...
explosively radiating beyond the spinal centre into the whole
sphere of feeling, thus into the cutaneous and sensorial centres as

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James C. Cowan 75

well. If this is the case, it is probably not a matter of indifference

whether the wave of lust finds a sphere of feeling that is prepared
by fore-pleasure, or one that is unexcited and, so to speak, cold.
(189-90)

Since "with masturbation a part of the excitation cannot reach

a proper level," the sexual tensions cannot be fully discharged.
As the flow of libido is dammed up, the "amount of excitation
remaining over" produces a "one-day neurasthenia" (190).
For Lawrence, as for Ferenczi, the mentalized sex of mastur
bation is a merely exhaustive activity, a wasteful spending of life
force, leading to an emptying and debilitation of the vital self.
Sexual intercourse, in contrast, is a regenerative activity, a vital
interchange between self and other, leading to creative balance.
Although Ferenczi attributes the effect of neurasthenic exhaus
tion in masturbation to the effort of maintaining the conscious
mental picture of the fantasied object throughout the act, Lawrence
attributes it to the absence of the reciprocal relationship between
self and other experienced in sexual intercourse. Just as Freud
saw masturbation as the cause of neurasthenia and the primary
addiction from which other addictions derived, so Lawrence saw
both masturbation and the habituated form of masturbatory con
sciousness as substitutes for vital relationship:

The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive

nature. In sexual intercourse, there is a give and take. A new
stimulus enters as the native stimulus departs. Something quite
new is added as the old surcharge is removed. And this is so in all
sexual intercourse where two creatures are concerned, even in the
homosexual intercourse. But in masturbation there is nothing but
loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of
a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a
corpse, after the act of self-abuse. (Pornography 179)

When Lawrence calls masturbation "the deepest and most

dangerous cancer of our civilization" and "the most dangerous
sexual vice that a society can be afflicted with, in the long run,"
he generalizes the practice from an individual act of autoerotic
gratification to a cultural vice. Although masturbation as a form
of mentalized sex has the effect in some people of releasing
mental energy, the intellectual activity thus generated always
manifests itself either "in a vicious circle of analysis and impotent
criticism, or else in a vicious circle of false and easy sympathy,

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76 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

sentimentalities. The sentimentalism and the niggling analysis,

often self-analysis, of most of our modern literature, is a sign of
self-abuse." Without an external object, the mentally masturbat
ing author moves only "within the vicious circle of himself." The
art work so produced is "self-absorption made public." Lawrence's
objection that "the outstanding feature of such consciousness is
that there is no real object, there is only subject" (Pornography
179-180) is accurate in the physical sense, although it should be
noted that, psychologically, both in masturbation and in the mas
turbatory consciousness Lawrence describes, the object is always
present in the accompanying fantasy and in the unconscious wishes
behind it. Lawrence's concern is that the masturbatory object is
not an independent subject and contributes nothing from a sepa
rate center of consciousness.

Like individual masturbation, the masturbatory cultural pro

cess, Lawrence says, is purely exhaustive. In this respect, the
"real masturbation of Englishmen began only in the nineteenth
century. It has continued with an increasing emptying of the
real vitality and the real being of men...." The result might be
described as cultural neurasthenia: "Most of the responses are
dead, most of the awareness is dead, nearly all the constructive
activity is dead, and all that remains is a sort of shell, a half
empty creature fatally self-preoccupied and incapable of either
giving or taking, in the vital self... .But null or nothing as it may
be, it still hangs on to the dirty little secret, which it must still
secretly rub and inflame" (Pornography 180). In Lawrence's
view, the "vicious circle of masturbation" is at the root of
modern self-consciousness, which is "never fully and openly
conscious," but a nullity maintained by the "vast conspiracy of
secrecy" among educators, the clergy, the family, the press; "at
the same time, [there is] the endless tickling of the dirty little
secret. The endless masturbation! and the endless purity!" (181).
Turning to the problem of how to get out of "the vicious
circle," Lawrence proposes a solution: "No more secrecy! The
only way to stop the terrible mental itch about sex is to come
out quite simply and naturally into the open with it" (Pornog
raphy 181). He proceeds, however, to attack the very people
who were attempting to accomplish that end by educating the
public on the scientific facts of human sexuality in order to
correct widespread ignorance and misinformation about sex and
thus to defuse its appeal as a "dirty little secret." In Fantasia of

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James C. Cowan 77

the Unconscious Lawrence had said, "To translate sex into

mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific fact of it is death"
(147). In Pornography and Obscenity he pointedly focuses his
attack on a widely known author of sex-education and marriage
manuals: "You can't do it by being wise and scientific about it,
like Dr. Marie Stopes." Although preferable to the hypocrisy of
"the grey ones," scientific seriousness tends only to disinfect
"the dirty little secret" with scientific words, leaving a sani
tized, "free and pure" "mentalized sex." "The danger is, that in
killing the dirty little secret, you kill dynamic sex altogether,
and leave only the scientific and deliberate mechanism" (182).
Lawrence thought that demystifying sex would reduce it to a
sterile idea of the physiological process and leave out of ac
count the dynamic interaction involved in sexual response and
satisfaction. He applies the same principle, in even greater
proportion, to the ostensibly "emancipated bohemians." In at
tempting to kill the "dirty little secret" by sexually acting-out in
both speech and behavior, they had produced only emptiness,
"dreariness and depression": "For sex is the fountain-head of
our energetic life, and now the fountain ceases to flow" (182).
The damming up of sexual energy in the masturbatory con
sciousness of the society, as Lawrence describes it, has led to
the same neurasthenic symptoms that Freud found to be the
result of individual masturbation.
In "Introduction to These Paintings," Lawrence sees the source
of society's putative masturbatory consciousness as the mind
body split: "Any creative act occupies the whole consciousness of
a man....The whole consciousness is occupied, not merely the
mind alone, or merely the body. The mind and spirit alone can
never really grasp a work of art, though they may, in a masturbat
ing fashion, provoke the body into an ecstasized response" (573
74). In such late works as "The Rocking-Horse Winner,"
masturbation, or its equivalent, became for Lawrence a metaphor
for achieving mechanistic or materialistic ends by the conscious
manipulation of vital instinctual forces that he thought were bet
ter left to the spontaneous expression of the unconscious.

experience in light of his adult disapproval of masturba

Considering
tion, Williamthe question
B. Ober, of Lawrence's
a medical pathologist, speculates own masturbatory

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78 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

that he probably masturbated in puberty and adolescence and

that he "almost certainly masturbated when returning home
after his unsatisfactory assignations with Jessie Chambers";
"We can reject as unlikely the hypotheses that he never mastur
bated or was a compulsive masturbator; the first is statistically
improbable, the second out of keeping with his character" (108).
Although Ober cites no external evidence to support his specu
lation, Lawrence's statement, "I know what it is, I tell you. I've
been through it myself' (Fantasia 146), indicates that mastur
bation was an area of conflict for him.

Masturbation has two components, physical (genital manipu

lation) and psychic (fantasy life). Both the physical masturba
tion and the accompanying fantasies may be either conscious or
unconscious. As I will employ the term, the masturbation fan
tasy also has two components: the usually conscious mental
imagery that accompanies the physical act and, behind this
imagery, the usually unconscious "central masturbation fan
tasy" which contains the fantasied gratification, often in dis
torted or symbolic form, of unrelinquished infantile instinctual
wishes (Laufer 300-01). As a core theme, this central fantasy is
always present, with or without masturbation.
In "The State of Funk," Lawrence discloses: "I know, when
I was a lad of eighteen, I used to remember with shame and rage
in the morning the sexual thoughts and desires I had had the
night before. Shame, and rage, and terror lest anybody else
should have to know. And I hated the self that I had been, the
night before" (568). Significantly, Lawrence associates his negative
feelings of "shame and rage" not with the physical act of mas
turbation but with the "sexual thoughts and desires," that is, the
fantasies, that accompanied it. Since the masturbatory fantasy
emerges from unconscious wishes involving early objects, it
may be inferred that Lawrence's sense of shame and fear of
being found out are associated with the forbidden nature of the
fantasied object relation.
As Evelyn Shakir has noted, one can also find evidence of
Lawrence's "secret sin" encoded in his early verse. A revealing
example here is "Virgin Youth," which was originally titled
"The Body Awake" and which was written when he was 20 or
21 and first published ten years later with only slight revisions
in Amores (1916). He subsequently rewrote the poem exten
sively for his Collected Poems (1928).2 In both versions, the

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James C. Cowan 79

poem centers on an autoerotic experience of masturbation. The

pattern of imagery of the 1916 version clearly expresses the
intensity and power of the sexual urge, following the flow of
sexual arousal from the "flush" and "flame" of the male breasts
(nipple erection) in "urgent, passionate waves" to the lower
body, to the "soft, slumbering belly / Quivering awake with one
impulse of desire" (penile erection), with the "docile, fluent
arms / Knotting themselves with wild strength / To clasp—what
they have never clasped" (the fantasy object). As the autoerotic
experience continues:

Then I tremble, and go trembling

Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body,
Till it has spent itself.

The masturbatory climax offers only partial discharge and par

tial resolution of sexual tensions. The fantasy object has not
been clasped in physical reality, and mental consciousness again
intrudes upon the domain of blood consciousness:

And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself,

Till the bürsten flood of life ebbs back to my eyes,
Back from my beautiful, lonely body
Tired and unsatisfied.

The 1916 version of "Virgin Youth," closer in time to the sexual

strivings of late adolescence, is more spontaneous in feeling but
less graphic in language than the 1928 version as rewritten for
Collected Poems. Gail Porter Mandell points out the structural
dialectic in the 1916 version between the blood consciousness
communicated through the penis and the mental consciousness
transmitted by the eye. In the 1928 version, "the two centers of
consciousness confront each other" (53).
The 1928 version, almost three times as long as the earlier
one, particularizes the state of arousal with graphic imagery of
erection and places Lawrence's youthful sexual awakening in
the context of his subsequent sexual philosophy, thus giving the
young man's poem the perspective of the more experienced
middle-aged man of 43:

A lower me gets up and greets me;

Homunculus stirs from his roots, and strives until,
Risen up, he beats me.

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80 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

He stands, and I tremble before him....

—Who art thou? What hast
Thou to do with me, thou lustrous one, iconoclast?—

Lawrence celebrates the iconography of the erect phallus in Old

Testament religious imagery: "He stands, the column of fire by
night. / And he knows from the depths...." The poem repeats the
dominant image of the phallus as sacral being in motifs that
reiterate the upward thrust of male desire from its roots in
darkness:

He stands like a lighthouse, night churns

Round his base, his dark light rolls
Into darkness, and darkly returns.

In subsequent images, Lawrence addresses the phallus as "Trav

eller, column of fire," "Dark, ruddy pillar," and "tower."
In this retrospective on the aroused sexual desire of youth,
although he

Would so gladly lie

In the womanly valley, and ply
Thy twofold dance,

the young man confesses:

I

Am helplessly bound
To the rock of virginity.

Continuing in the vocative mode, he rhetorically addresses the

erect phallus as a dark deity: "Thou dark one, thou proud, curved
beauty! I / Would worship thee, letting my buttocks prance." Then
lamenting the strength of the prohibition—"But the hosts of men
with one voice deny / Me the chance"— he concludes with an
ambiguous reference to the futility of masturbation:

I salute thee

But to deflower thee. Thy tower impinges

On nothingness. Pardon me!

In the 1928 "Virgin Youth," the narrative voice asks: "Does his
steep / Curve sweep towards a woman's?" and imagines "letting
my buttocks prance" in the "twofold dance." These are the
impulses the middle-aged man attributes to the young man from

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James C. Cowan 81

the vantage point of an established adult sexual identity. In the

1916 version the sexual object to be clasped in the fantasy is
vague and unspecified; even the 1928 version, narcissistically
centered, is primarily an ithyphallic celebration of the erect
penis. In both versions the speaker remains entranced with the
phenomenology of the autoerotic experience.

of his patient the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff), Freud ex

In his
plains:reconstruction ofcametheinto being..
"The homosexual attitude which psychic .was state in early childhood
of such overwhelming intensity that the little boy's ego found
itself unable to cope with it and so defended itself against it by the
process of repression. The narcissistic masculinity which attached
to his genitals, being opposed to the homosexual attitude, was
drawn in, in order to assist the ego in carrying out the task"
(17:110-11). In his description of narcissistic masculinity in adult
male masturbation, Victor Tausk—another psychoanalytic con
tributor to the 1912 Vienna discussions on masturbation—pro
vides a gloss on a striking element in the 1928 "Virgin Youth":

The individual gradually develops an enormous interest in his own

genital. In some cases I have observed, this interest went so far that
the genitals were completely personified, i.e., they were treated like
real persons. Some masturbators carry on conversations with their
genitals, call them "the little one," or "the little son," or "the little
friend," and thank them for their loyalty, generosity, etc. (75)

The speaker in the 1928 version of "Virgin Youth" directly

addresses his erect penis in a phallic motif expressing a pre
dominant sexual attitude of narcissistic masculinity. In Lady
Chatterley's Lover, which was also published in 1928, Mellors,
adopting the slang name for the male genital, personifies his
penis as John Thomas, and treats it throughout as a figure with
a separate identity and a will of its own. Both he and Connie
refer to the organ with the masculine personal pronoun, even
playfully knighting "Sir John" for the marriage with "Lady
Jane." In a memorable scene, Mellors addresses his phallus
directly. Although the element of phallic narcissism would be
hard to miss in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prevailing issue is
the struggle to establish an adult reciprocal heterosexual
relationship.

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82 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

Holly A. Laird comments on the sexual trend in "Virgin

Youth": "In the 1928 version, he does not consider whether or
not he has an external object. His object is himself" (168). I
postulate, however, that internalized object representations of
Lawrence's earliest parental objects were involved, either di
rectly or indirectly, in the fantasy elements of this and other
early poems. Ernest Jones demonstrates that "the individual
recapitulates and expands in the second decennium of life the
development he passed through during the first five years....the
precise way in which a given person will pass through the
necessary stages of development in adolescence is to a very
great extent determined by the form of his infantile develop
ment" ("Some Problems" 398-99). Lawrence's symbiotic rela
tionship with his mother from early childhood through late
adolescence precluded his developing any significant relation
ship with another woman as long as his mother was alive. The
depreciated position of his father in the family constellation,
which was already in place when Lawrence was born, made the
father unavailable for the positive masculine identification with
the paternal figure that might have enabled Lawrence as a
young boy to separate himself from the symbiotic merger with
his mother and to achieve a greater measure of psychic autonomy.
Arnold M. Cooper identifies "two [psychoanalytic] aspects of
penis symbolization—the penis as representative of male privilege,
and the penis as a representation of successful separation from
the powerful mother of the pre-Oedipal period" (119). I posit
that in Lawrence's development from the phallic stage to young
manhood, in the absence of a viable paternal relationship, the
penis itself came to represent the differentiation and separation
from his mother that he could not yet otherwise establish.
Despite the young man's feeling of shame and disappoint
ment with regard to masturbation, Lawrence's increased focus
on the penis in the graphic phenomenology of erection in the
1928 "Virgin Youth" suggests that the experience was of greater
significance than he had recognized at the time. Specifically, as
Moses Laufer has argued, "in adolescence masturbation has the
function of helping the ego reorganize itself around the su
premacy of genitality. This is normally accomplished by using
masturbation and masturbation fantasies as something equiva
lent to 'trial action'—that is, as an autoerotic activity which
helps to integrate regressive fantasies as part of the effort to

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James C. Cowan 83

achieve genital dominance" (301). The genital supremacy that

Lawrence's autoerotic experience in adolescence and later his
heterosexual experience in young manhood helped him to achieve,
despite the continued presence of regressive perverse fantasies,
also enabled him to establish an independent, though not an
untroubled, adult sexual identity.

Freud's attitudes toward masturbation, I will argue, in terms

In view of the
of the Freudian theoryparallel
of ego defenses,I that
have drawn
the extremity of between Lawrence's and
Lawrence's negative judgment of masturbation represents a
defense against the "shame and rage" he felt about the "sexual
thoughts and desires" he had experienced in association with it.
Although Lawrence does not specify their content in "The State
of Funk," the nature of these fantasies may be inferred from
several poems and scenes in his autobiographical fiction dating
from his late adolescence. In the following discussion, I shall
consider two types of sexual fantasy suggested by these sources,
namely, those containing homoerotic and those containing
sadomasochistic elements.

The idyllic adolescent bathing episode in Chapter 8 of The

White Peacock (222-23) and the recollection by Lawrence's
friend George H. Neville of Lawrence's gaze of "rapt adora
tion" at the sight of his athletic friend's naked, muscular body
(78-80) suggest that the content of Lawrence's adolescent sexual
fantasies was sometimes homoerotic. The emergence of this
component instinct, however, does not mean that Lawrence's
sexual identity was homosexual. I believe that Lawrence's
homoerotic impulses in late adolescence and young adulthood
were in the service of early childhood developmental issues that
were reactivated in what Peter Bios has called "the second
individuation process" of adolescence.
In Michael Black's précis of the nude male bathing scene in
The White Peacock, "Cyril is taken with the nobility of George's
body, and George, like a father, holds Cyril to him and rubs him
dry." With regard to the inevitable interpretation that the scene
is an example of latent homosexuality, Black insists that "the
idea is too simple: George looks like a god and acts like a father,
and Cyril's attitude to him is reverence without overtones of
simple desire" (65). Most readers cannot so easily dismiss the

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84 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

homoerotic feeling tones of the scene, but psychologically Black's

point has a kind of validity. For all the homoeroticism of the
scene, the wish expressed in its fantasy elements is not a straight
forward, undisguised, homosexual instinctive impulse but the
sexualized need for the nurturing masculine paternal relation
ship that Lawrence felt he had never had. The homoerotic strivings
that emerged in expression of this wish could be partially sub
limated through idealization and his creative work, and par
tially repressed in the interest of ego functioning in a primary
heterosexual identity, but they tended to return whenever the
longing for male nurturance reasserted itself—as it did espe
cially in such crisis situations as the difficulties with govern
mental authorities and the persecutory feelings that Lawrence
experienced in the Cornwall period during the First World War.
If the body of the father or his surrogate could become the
object of reverence that Cyril feels for George in the "Poem of
Friendship" chapter, there is only a step further to the awe of the
erect penis as sacral object that characterizes Lawrence's use of
the phallus as a literary symbol.
Citing such early poems as "Discord in Childhood" and "Love
on the Farm," Shakir argues persuasively that the sexual fantasy
accompanying masturbation was sadomasochistic in character.
As she sees it, in the first poem, the violent quarrel between
mother and father became for Lawrence the prototypal pattern of
male-female relationships. The second poem, which employs this
pattern as a source of erotic imagery, "clearly reveals the sado
masochistic nature of Lawrence's sexual fantasies" (158-59).
Although I am unwilling to limit myself to early Freudian
theory as the only basis for a psychoanalytic understanding of
Lawrence, I think it useful to extend the Freudian analysis of
the issue at hand. Since the driving elements of the fantasy are
often unconscious, the more specific source of the feelings
involved is not so easy to determine, but these early poems, as
Shakir suggests, provide revealing clues. "Discord in Child
hood" turns on a scene of family violence inside the house in
which the sound of

a slender lash

Whistling she-delirious rage, and the dreadful sound

Of a male thong booming and bruising, until it had drowned
The other voice in a silence of blood
(Complete Poems 36)

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James C. Cowan 85

are metaphorically correlated with the "terrible whips" of the

ash tree, lashing and shrieking in the wind outside. In a parallel
scene in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence gives realistic dimension
to the impact of this family violence on the children when Paul
is awakened at night by "the booming shouts of his father, come
home nearly drunk, then the sharp replies of his mother." As the
quarrel escalates, "the whole was drowned in a piercing medley
of shrieks and cries from the great, wind-swept ash-tree." Fear
ful that the father may hit their mother again, the children wait
in suspense, "their hearts in the grip of an intense anguish....All
the cords of the great harp hummed, whistled, and shrieked."
Even more terrible is "the horror of the sudden silence: silence
everywhere, outside, and downstairs. What was it?—was it a
silence of blood? What had he done" (84-85). Although these
questions resonate with the psychic conflicts of Paul's oedipal
situation, the scene of childhood terror is not directly sexual.
"Cruelty and Love," which Jessie Chambers dates to early
1907 when Lawrence was twenty-one (Sagar 66), was first
published in Love Poems and Others (1913). Although Lawrence
wrote to Edward Marsh (25 September 1915), saying that the
poem "doesn't interest me a bit" (Letters 2:401), he included it
in his Collected Poems (1928) under the less revealing title
"Love on the Farm." Lawrence's ambivalence is understand

able. Speaking of this dramatic monologue and several other

nominally "fictional" poems of the same period, Holly Laird
says: "more compelling than any event in these poems are th
emotional swings they register, between fierce energy and d
spondency. The Beulah-like laddishness of Lawrence's younger
self is torn by discord, confusion, and fatigue" (186).
As Shakir suggests, the poem illustrates Lawrence's conver
sion of the imagery of parental violent conflict into a source of
erotic stimulation. Although the figurative equation of orgasm
and death (le petit mort) is traditional, the husband's throttling
a rabbit caught in a snare is metaphorically associated with
vampiristic image of sexuality as he kisses his wife's throat like
"a stoat / Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood," then
kisses her mouth, and "so I drown / Against him, die, and fin
death good" (Complete Poems 43). To the child observing it,
Freud says, the sexual intercourse of the parents appears to b
an act of violence (5:584-86; 7:196). Lawrence's associations
öf marital relationship with struggle and conflict and of sex

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86 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

with cruelty suggest that a repressed element of the fantasy is

the equation of the primal scene with violence. Although Lawrence
consciously identified himself with his powerful mother and
rejected any such identification with his devalued father, he
assumes, in the narrative voice of "Love on the Farm," the
feminine perspective and masochistic attitude of the farm wife,
who, in the fantasy, takes erotic satisfaction in her passive
submissive role in relation to the erotically sadistic husband. In
the poem Lawrence corrects his childhood family situation by
shifting the balance of power to the dominant male, but he also
employs the preconscious fantasy elements to express his own
"feminine" masochistic wishes.
The conflicting sadistic and masochistic impulses emerge in
Sons and Lovers in Paul Morel's fight with Baxter Dawes,
which is described in the same erotically evocative imagery of
darkness, hardness, the unconscious, cleaving bodies, and pas
sion, wherein the tension builds to a climax that Lawrence
usually employs for sexual scenes between a man and a woman:

His body, hard and wonderful in itself, cleaved against the struggling
body of the other man. Not a muscle in him relaxed. He was quite
unconscious....He lay, pressed hard against his adversary, his body
adjusting itself to its one pure purpose of choking the other
man...silent, intent, unchanging, gradually pressing its knuckles
deeper, feeling the struggles of the other body become wilder and
more frenzied. Tighter and tighter grew his body, like a screw that
is gradually increasing in pressure, till something breaks.
Then suddenly he relaxed, full of wonder and misgiving....He
was all bewildered. Dawes' struggles suddenly renewed themselves
in a furious spasm. (410)

With the emergence of Paul's oedi

fillment of his wish to kill the fath
defeat of the surrogate father, th
Dawes, with whom Paul is involved in a sexual affair. Then
bewildered by the emanation of tender feelings for the father,
which he transfers to Dawes as their bodies cleave together,
Paul is struck with wonder at his own feminine impulses and his
pleasure in them. Assuming a submissive attitude toward the
other man, Paul, instead of patricide, enacts the primal-scene
fantasy of sex as violence, with himself in the fantasied woman's
role. As Dawes kicks him into unconsciousness, "the whistle of

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James C. Cowan 87

the train shrieked two fields away" (410), echoing the shriek of
the whips of family violence heard in the earlier ash tree scene
and in "Discord in Childhood."

The repressed erotic content of the lash and whip imagery

return in another context that reflects Lawrence's unconscious
identification with the fantasied dominant sadistic father, ante
rior to his identification with the fantasied submissive masoch
istic mother. In his essay on Dana's Two Years Before the Mast,
after paralleling the relationship of master and servant with that
of male and female, Lawrence defends the Captain's flogging
the man Sam and another sailor on the vitalistic argument that
the beating restores the circuit of "blood-reciprocity of master
and servant," re-establishing the polarized current between them
by means of the cat-o'-nine-tails (116). As Lawrence's descrip
tion takes on the characteristics of sadomasochistic fantasy, the
language becomes unmistakably sexual in tone:

And the living nerves respond. They start to vibrate. They

brace up. The blood begins to go quicker. The nerves begin to
recover their vividness. It is their tonic....

There is a new equilibrium, and a fresh start. The physical

intelligence of a Sam is restored, the turgidity is relieved from the
veins of the Captain.
It is a natural form of human coition, interchange. (118)

The fantasied equation between beating and the sex act could
not be clearer.
Freud's analysis of how sadism becomes transformed into
masochism helps to clarify the evolution of the child's terror
stricken response to parental violence in "Discord in Child
hood" and Sons and Lovers into the fantasy of sadistic male
dominance and masochistic female submission in "Love on the
Farm" and thence into the homoerotically tinged sadomasochistic
fantasy of being beaten by the father-surrogate in Sons and
Lovers and finally the explicit equation of such a beating with
coitus in the Dana essay.
The two interpretations—that Lawrence's adolescent shame
about his sexual fantasies derived from the homoerotic wishes
they expressed and that his sexual fantasies were sometimes
sadomasochistic—are not mutually exclusive. According to Freud,
in "'A Child Is Being Beaten'," the beating fantasy is "invari
ably cathected with a high degree of pleasure and [has] its issue

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88 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

in an act of pleasurable auto-erotic satisfaction" (17:180). "The

boy, who has tried to escape from a homosexual object-choice,
and who has not changed his sex, nevertheless feels like a
woman in his conscious phantasies..." (17:200). Applying the
"rule that what belongs to the opposite sex is identical with the
repressed" (17:202), Freud observes that "with men, what is
unconscious and repressed can be brought down to feminine
instinctual impulses" (17:201). In his analysis of the beating
fantasies of men, Freud says:

The original phantasy, "I am being beaten by my father", corresponds

in the case of the boy, to a feminine attitude [that is, "I am loved
by my father"], and is therefore an expression of that part of his
disposition which belongs to the opposite sex....In the last
resort...both in male and female individuals masculine as well as
feminine instinctual impulses are found, and...each can equally
well undergo repression and so become unconscious. (17:202)

In "The Economic Problem of Masochism," Freud reiterates:

"We now know that the wish, which so frequently appears in
phantasies, to be beaten by the father stands very close to the
other wish, to have a passive (feminine) sexual relation to him
and is only a regressive distortion of it" (19:169). Clinical
experience in contemporary psychoanalysis confirms Freud's
view. Leon Ferber reports the uncovering and reconstruction in
analysis of an adult man's repressed beating fantasy: "The cen
tral meaning was a wish to be beaten by the father, which stood
for a passive sexual yearning for him" (211).
The evolution of erotogenic masochism, as Freud traces the
progress of the libido through the developmental phases from
which it derives its changing psychic characteristics, is relevant
for an understanding of several drive derivatives of Lawrence's
early psychic experience. First, the "fear of being eaten up by
the totem animal"—which Freud associates with the father, but
which, as Judith Ruderman has persuasively demonstrated,
Lawrence experienced as the devouring mother—"originates
from the primitive oral organization." Next, the "wish to be
beaten by the father"—which I have been tracing in the erotic
beating fantasies in several of Lawrence's works—"comes from
the sadistic-anal phase which follows" the oral phase. In turn,
castration anxiety—which is demonstrably present in "The Thorn
in the Flesh" in Bachmann's response to the barking voice and

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James C. Cowan 89

threatening, biting teeth of the sergeant, and in "The Prussian

Officer" in Schöner's response to the captain's sadistically ex
ercising control over every area of the orderly's life—"enters
into the content of masochistic phantasies as a precipitate of the
phallic stage of organization." Finally, "from the final genital
organization there arises, of course, the situation of being copu
lated with and of giving birth, which are characteristic of fe
maleness" (19:164-65). Derivatives of this repressed feminine
attitude are located figuratively in the preconscious homoerotic
fantasies that emerge in sublimated drive derivatives in such
novels as The White Peacock, Women in Love and Aaron's Rod.
Freud's comment that the buttocks "are the part of the body
which is given erotogenic preference in the sadistic-anal phase,
like the breast in the oral phase and the penis in the genital
phase" (19:165), is exemplified by Schöner's fascination with
the Captain's "amazing riding muscles" in "The Prussian Of
ficer," and Lawrence's statement in the Dana essay: "As long as
man has a bottom he must surely be whipped. It is as if the Lord
intended it" (115). As Ferber explains, the wish to be beaten
"arises in the anal phase, when beating and power struggles are
the regular mode of object relations. Because anal-phase con
cepts of object relations persist and are applied to the impulses
of the phallic phase, the child forms a sadistic theory of adult
intercourse, and it is through this sadistic theory of intercourse
that the beating wish becomes sexualized" (212).

and sometimes sadomasochistic, does this mean that he

If Lawrence's sexual or
was homosexual fantasies were sometimes
sadomasochistic homoerotic
in his basic sexual

organization? That is not what I intend to suggest. Such im

pulses may be partly accounted for, in Freudian terms, as the
derivatives of component instincts. Freud writes to Oskar Pfister
(9 October 1918): "But when it comes to sexual theory what
ever makes you dispute the resolving of the sexual instinct into
partial instincts to which our analysis compels us every
day?...Don't you see that the multiplicity of instincts goes back
to the multiplicity of erotogenic organs?" (qtd. in Jones, Sigmund
Freud 2:506). The impulses, homoerotic or sadomasochistic,
that emerged at times in Lawrence's late adolescence and young
manhood can be understood in the context of Freud's concept,

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90 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

set forth in "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (7:167

69), that polymorphously perverse component instincts are char
acteristic of human sexuality before it becomes organized around
genital and reproductive aims and that these component in
stincts persist in subsequent sexual responses centered in the
various non-genital erotogenic zones (see also Nagera et al, 50
54, 61-66). Freud is speaking, of course, from the position of
classical drive theory.
In classical psychoanalysis today, the concept of the mastur
bation fantasy is not limited to the particular fantasy image that
Ferenczi describes as forcibly retained in the mind throughout
the act of masturbation. Of greater significance than the con
scious mental picture is the underlying fantasy, which remains
largely unconscious and which—though it is correlated with the
mental imagery during masturbation—is always present as a
core fantasy: a powerful unconscious wish or longing that con
stitutes a motivating force in the personality, with or without
masturbation.

In defining "the central masturbation fantasy," Moses Laufer

explains its background and development as follows:

The preoedipal child may have available a whole range of autoerotic

activities, games, and fantasies which help to recreate and relive
the relationship to the gratifying mother. After the resolution of
the oedipus complex and the internalization of the superego,
however....all regressive satisfactions will be judged by the superego
as being either acceptable or not. Moreover, in terms of the future
sexual orientation and the "final sexual organization" of the person,
the resolution of the oedipus complex fixes what can best be
described as the "central masturbation fantasy"—the fantasy whose
content contains the various regressive satisfactions and the main
sexual identifications. (300)

In this context, Laufer asserts two a

establish the psychological significan
relevance to the present discussion: 1
tion fantasy is...a universal phenomenon
does not depend on whether the chil
"Although the content of this central m
not normally alter during adolescence, the fact that it is
experienced within the context of physically mature genitals
means that the defensive organization is under much greater

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James C. Cowan 91

stress," since "the incestuous wishes (which are contained within

the masturbation fantasy) are now tested within a new context"
(300-01).
In these terms, can one presume to say with any certainty
what the young Lawrence's "central masturbation fantasy" was?
My response at this point must be no, not if that means delin
eating this core fantasy in specific detail: conscious derivatives
of the fantasy that sometimes emerged in Lawrence's personal
relationships and correspondence and that informed some as
pects of his literary work are all that one has to go on. What one
can note is that the two elements I have discussed—the fanta
sies that accompanied the homoerotic impulses he experienced
in late adolescence and young adulthood, and the sadomasochistic
beating fantasies that emerged in several of his works—have
essentially similar meaning: the wish to be loved and tenderly
cared for by a powerful masculine paternal figure, often, though
not always, a man of the working class.
Sometimes this figure, in a wish-fulfilling righting of the
balance, asserts a powerful male dominance in an erotically
sadistic relationship with a passive, erotically masochistic woman.
An example is the sadomasochistic relationship of the farm
husband and wife in "Love on the Farm." Sometimes the mas
culine figure is a man whose physical form and bearing embody
a certain nobility of soul even as, in the exigencies of his life
circumstances and in relation to a woman with middle-class
pretensions to refinement, he moves toward tragic ruin (George
Saxton). At other times he is a man who, like Lawrence's father,
has been tragically devalued and whom the Lawrence persona,
in attempted reparation for his own part in the devaluation,
attempts in fantasy to love and rescue (Baxter Dawes, as a
stand-in for Walter Morel). In one instance, the paternal figure
is arbitrarily brutal to the point of irrational sadism, but Lawrence
sees his violence as providing the reciprocal vital interchange
needed for homeostatic balance (the ship's captain of Dana's
Two Years Before the Mast). In later novels, the masculine
figure offers the means of psychic transformation into indi
vidual selfhood. He may provide love and tenderness in caring
for the Lawrence persona in his despair and illness (Rawdon
Lilly in relation to Aaron Sisson in Aaron's Rod). Beyond a
certain point, however, this figure's arbitrary political power
and the danger of engulfment in his merging embrace make him

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92 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

so unpredictable that he is to be regarded with ambivalence and

mistrust (Ben Cooley in Kangaroo). As a religious leader, the
masculine figure is idealized as a "natural aristocrat," who
offers the way to dark godhead (Ramon Carrasco in The Plumed
Serpent). Ultimately, as the bearer of the regenerated and ide
alized phallus, this figure becomes an object of identification
(Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the risen man in The Es
caped Cock).
The preponderance of evidence shows compellingly that a
loving relationship with the powerful masculine paternal figure
was a major component of Lawrence's fantasy life. This long
ing derived, I believe, from the early childhood deficit in such
a relationship with his own father. This was not, however, the
only important part of Lawrence's psychic life. What Laufer
calls the "central masturbation fantasy" contains, by definition,
one's unrelinquished infantile wishes, which can be gratified
only in the symbolic or distorted form of fantasy but which
remain, usually unconsciously, as motivating forces within the
personality. Lawrence's fantasy life, I believe, also included at
least one other major component, which I have not discussed
here: the wishes and fantasies deriving from his overgratifying
but engulfing relationship with his mother. Since it is outside
the scope of the present essay, I will defer further exploration
of this issue to a separate discussion elsewhere.

offering a clear scientific explanation, contemporaneous

Although Freud's
with Lawrence, psychology
for manifestations of drives
of homoerotic and has the appeal of
sadomasochistic component instincts in his masturbatory fanta
sies, I must reiterate that I am unwilling to limit myself to early
Freudian theory as the only basis for a psychoanalytic under
standing of Lawrence. Traditional psychoanalysis today recog
nizes the adaptive and integrative function of adolescent
masturbation in assisting the transition from infantile narcis
sism to object love. John J. Francis and Irwin M. Marcus
emphasize this developmental function: "Masturbation in ado
lescence serves to assist the forward movement of the instinc
tual drives.. .and to bring the pregenital drives under the regulation
of the genital function....Further development of object relat
edness is facilitated by the masturbation fantasy, which brings

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James C. Cowan 93

the autoerotic experiences into contact with objects" (31). In

addition, such post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories as object
relations theory and self psychology provide alternative and for
many, I suspect, potentially more satisfactory means of under
standing the relational function for Lawrence of the polymor
phously perverse elements of his sexual fantasies.
In the language of object relations theory, D. W. Winnicott
says that "the capacity to be alone," which is "nearly synony
mous with emotional maturity," depends on the individual's
"ability to deal with the feelings aroused by the primal scene,"
whether observed or imagined. Unable as a child to incorporate
such feelings "in the service of masturbation," understood in its
developmental function, Lawrence in late adolescence remained
unable to accept "the whole responsibility for the conscious and
unconscious fantasy." According to Winnicott, "To be able to be
alone in these circumstances implies a maturity of erotic develop
ment...it implies fusion of the aggressive and erotic impulses
and ideas, and it implies a tolerance of ambivalence; along with
all this there would naturally be a capacity on the part of the
individual to identify with each of the parents" (417).
Lawrence's primary sexual identity was consciously hetero
sexual. His sexual development in adolescence, however, rather
than completing the phase-appropriate task of integrating ag
gressive and erotic impulses, was marked, I believe, by both
"masculine" and "feminine" feelings and a confusing clamor of
component instincts. Experienced as homoerotic as well as
sadistic and masochistic impulses, these partial instincts were
directed toward satisfying both aggressive and passive im
pulses in the dominant and submissive roles played out in
fantasy. Rather than being characterized by an increasing toler
ance of ambivalence, Lawrence's relationships in late adoles
cence and early adulthood were marked by the same wide
emotional swings between love and hate that Holly Laird finds
in his early poems. In Sons and Lovers, for example, Paul
Morel's feelings about Miriam undergo a series of rapid and
radical changes, in response to his mother's manipulation of his
oedipal guilt, which in turn fuels the ensuing conflict with his
father in which the two men nearly come to blows (249-54).
Rather than making a positive identification with both his
parents, the young Lawrence could consciously identify him
self only with his mother. His rejection of any such identifica

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94 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

tion with his depreciated father consciously defined both the

good and bad qualities of the father as outside the self. Even so,
Lawrence, at the same time, unconsciously internalized, albeit
in fragmented form, what he saw as the "masculine" qualities
of the only male model he had. These qualities included not
only the father's natural instinctuality, his vital sexuality, "dark
ruddy life" and unconscious being, but also his irrationality,
distrust of mental processes, impulse toward violence in re
sponse to family frustrations, and tendency to avoid conflict by
seeking escape in drink at the public house (Letters 1:189
90)—just as Lawrence later saw his world travels as "a form of
running away from oneself and the great problems" (Letters
4:313). Actually there was no whole external masculine paren
tal figure that Lawrence could identify with the internal ideal
ized paternal imago. What was available for introjection was a
part object, the penis, which, as in "Virgin Youth," could be
idealized as both lustrous deity and iconoclast.
Employing Melanie Klein's concept of internal objects, of
ten represented by introjected part objects, Winnicott says: "The
capacity to be alone depends on the existence in the psychic
reality of the individual of a good object. The good internal
breast or penis or the good internal relationships are well enough
set up and defended for the individual...to feel confident about
the present and the future" (417). There is little question that
despite the dangers of devourment and engulfment posed by the
symbiotic merger with his mother, the imago of the nurturant
and supportive mother was well established in Lawrence's in
ternal representational world. His lifelong preoccupation with
the image of the phallus, however, suggests, in object relational
terms, a continued search for the father's penis as a part object
that could substitute for the unavailable nurturant whole pater
nal imago that still could not be reliably established and stabi
lized in object constancy.
To shift to the perspective of self psychology, one might note
that Lawrence's early experience denied him the possibility of
realizing, or even fully recognizing, the developmental need to
identify himself with an idealized paternal figure. Consequently,
in Heinz Kohut's terminology, the internal idealized paternal
imago was shattered into pieces and the unmet need was subse
quently sexualized and directed toward these fragments (see
Kohut 127-28). As a child, Lawrence's massive disappointment

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James C. Cowan 95

in his father meant that the idealized paternal imago could find
no validation in the external object. Thus, in self psychological
terms, his late-adolescent homoerotic and sadomasochistic fan
tasies were an attempt to fill the deficit by means of a sexual
ized connection with the irrational, punitive, demeaning qualities
of the omnipotent masculine parental imago. The drive was
enlisted to effect a merger with the shattered fragments (repre
sented variously by the erotically sadistic farm husband, the
defeated and depressed Baxter Dawes, the irrationally arbitrary
ship's captain of Dana's novel) in an attempt to repair the injury
by magical means.

seem anachronistic in view of his reputation as a writer

Lawrence's
committednegative statements
to freedom of sexual about masturbation may
expression. This attitude,
I believe, derived primarily from the shame he felt about the
nature of his own masturbatory fantasies. It derived secondarily
from his conscious response to the hypocrisy of official disap
proval of masturbation, though hardly the private abstinence
from it, in the society in which he matured from childhood
through adolescence to young manhood. Lawrence's negative
view of the practice, however, was also in keeping with much
medical opinion of the time. Although both Lawrence and Freud
recognized that the public prohibitions against masturbation
were widely ignored in individual practice, neither was able to
transcend the prevailing opinion that it should be prohibited.
Yet Lawrence and Freud were also sexual liberators who chal
lenged the sexual orthodoxy of their day and advocated a much
greater sexual freedom in the interest of psychic health; hence
their ideas on human sexuality had a liberalizing effect on all
forms of sexual expression and behavior, including masturba
tion. My impression is that the liberalizing effect of their work,
as conditioned by other external social and economic determi
nants, has contributed to a cultural change, in which the Victo
rian judgments that formed the context for both Lawrence's and
Freud's views on masturbation have largely given way to social
and sexual attitudes that characterize a more tolerant, laissez
faire position.*

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96 Mosaic 28/1 (March 1995)

* I wish to thank Gerald Pollinger, Laurence Pollinger Ltd., and the

Estate of Mrs. Frieda Lawrence Ravagli for permission to quote from
the published works of D. H. Lawrence in the editions cited.

NOTES

1/ Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Freud are from The Standard
Edition and will be cited by volume and page number.
2/ Sagar approximates the date of the poem as 1905-06 (3). An early manu
script version entitled "The Body Awake" survives in MS. E317 at Uni
versity of Nottingham. "Virgin Youth," as the revised version in MS.
E320.2 is called, was published as a poem of twenty-two lines in Amores
(1916) (see Complete Poems 896). A later version, prepared for The
Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1928), is expanded to sixty-two
lines (see Complete Poems 38-40). These three versions are printed to
gether in Mandell, Appendix F, 181-83.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES C. COWAN teaches courses in modern British fiction at the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is also an aca
demic candidate in the UNC-Duke psychoanalytic institute. Founder
and former editor of The D. H. Lawrence Review, he has published D.
H. Lawrence's American Journey, D. H. Lawrence: An Annotated
Bibliography of Writings about Him (2 vols.), and D. H. Lawrence and
the Trembling Balance. His current essay is the fourth in a series on
sexual issues in Lawrence.

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