Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious Book

I have spent most of this summer of 2012 with D.H.Lawrence. It began with reading a book by Geoff Dyer Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence and went on to daily morning meditations with four to six pages of this book of the unconscious and four to six pages of his triple travelogue, D. H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy; Sea and Sardinia; Etruscan Places which I am still enjoying a few pages of every morning before sitting down to write. But this particular book was of most importance to me in my study of Lawrence and it has proven, for the most part, a disappointment. It would have been hard for me as well to have been a man and to not have been a chauvinist in the 1920's. I am afraid his opinions and beliefs are riddled with this idea of man's superiority over women. He, at least, believed that man should have a higher purpose in order to keep his woman at his side. The so-called facts of Lawrence's ideas of the unconscious were for the most part discarded by me. I quickly began to be only interested in what he thought and believed in, of which elements, formed and made him the man he was. Concurrently I am also reading his Selected Letters by Boulton and Cambridge before plunging into the biographies by others and also some of the fiction he wrote. If nothing else, this book will help me further understand the things Lawrence has to say as I complete the reading of his letters to both friend and foe, and his fiction will be uncolored a bit with some of his now-known-by-me blacks and whites.

In these two books Lawrence often acted silly and taunting, especially in the second book of this collection. On the other hand his Selected Letters depict a very serious man, thoughtful and well-read. This latter piece of this two-part book was a mumble jumble of ideas and beliefs that today would seem out-of-date and archaic. But I do not hold this book against him. Lawrence was certainly brave and had the courage to fight back against his fearful detractors and despotic critics. During this time his books were banned and unpopular. He lived meagerly and relied on the generosity of others. He seemed almost desperate in his attempts to sound out his warring and his self-perceived-as-superior views. I garnered little from reading these two small books and almost wish I hadn't. His letters are remarkable though, but these thoughts are not. The unconscious is an important subject to me and my poetry. I have always maintained I have attempted (especially in my early work) to write from the unconscious to the unconscious. I was hoping to get some answers from Lawrence and perhaps some tips on how to better tap into this amazing source we all have inside us. Or how we can gainfully use this uncommon source to compose, in addition to such poetic lines as my own, She wore a tattered wiesenboden the color of a schooper.