D.H.LAWRENCE ON THE ROLE OF THE FATHER

................................by Elizabeth Hope

........Relating to the first evening of our series of seminars on ‘Siggy and his Successors’, Elizabeth Hope came up with this interesting quotation from D.H.Lawrence, whom most of us know only as a novelist. Apparently, he wrote a remarkable number of essays that remain neglected and generally unknown. Elizabeth says, “These essays by Lawrence have much to add to our discussion of ' psychodynamism’. I thought this quote would have been useful for the father's role when it arose the other night.” Here is the quotation from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious by D.H. Lawrence:

............' But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, vibration from the present, body of the man There may not be any actual palpable connection. But from the great voluntary centre in the man pass unknowable communications and untellable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far we have refused to know, but none the less the quickening dark rays which pass from the great abdominal life centre in the father to the corresponding life centre in the child. And these rays these vibrations are not like mother vibrations. Far, far, from it. They do not need the actual contact the handling and caressing. On the contrary the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with the baby. It may not even need actual presence. But present or absent there should be between the baby and the father that strange intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital quickening , strength , knowing. Any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant.
..............The child exists in the interplay of the two great ‘l’s, the womanly and the male. In appearance the mother is everything. In truth the father has actively very little part. It does not matter if he hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should and touch it sometimes, and renew with it the connection the life circuit, not allow it to lapse, and vitally starve his child.