ABSTRACT
In a late autobiographical fragment D. H. Lawrence laments the taming of the colliers in the generation after his father’s, and the loss of a ‘sense of latent wildness and unbrokenness’. It is clear and well-attested that Lawrence had indeed been trapped by his mother’s excessive and demanding love of him, and that this had discouraged him growing beyond the incestuous, Oedipal attachments and conflicts. Many of the women involved in the most intense love-work in Lawrence’s stories, particularly in the earlier ones. However, there were in Lawrence in spite of the confusions in his external and in his internal life, strong synthesizing impulses that drove him on towards ever greater integration and individuation. Lawrence seems to strain after a process of development that Carl Gustav Jung has named ‘individuation’. As time passed, Lawrence’s trust and conviction that polarity must be became progressively clearer and more and more solidly founded in him.
