ABSTRACT
This chapter studies in detail the correspondence between Lawrence and Trigant Burrow from 1925 to 1928, ascertaining which of his writings Burrow sent Lawrence; assessing Lawrence’s review of Burrow’s book The Social Basis of Consciousness, with its criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis; and noting the new language of True and False Self shared between the two men. It refers their ‘accord in the inner sense of values’ that Burrow noted to their experiences in infancy and shows how the language and concerns of classical psychoanalysis did not engage with their sense of personal difficulty, as they wrestled – like Gross and Jung before them – to separate the individual reality of their psyche-soma from the compliance forced upon them from without. It argues that the schizoid sense of unreality that haunted them was as characteristic of the twentieth century as hysteria had been of the nineteenth; that their resultant concern for creativity, relationship, personalisation and true-self living raised issues that did not enter mainstream psychoanalysis for another 30 years with the work of the British object-relations school, most notably that of Donald Winnicott; and that Lawrence, more than anyone else, helped to shape the cultural climate out of which that new psychoanalytic development came.
