Lawrence’s Bildungsroman and the Science of Sexual Development

Abstract

In the 1922 postscript to Sigmund Freud's Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, the famous case study of Hans, Freud describes a meeting with his former patient thirteen years after the publication of the original case study in 1909. Once a child with a crippling fear of horses, is now a strapping youth of nineteen (148) who appears healthy and normal. One piece of information that Freud finds particularly about the encounter is that the young man has completely forgotten his phobia and its treatment: When he read his case history, he told me, the whole of it came to him as something unknown; he did not recognize himself; he could remember nothing; and it was only when he came upon the journey to Gmunden that there dawned on him a kind of glimmering recollection that it might have been he himself that it happened to. So the analysis had not preserved the events from amnesia, but had been overtaken by amnesia itself. The polymorphously perverse Little Hans of Freud's case study is unrecognizable to the young man. To Freud's mind, this is remarkable only because he has been subjected to psychoanalytic treatment during childhood, which might have disrupted the course of his development in the process of curing his neurotic behavior. Far from damaging the boy, psychoanalytic treatment has given him an advantage over other children by freeing him from the burden of unresolved developmental problems. He declared that he was perfectly well, and suffered no troubles or inhibitions, Freud writes; and not only had he endured puberty any damage, his emotional had successfully undergone one of the severest of ordeals--his parents' divorce. Hans's inability to recognize his younger self in Freud's case study is, paradoxically, a sign of normalcy. For Freud, as for the audience of specialists on juvenile development to which his case study is addressed, the transformation from childhood to normal adulthood entails the complete or partial occlusion of childhood experience. In D. H. Lawrence's bildungsroman Sons and Lovers (1913), the protagonist, Paul Morel, encounters a similar gap between childhood and adulthood. In the final pages of the novel, after Paul's mother has died and he has made a permanent break with his first two lovers, Miriam and Clara, Paul confronts the prospect of his future life--a life he will lead, for the first time, without his mother's support--as a vast existential blank. This final scene is set against a nightscape onto which Paul projects his overwhelming sense of abandonment: On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a speck, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that them all and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing. (464) Now that Paul's mother is gone and he is no longer a child, nothing seems to separate him from death and eternity. The social relationships that have defined his identity up to this point (like the stars and sun that seem to embrace each other in the night sky) collapse under the pressure of mortality (the darkness that outpassed them all). In the infinite universe, Paul realizes, humans are so small that they are almost nothing--tiny and daunted, like the stars. Paul's distress here thus stems not just from the recent death of his mother but also from the sheer incomprehensibility of his future. Adulthood opens before him like a trap door. These two texts from the beginning of the twentieth century depict, from different vantage points, a gap between childhood experience and adulthood that emerged in literary and scientific discourse concurrently. …