Fantasia of the Unconscious | Page 3

and creatures which nourish the sun.

Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--the
old duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have some respect
for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleeve than just
the marvel of the unborn me.
One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy of
mine--"pollyanalytics," as one of my respected critics might say--is
deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and
poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need
which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards
oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite
conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man. The
novels and poems are pure passionate experience. These
"pollyanalytics" are inferences made afterwards, from the experience.
And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent on
philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or
philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be
quite unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men
at the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived.
Men live and see according to some gradually developing and
gradually withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or
metaphysic--exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art.
Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin, and the
art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future; neither for our
hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone gray and opaque.
We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the heart
really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants, for the next
future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief and of
knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment in life and
art.
Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. And if I
try to do this--well, why not? If I try to write down what I see--why not?
If a publisher likes to print the book--all right. And if anybody wants to
read it, let him. But why anybody should read one single word if he
doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless of course he is a critic who needs to

scribble a dollar's worth of words, no matter how.
TAORMINA
October 8, 1921

FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Let us start by making a little apology to Psychoanalysis. It wasn't fair
to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it was fair to jeer
at the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is truly a negative quantity
and an unpleasant menagerie. What was really not fair was to jeer at
Psychoanalysis as if Freud had invented and described nothing but an
unconscious, in all his theory.
The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory. The
real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all human
activity.
Now this is going too far. We are bound to admit than an element of
sex enters into all human activity. But so does an element of greed, and
of many other things. We are bound to admit that into all human
relationships, particularly adult human relationships, a large element of
sex enters. We are thankful that Freud has insisted on this. We are
thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds of
superfineness. What Freud says is always partly true. And half a loaf is
better than no bread.
But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is not sex. And a
sexual motive is not to be attributed to all human activities. We know it,
without need to argue.
Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means the being divided into

male and female; and the magnetic desire or impulse which puts male
apart from female, in a negative or sundering magnetism, but which
also draws male and female together in a long and infinitely varied
approach towards the critical act of coition. Sex without the
consummating act of coition is never quite sex, in human relationships:
just as a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say, the act of coition is
the essential clue to sex.
Now does all life work up to the one consummating act of coition? In
one direction, it does, and it would be better if psychoanalysis plainly
said so. In one direction, all life works up to the one supreme moment
of coition. Let us all admit it, sincerely.
But we are not confined to one direction only, or to