Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence doesn’t merely distrust psychoanalysis; he suspects it of running a soft coup against the conscience. The phrase “under a therapeutic disguise” is the tell: therapy, in his framing, is costume drama - a benevolent mask that lets a new authority enter the room without looking like authority. Psychoanalysis doesn’t march in waving ideology; it reclines on a couch, takes notes, and quietly reclassifies sin as symptom.

The sting is in “do away entirely.” Lawrence isn’t warning about excess or misuse; he’s accusing the whole project of an annihilating ambition. That absolutism fits a writer who treated modernity as a kind of psychic de-naturing: industrial life, mass society, and technocratic expertise sanding down instinct, vitality, and the older language of guilt and responsibility. Psychoanalysis, emerging as the prestige tool for interpreting inner life, becomes for him a rival priesthood - one that replaces moral judgment with diagnosis, and replaces accountability with etiology.

The subtext is cultural power. If an act is primarily the product of repression, childhood scripts, or unconscious drives, then the “moral faculty” looks quaint, even cruel - an outdated tribunal punishing people for forces they didn’t choose. Lawrence bristles at that shift not because he’s unaware of hidden motives, but because he believes moral life is inseparable from a felt, living self, not a case file.

Historically, he’s writing into early 20th-century battles over sexual candor, censorship, and the new sciences of mind. Psychoanalysis offered permission and explanation; Lawrence hears, behind the permission, an attempt to abolish the very idea of inner law.