Psychoanalysis
Indeed my own view of all this pathological theorizing that Freud has started — my own sympathies are very much in favour of Jung — is that our present psycho-analytical dogmas break down when they deal with a person who, like me, has both an abnormally powerful imagination and an abnormally strong will. For myself I disagree with this whole modern tendency to disparage the will and the imagination in favour of letting yourself go. My theory is that it is with the reason that we attain the irrational, with the will that we change our character, and with the imagination that we recreate the world! (John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)
Powys' views on the subject were also expressed in a small volume, Psychoanalysis and Morality, published in 1923 by Jessica Colbert, San Francisco. Some of the subjects Powys tackles here have a modern ring:
The repulsive and odious vulgarity of our modern American attitude to sex-pleasure is flagrantly illustrated by the tone of our popular newspapers when any social lapse of this kind is dragged forth into the light. A queer torrent of emotion seems just then released wherein a half-comic, half obscene sentimentality, goating over its victims, mingles with a positive orgy of ethical vengeance, the brutality of which rises to the sadism of the pillory.
One can only suppose that the same electric vibrations in human nerves and the same perilous secretions in human glands which drove forth the ancient tribes of men to worship Dionysus upon his hilltops and Ashtoreth in her forest-groves express themselves now — in a form vulgarized and debased, in these comic-brutal malice-dances, drunk with sentiment and cruelty, round the moralistic lynching-post. (John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)
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In a much later text, John Cowper launches into a passionate plea for the Common Man, the "dub" as he calls him, and again fights against the — to him — preposterous idea of an "Unconscious":
One poor gibbering dub in these dim outer courts may whisper to another that nobody has ever seen the Unconscious, and that nobody has ever gone down into that cistern 'for toads to gender in', or, with his wits about him, fished up some of its scaly denizens; may whisper that there was a great philosopher once who denied that the 'Thing-in-Itself' could be reached at all by any rational approach; may whisper that of course mathematics could go anywhere, simply because it only went in paper-boats and under its own stream of algebraical figures, and could never inform us what really existed in those dim regions, but only how any imaginary reality would have to behave if it weren't to contradict the necessity of its own nature; but none of these whisperings can stop our trembling.
The only thing to do is to deny the existence of the Great Totem Itself. The only thing to do is to refuse to pay our 'obols' to the superior Charons who take us on these imaginary health-excursions over the black Acherons of our mythological selves. The only thing to do is to make a commonsense Co-op of this mad world where matters can be rendered less complex and more conscious by a revolt of the dubs. (John Cowper Powys, The Unconscious, The Occult Observer, 1949)
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