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And so we find Barfield pointing out (in "The Son of God and the Son of Man") how D. H. Lawrence and his followers--those espousing sexuality as liberation--"tacitly assume that the unconscious is rooted, not in mental or spiritual but in bodily energies, the divine origins of the body itself." Thus, "they forget that man is, precisely in his physical organism, already a 'son of god'" (RM 252). Though he would change our understanding of
its nature, Barfield certainly does not undervalue its significance. As
early as Poetic Diction, for example, he writes: "The possibility
of man's avoiding self-destruction depends on his realizing before it is
too late that what he let loose over Hiroshima, after fiddling with its
exterior for three centuries like a mechanical toy, was the forces of his
own unconscious mind" (35-36).
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