Self-Disintegration in The Modern World: Freeing the Fragmented Self in The Works of Lawrence and Erich Fromm

Abstract

21^st century individuals, in the overly industrialized civilization, have been molded by a generality of what an average man should be. What he should have, how he should act and what kind of relationships he should form with other fellow men. Yet, he still believes his freedom intact. This paper, aims to study how industrialism from the modernist age as depicted in D.H Lawrence’s fiction and non-fiction, has progressed further into enclosing the individual inside a materialist cage labeled as “freedom” turning him into an automaton, one copy of the rest, enmeshing his individuality and spontaneity as an original being, capable of creative achievements, causing his self to disintegrate into different neurotic forms of love and coping. as well as the social psychologist Erich Fromm’s empirical analysis of this disintegration in our contemporary society, which has progressed further since the modernist age. Thus, this paper adopts a psychoanalytical and socio-cultural approach based on Erich Fromm’s theories of love and disintegration to analyse D.H Lawrence’s characters in “The Rainbow” and examine his prophetic insights in relation to the disintegration of the individual in our contemporary society.