Defense Mechanism as a Psychological Concept in Afro-American Novel

Abstract

The life of average black man offshore African soil is fraught with greater challenges. The study concentrates on defense mechanism as one of the many psychological devices or tools, used ignorantly by Black-Americans as a means of earning their manumission or emancipation from white overlords. Many of these challenges could be both mild and severe, traumatizing and excruciating; causing great mental or physical pain. The extreme of these challenges is that, it leads to early death if the victim or the situation is not rescued. Against this backdrop, the study adopted the concepts based on the psychoanalytic principles established by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) whose theory of the psyche is often today in Eagleton’s Introduction to Literary theory (2005) referred to as classical psychoanalysis. This theory also combines with Lois Tyson (1999) African-American criticism to examine black families in black literatures from the psychological point of view. Cases of defense mechanism as a psychological concept are drawn out of four (4) Afro-American literary texts; Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and “Native son”, August Wilson’s “Fences” and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Major findings are the psychological errors committed by traumatized blacks from their daily challenges and how the errors defined their lives in ruins and their identity as blacks. Major attention was focused on how those blacks were able to defend themselves and possibly gained their emancipation from slavery. The study focused on how the sampled-blacks faced and accepted the confrontational harsh economy and unbreakable political structure created by the whites. The classist nature of the social structure were also considered and how this affects or defines the limitations of blacks as second-class citizens in diaspora.