Troubled and Traumatized Self: A Psychoanalytical Study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

An attempt has been made in the present paper to study and analyse the troubled and traumatized self of Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A psychoanalytic thinker says “trauma places the relation between external reality and psychic reality in focus. A person’s personal experiences are represented in one’s own psyche and gets personalised. The internal world of wishes, conflicts and deficits, resulting from trauma, is negotiated in human interaction”. Here, Sethe felt affected both by physical and emotional trauma caused by the institution of slavery.The institution of slavery not only repressed the maternal bond betweenSethe and her children but alsoher own individualization and the development of her consciousness as a normal human being. Here, an attempt has also been made to explore how much she was affected by the repression of the memories of the trauma she had endured in her life and how much she was victimized and traumatized that she felt unable to nurture her own child Beloved. Under the oppressive conditions of slavery she found herself unable to form a maternal bond between herself and her beloved daughter. Morrison also tried to restore the historical record of the atrocities on the blacks during the period of slavery and give voice to the collective memory of Afro-Americans by depicting the trauma faced by Sethe