Ivan Luana

Master Studies, English Language and Literature

2nd year

Psychoanalytic Approach in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract: The present paper is meant to underline the main theories of Freud's psychoanalysis
applied to Toni Morrison's award-winning novel Beloved and the very strong connection between
all of them and the way they are intertwined with one another. The structure of the psyche is of a
great importance to take into consideration in analyzing the characters, while the function of the
consciousness and the mental processes of the characters, together with the particular motifs and
symbols, will help us get a deeper insight of the undersides of Morrison's masterpiece.

Beloved explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual decay mutilated by slavery,
a decay that will continue to haunt the characters during the entire unfolding of the
novel. It is a novel in which love is expressed quite differently and hard to
understand, as soon as the main character, Sethe, kills her own daughter in order to
save her from the terrifying claws of the slavery. It is also a novel in which the
shadows of the past keep tormenting the present of the characters. Having pointed
out all of these features that outline the entire novel, we have a great variety of
characteristics that can make us analyze it from a psychoanalytic perspective.

To begin with, the iceberg theory divides the human’s mind schematically
into three dimensions: the Id or the unconscious which contains everything that is
inherited, that is presented by birth, that is fixed in the constitution, the Id
incorporates all the primitive desires, it is based on the hedonism of life, of seeking
pleasure in all things and avoiding pain. On the other hand, the Id encompasses all
our deepest fears, dreams and desires which tend to subjugate the social conceptions
and boundaries. The second dimension of the psyche is the ego or the conscious
1
personality, the side of the mind which feeds itself with our repressed feelings, the
place in which we store the “forbidden” fears and desires mentioned above. The last
part of the „iceberg” is represented by the super ego, the social construct of the mind,
the orders and values accepted and allowed by the society.

Freud's pattern of the id, ego and superego can be very well applied on
Sethe's state of mind and starting with this theory we can analyze Sethe's
psychological changes and behaviour throughout the entire novel and she is going
through a lot of things than did actually "modelled" her not in a very positive way.
Following this pattern that I have already mentioned below, Sethe’s id could
describe her greedy desire for freedom that, to some extent, becomes inhumane, she
is merely pulled by her own primary instincts; she is constantly and desperately
trying to get away from the chains of slavery, to save herself and, above all, to spare
her children from having the same future, even though she resorts to the most horrific
methods in doing so. Sethe’s ego consists in the fear of slave life. It is the point in
which she does become aware that life of a slave is the worst things she could have
ever gone through and she becomes afraid of the white people reiging over the black
people. Sethe’s superego is her maternal love, the only humane and innocent feeling
that she has been left with: the love for children. In playing the role of the superego,
love is also a social construct, an act that people from outside percieve differently,
for instance: she would not have killed her daughter if she had loved her; it is the
love the society would see, but deep down, the love Sethe has for her daughter is so
great that it brings her death.

Another aspect in our psychoanalytic interpretation of the novel is

displacement. In the essay "Dilemma of the Displaced: A Study of Toni Morrison’s
Select Novels," Karunashree points out that:

2
 "Beloved portrays the displaced Africans as the victims of slavery who had to undergo
pain, captivity, and horror. The extent to which the black women in American society
were tortured made them to wonder if they had to live. Sethe and Beloved are the
displaced black women who struggle towards liberation and self-hood. Their
displacement has caused specific contradictions in the social order of their life.
Beloved is a girl who was killed by her mother Sethe. It is an act of mercy killing
performed by a mother just for the sake of safeguarding her daughter from the pangs
of slavery. Sethe had no freedom even to feed her baby […]." (9)

Beloved herself deals with displacement as a consequence of the lack of her father's
figure. Coined by Freud itself, the Oedipal Complex implies a certain affection of
the daughter for her father. In this situation, the father is out of context, he is not
there in Beloved's oedipal stage, this is why she becomes more affectionate towards
her mother and tries to seduce Paul D when he lives with them, due to displacement
and desire for transition. Sethe centers her entire attention upon Beloved and tries
somehow to offer her what her father has never given her before. But at some point
Beloved begins to ignore Sethe's feelings and her demands suddenly increase and
she even tries to become her. All of these features, although present is Beloved's
character predominantly, they represent the overall idea of a slave, the isolated man
and his diminished personality in a white man's world, his continuous search of self-
identity and the inevitable failure in finding it.

Because of the experiences of slavery, most slaves repressed these memories

in an attempt to forget the past. Beloved deals exclusively with the distorted love of
a mother for her child under the oppression of slavery. The only thing the slaves
wanted at that time was to completely forget the sorrow caused by slavery and totally
bury it in the ground. As Maria del Mar, in her article "Community and Love:
Understanding the Past in Toni Morrison's Beloved," she pertinently argued that:

3
 So far two alternatives of dealing with life have been proposed: on the one hand,
Sethe's refusal to leave and her need, almost despair, to cling to whatever she possesses
or is left to her; and, on the other, Paul D's desire to continually move on, as if he
wanted to catch up with life that way. Both of them have one thing in common, though:
their wish to escape from the memories related to their enslaved past […]. This
conscious rejection of the past is justified by the characters in the name of the present,
of the future that lies ahead, as Sethe puts it: «No thank you. l don' t want to know or
have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow,
about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love.» She is
interested in the present, in the present feelings that, nevertheless, seem to be blocked
by the past she tries to unlearn. Despite all efforts, the past always returns […]. So, in
a sense, it seems that the characters are trapped in a sort of vicious circle in which they
refuse to remember the past in favor of their present life, but this life is impossible to
live without its past account." (12-13)

All of these feelings against slavery were repressed but they came back to haunt
them much more later, in the form of the schoolteacher, for instance, at the end of
the novel when Sethe mistakes Mr. Bodwin for schoolteacher and runs at him with
an ice pick. She wants to distance herself from the past by merely killing every shade
of it, she is terrified when she thinks she sees schoolteacher who is the embodiment
of all of her dark and miserable past and throughout the story she tries to get away
from it but with every step she makes, she bumps into it. This struggle to repress the
memories does harm the characters in a much more horrific manner and they come
back in an uglier form, haunting them, tormenting them and even bringing them the
inevitable death; they cannot escape the past, nor can they change it or embrace it.

The strong relationship between mother and daughter is very well felt
in the novel and it represents another feature of the psychoanalytical theories.
Therefore, Sigmund Freud, in his essay "Family Romances," points out the fact that

4
"when presently the child comes to know the difference in the parts played by fathers
and mothers in their sexual relations, and realizes that ‘pater semper incertus est’,
while the mother is ‘certissitma’, the family romance undergoes a curious
curtailment: it contents itself with exalting the child's father, but no longer casts any
doubts on his maternal origin, which is regarded as something unalterable." (239) In
Beloved, things are much more complicated regarding the relationship mother
daughter, as Marianne Hirsch affirms in her essay "Maternity and Rememory: Toni
Morrison's Beloved": "Sethe is permanently separated from her husband, Halle, and
separates herself from her own children when she sends them ahead to freedom. In
this economy in which even one's own body is not one's property, the white masters
can rob Sethe of everything, including her mother's milk. Her maternal labor is
supposed to be theirs, not hers or her children's."(98-99) She suffers because she
cannot be with her children and raise them but his maternal instinct is constantly
more powerful and tells her it is better to be separated from them than letting them
live in slavery, even though this means killing one of them. But in the end Beloved
and Sethe get closer and closer as if they were trying to catching up with what they
have missed but they end up destroying one another, this love ends up in pain from
both sides, proving that the past comes back and it cannot transform into something
better.

In conclusion, Beloved, besides offering us a deep insight of the life of

slaves and what they had to deal with back in those days, it depicts a particular story
of a family destroyed by this inhumane enemy called slavery. Freud's
psychoanalytical theories help up get a closer look at the undersides of this novel
and look at it with a critical eye, on one hand, and with empathy and emotion, on the
other. All these theories applied on our present text are a good occasion to go through
the mental processes of the characters, to get to understand them and their choices

5
better and become more aware of the seriousness of the events. What is certain in
this novel is that past cannot be forgotten, it comes back in the most horrific shapes
and, as Freud himself would probably put it, in order to understand our present we
need to accept the past.

Bibliography:

1. Del Mar, Maria Gallego Duran. "Community and Love: Understanding the Past in Toni
Morrison's Beloved." 1994, 11-17. Print.
2. Freud, S. (1909). "Family Romances." The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906-1908): Jensen's ‘Gradiva’ and
Other Works, 235-242. Print.
3. Hirsch, Marianne. "Maternity and Rememory : Toni Morrison's Beloved." Print.
4. V S Karunashree. “Dilemma of the Displaced: A Study of Toni Morrison’s Select Novels.”
International Conference on Systems, Science, Control, Communication, Engineering and
Technology 2016, 08-10. Print.