Family 'truths' and individual lives: The psychoanalytic and the social in Toni Morrison's fiction

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to the construction of family in Toni Morrison's fiction. It combines a sociohistorical framework on the Black family with recent psychoanalytic discourses on individual development and early parental interaction. The central claim of this study is that Morrison's use of psychoanalytic narrative is actually a rewriting of it. Rather than read her characters as inherently pathological, which has traditionally been the outcome of much social science research exploring the experience of Black Americans, and not coincidentally, the reason for much African American cultural resistance to its application, Morrison constructs developmental issues against the backdrop of the cultural and sociohistorical factors which her characters must inevitably face down. Thus Black migration from the south to northern urban centers, the First World War, Reconstruction, slavery, and the Middle Passage are reference points from which she explores the identity crises Blacks have experienced as a function of their history in this country. By locating the sociohistorical at the center of her novels, Morrison insists that psychological disruption as a function of social change be understood in the context of psychosocial development and of the family's capacity to socialize the child to survive whole in an often hostile world.