A Social Motif, A Psychological Projection Or A Metaphorical Castration?

Witch-hunting is one of the darkest phenomena both in human society and human mind, and has remained active ever since it made its early appearances against primitive and religious backgrounds. In spite of the development of civilization, it does not disappear but keeps alive in its contemporary disguise with even more destructive forces. As a matter of fact, witch-hunting has become a metaphor for finding victims responsible for certain unexplainable happenings, incidents, and events as well as excuse for deliberate and unjustified persecutions of various kinds. It is believed by the author that a multi-dimensional research of witch-hunting may contribute to our effort to understand its nature, to recognize its forms and transforms, to avoid its evil effects, and finally prevent it from further happening at all. For these purposes, this research tries to approach witch-hunting with an integrated framework covering some anthropological and psychological elements combined with Lacan's conceptions of castration and projectign.Accordingly, the first part of the thesis tries to define, explain, and illustrate witch=hunting phenomenon as a wide-spread and destructive human behavior, focusing on its nature, forms of expression, its influence on human life, and to explain the motivations for the research. The second part presents a review of the literature in question to make clear the status quo of the research, and a summary on findings of previous researches on this theme. Some perspectives on the causes of witch-hunting, including feminist, historical, economical, archetypal, religious, and anthropological interpretations, are also stated in this part. In the third part, literary manifestation of witch-hunting is raised as the main thrust, which is illustrated with William Faulkner's short novel Dry September as a case to the point; the analysis is done multi-disciplinarily, inviting discussions of witch-hunting in social-anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical terms, that is, as a social motif, a psychological projection and a metaphorical castration. The three terms constitute the main argument and theoretical construction of this research, the validity of which is subsequently tested during the analysis resulting in some positive findings for their interpretative power. The last part is the conclusion, in which the major findings are summarized and the implications and limitations of this research are mentioned. The realistic significance of the research lies in strengthening the anti-witch-hunting awareness of the society as well as throwing some new light on the research on human nature and social behavior.