Self-Actualization in the Poetry of Langston Hughes: A Psychoanalytic Study | ||||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||||
| Article 6, Volume 79, Issue 1, July 2022, Page 165-179 PDF (791.36 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2022.265689 | ||||
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| Author | ||||
| Mohamed Abdel Wahab Mahmoud | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| The objective of this study is to widen the scope of reading the poetry of Langston Hughes, one of the main leaders of Afro-American poetry. The psychological approach represented by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow is adopted and applied to the literary output of Langston Hughes. Maslow’s theory of self-actualization can be traced in Hughes’s poetry showing the poet’s ability to triumph over the limited realm of the Afro-Americans’ identity crisis. The poet’s psychological balance helped him a lot to interweave his fellow people’s dilemma with all the hopes of the would-be American Dream. Although he does not exclude himself from the daily sufferings of his people, yet he takes the issue in his poetry beyond the horizon of the stereotypical image of the Afro-American sufferers in a white-dominated society. The study is an attempt to stress the idea that there are Afro-American writers who could set themselves free from the chain of the Afro-American dilemma. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Maslow; Self; Actualization; Hughes; Identity Crisis | ||||
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