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Invisible Man

According to Goethe, "We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe." Despite the hyperbolic nature of Goethe's statement, it holds some truth. Because of this element of truth, society looks to psychoanalysis as an important tool for understanding human nature. Furthermore, psychoanalytic criticism of authors, characters, and readers has a place in literary criticism that is as important as the place of psychoanalysis in society. This is because of the mimetic nature of much of modern literature. In fact, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote, "If psycho-analysis is to be constituted as the science of the unconscious, one must set out from the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language,"(1) thus directly relating literature – the art of language - and psychoanalysis. Searching the database of the Modern Language Association for articles about the use of psychoanalysis for understanding Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man yields one article by Caffilene Allen, of Georgia State University, in Literature and Psychology in 1995. Thus, further study of this subject seems warranted. As Allen points out, "Purely psychoanalytic interpretations of Invisible Man are rare, even though Ellison clearly threads the theories of at least Freud throughout his novel."(2) Because of the rarity of psychoanalytic critiques of Invisible Man, this paper will examine the character of the invisible man in the Prologue and Epilogue of Ellison's masterpiece using the theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Jacques Lacan.
The first step in this study should be to look at previous psychoanalytic critiques of Invisible Man. As stated earlier, Caffilene Allen's article showed itself as the only article of this type in the Modern Language Association database. Other researchers mention Freud, and Allen cites one other article of this type, but as Allen notes, "Even those critics who touch on Freud do...

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