Psychological Criticism Of The Misfit In Flannery O?Connor?s A Good Man Is Hard To Find
Flannery O?Connor?s A Good Man Is Hard to Find is about a family that gets lost while driving through Georgia and runs across a man known as The Misfit. The Misfit is widely known as a dangerous man and a serial killer to say the least. The Misfit proves to be a true psychological case, and with the help of some Freudian concepts, The Misfit can be deconstructed. The ultimate question when looking at The Misfit is of course, why is The Misfit a killer In this paper I intend to use Freudian ideas to discover why The Misfit poses to be such a dangerous person.
When trying to discover why The Misfit has become the murderer that we find in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, we can first look at some Freudian theories. The Misfit was dealing with some sort of anxiety, and we know this because of his use of several ego defense mechanisms. Ego defense mechanisms, according to Sigmund Freud, are certain techniques that the mind uses when overwhelmed with anxiety, which unconsciously blocks impulses, or distorts them into a more acceptable, less threatening form (Boeree). The first, and
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