A Psychoanalytic Criticism

Sibhat Gebregziabher is one of the rare literary masters Ethiopia has ever seen. His two works, Letum Aynegalign and Tikusat, are marked with autobiographical narrators. This book attempts to illustrate both novels as sublimated expressions of Sibhat's sexual instinct. It presents a literature on the Theory of Psychoanalysis, its central issues, and the relationship between creative writing, dreams and sublimation. It contains an original critical analysis that employed Freud's mechanism to present equivalent interpretations to the details of sexual fantasies and symbols that appear in both novels. The effort, here, is to substantiate that writers create an aesthetic value in their works of art through the use of imaginative literary elements fused with their original sexual instincts. An attempt is also made to explicate the relationship between the author and the autobiographical narrators he employed to tell the stories. In revealing the writer's psyche, a work of art can demonstrate the role of sexuality in the development of selfhood. Such work could be interpreted as 'an embodiment of its creator's unconscious desire', the author's instinctual desires.