as such it represents a threat."161 Via The Bluest Eye Morrison "talks back" to the

oppressive, victimizing forces against and within African American communities. By

doing so, she restores the denied dignity and respect to persecuted victims like Pecola and

thus creates a possible narrative space for healing and restoration of the self.



 Notes


37 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders-IV (Washington, DC.: Author, 1994), 209.

38 J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language ofPsycho-Analysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), 465.

39 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from German under the
general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, 24 vols. (London:
Hogarth, 1953-74), vol. 2, xx, 86. Hereafter all references to Freud's work will be cited
as SE.

40 Elizabeth A. Waites, Trauma and Survival. Post-Traumatic and Dissociative Disorders
in Women (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 6. For the controversy about Freud's
abandonment of the seduction theory and its impact on trauma studies, see Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson's The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory
(New York: Penguin, 1984). Masson's highly polemical view on Freud holds that he
gave up his earlier position on trauma and seduction theory to gain acceptance in the
existing medical circle, because his seduction hypothesis posed a great threat to the
genteel Viennese society and upholding his position became such a great liability to him.
Masson argues that by explaining "memories" of seduction and sexual violence as
patients' fantasies and a development of childhood sexuality, Freud built the foundation
of psychoanalysis upon the neglect of sexual crimes and the suppression of truth.
Some feminist psychoanalysts take a similar view on Freud's recantation of the seduction
theory. For instance, in her books Father-Daughter Incest and Trauma and Recovery,
Judith Herman criticizes Freud's lack of empathy toward his female patients and his
denial of their reality. So she sums up the development of psychoanalysis in this way:
"Out of the ruins of the traumatic theory of hysteria, Freud created psychoanalysis ....
The dominant psychological theory of the next century was founded in the denial of
women's reality. Sexuality remained the central focus of inquiry. But the exploitative
social context in which sexual relations actually occur became utterly invisible.
Psychoanalysis became a study of the internal vicissitudes of fantasy and desire,
dissociated from the reality of experience" (Trauma andRecovery, 14). Father-Daughter