A psychoanalytic analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a salesman and Tennessee williams' a Streetcar Named Desire

In this thesis, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire are analyzed via Freudian psychoanalytic theories. In the first chapter of this study, firstly the relation between literature and psychoanalysis is explained regarding the human psychology as a subject matter for both fields. Later, the key Freudian psychoanalytic theories are explicated in order to provide the ground for the analysis of the protagonist in the selected plays. The second chapter of this study focuses upon the psychoanalytic examination of the protagonist in Death of a Salesman in the context of American dream by working through his psychosexual development, his contradictory personality, his relationship with other characters, his physical and mental struggle as an oppressed common man in the capitalistic American society and his consultation to defense mechanisms and suicide as solution to his problems. In the third chapter, the female protagonist of A Streetcar Named Desire is studied through exploring the motives behind her behaviors and gradual mental deterioration by investigating her inter-personal relations, obsessions, past experiences and environmental elements that contribute her striving as an abject and ostracized woman in the patriarchal society. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to examine the relationship of individuals with society that starts up within the family through the internalization of the cultural ideals via introjections and to explore the role of the identity formation process, the subconscious and external factors in the personality development, behavior pattern, decision making process and inter-personal relations of an individual. It also intends to anatomize the possible results of traumatic past experiences, of a defect in the process of the instillation of cultural ideals, and the resolutions consulted by both society and individuals.