Exploring Identity and Alienation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

This study reads Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah through the lens of a psychoanalytic theory to explore identity formation and alienation, in particular with reference to the protagonist, Ifemelu. The research further uses Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development theory to investigate Ifemelu’s journey between Nigeria and the United States, explaining how she experiences a psychological conflict between Nigerian heritage and American social expectations. From her struggle to reconcile competing dual cultural identities, Erikson’s theory helps to explain her personal growth within competing dual cultural identities. Concepts on the unconscious and repression from Freud help us to understand the psychological struggle Ifemelu must endure to understand and try to deal with racial discrimination and microaggressions. Her blog acts as a therapeutic safe space where she can repress what’s bottled up and finds herself struggling with identity. Freud’s theories discover the connection between her unconscious experience of the world and her outer experience, and in the process, they explain her resilience and her emotional catharsis. Thus Mr. Lacan’s mirror stage theory is applied to analyze the alienation that characterizes Ifemelu, specifically, her disparately fragmented self-perception in a racially illiterate American society. Societal expectations about what she should be weigh down on her sense of self, an internal and external tension captured in this analysis. When examined from the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness, Ifemelu has struggled with the psychological strain of inhabiting conflicting identities—one of her unique, Nigerian, essential self and one that is determined in American culture. Essential also is the psychological effect of systemic racism on her sense of belonging. The study depicts Ifemelu’s voyage as a mental odyssey of self-ownership, isolation as well as recovery. The return of her to Nigeria is a confrontation with traumas repressed and an integrating of the fragments of her identities. This study blends psychoanalytic theories with such applications to explore the psychological aspects of migration, identity, and race in contemporary literature while strengthening broader cultural hybridity and the immigrant experience.