Psychological Criticism Of The Misfit In Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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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 possibly the most apparent defense mechanism that The Misfit uses is denial. The Misfit has quite possibly had a rough childhood, and thus, we can assume that his parents weren’t the “finest people in the world (354).” In letting himself believe that his parents are such good people, he has been denying the opposite, in that he was not treated fairly as a child.
Another mechanism that is closely related to denial is repression. Repression has been defined as motivated forgetting, and happens when someone is not able to recall a threatening situation, person, or event (Boeree). There is some event that The Misfit happens to be forgetting. The Misfit had done something earlier in his life that landed him in the penitentiary. At the penitentiary, a psychiatrist told him that he had killed his father and that is why he was being locked up, but, a...