A rich body of recent scholarship has commented on the depth of Ellison’s engagements with major developments in sociology and psychology, including direct engagements with the work of Robert Park, John Dollard, Gunnar Myrdal, and the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. Ellison showed a sustained interest and concern with the new prominence of sociology and psychology in mid-century policy decisions in the U.S. Accordingly, his fiction and chapters consistently engaged with these disciplines’ claims to knowledge of African American culture as compared with other ways of knowing, such as naturalist fiction, Marxist analysis, music, and folklore.

The essay provides an overview of Wright’s engagement with psychoanalysis. It traces Wright’s literary adaptations of psychoanalysis from his first completed novel Lawd Today! to his later writings and surveys his collaborations with the German-American social psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Wertham’s studies of matricide provided Wright with the material for his novel Savage Holiday (1954), which has long been recognized as his most explicitly psychoanalytic fiction. Wertham developed his theory of matricide partly through a critique of Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet and he repudiated Freud’s claim of the universality of the Oedipus complex. In contrast to the critical consensus that reads Savage Holiday as an orthodox depiction of an Oedipus complex, the essay traces the novel’s indebtedness to Wertham’s work and its relation to Wright’s anti-colonial nonfiction. Within these contexts, Savage Holiday appears as a critique, rather than an orthodox representation of Freudian psychoanalysis. Through this rereading of the novel, the social history of matriarchy emerges as an important theme of Wright’s writings of the 1950s.