WOLE SOYINKA’S AUTISTIC THINKING AND THE UNIVERSE OF THE YORUBA MIND IN DEATH AND THE KING’S HORSEMAN A PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVE

Psychology deals with the aspect of the individual’s mind that reveals his thinking. Psychoanalytical study of literature, therefore, is concerned with the way the writer thinks in his creative perception of the world and the events around him. This concern is in tandem with New Historicists’ view that the literary text does not exist in a vacuum, and therefore, the writer thinks he draws on what he already knows about the world around him, which he shuttles and rearranges to come up with his own derivative creative reality. This is precisely what Soyinka has done in his thinking about the historical incidence of 1946 in Oyo in his play, Death and the King’s Horseman. However, in so doing, Soyinka displays a creative madness that venerates death over life and ties society to a stake of perpetual exploitation and suffering. This paper therefore uses the psychoanalytical approach to literature to discuss the artist’s frame of mind and the society’s attitude to this servitude