The Role Of Power In Soyinka's Madmen And Specialist

The paper seeks to interrogate the motives of power as sought by the principal characters in Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists, using psychoanalytic critical tools. Soyinka’s play highlights the challenges inherent in a system made dysfunctional by misguided leadership. The protagonist, Bero, appears to hanker after inordinate desires of power and omnipotence, and in the process orchestrates disruptive processes within the polity. So strange and inexplicable are his actions that they invite comparison to Freud’s idea of Oedipus complex, an unnatural phenomenon of predilection for domestic sexual crises and homicide. The renowned French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, has extended the Freudian examination of this tendency to the wider spheres of social and political life, which helps to provide insight into Soyinka’s Faustian protagonist. By analyzing Dr Bero’s enigmatic behavior in the play as an Oedipal phenomenon, it is possible to make some sense out of what ordinarily is a confounding character. Moreover, it also helps to clarify the vexed question of leadership and power that so often recurs in Soyinka’s oeuvre.

Key terms: Power, Practice, Leadership, Oedipus complex, psychoanalysis.

Introduction

In many ways, Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists lends itself to discussions of power and leadership.

This history is in the form of a missing key family member, which constitutes a ‘Lack’, in the Lacanian sense of the term, a lack or absence that may have negatively impacted the protagonist’s psyche. The absence of a mother in the life of Dr Bero appears to create a void in his life that is evident in his eccentric behaviour. All this is because, as psychologists have cautioned, the role of parents in the formation of the selfhood of the individual person cannot be