Self-Exile Within the Community: Athol Fugard’s Psychotherapist Solution to His Characters in His Film Plays The Guest, The Occupation And Marigolds in August

Abstract

The South African playwright Athol Fugard has crafted more than twenty five plays based on Apartheid South Africa, each of them prescribing a different solution to this malady known as Apartheid for both his non-white and white characters. The three film plays selected for this paper explore the period when the playwright seemed to suggest that self- exile could effectively work against apartheid policies, so his characters withdraw from the community and into themselves as a way of escaping the harsh conditions they find themselves in. The study adopts psycho-analytic theory as propounded by Sigmund Freud and enhanced by Carl Gustav Jung to explore the psychological conditions of the characters as they react to their physical environments.