الفهرس 
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Abstract
The present dissertation mainly tackles the concept of identity crisis from a psychoanalytic perspective in accordance with self-acceptance and self-actualization. Regarding the African American hybrid identity and identity crisis as a related matter, the present dissertation examines the poetry of two African American poets: Countee Cullen and Nikki Giovanni, to identify their Afro American self-acceptance and self-actualization psychologically. In this respect, two psychological approaches: the Nigrescence theory or the Cross model and Abraham Maslow’s conception of self-actualization, are going to be applied to some selected poems of both poets to recognize their psychological visions of the self. Self-acceptance and self-actualization are the cores of self-psychoanalytics, they are two sequential routes to get over the identity crisis, first one must accept his identity, then comes the phase of actualizing and goals’ achieving. Surprisingly, African Americans who fulfill self-acceptance and self-actualization, have either Black Nationalist, Biculturalist, or Multiculturalist racial identity.
In other words, according to the Cross model they either accept their blackness only or have acceptance to both cultural identities they have −African and American− or become multicultural in which they can accept any other identity. Focusing on the poets under discussion, it appears that Cullen’s poetics prove his Biculturalist persona, while Giovanni’s poetry proves her Black Nationalist persona. Although both poets attain self-acceptance and self-actualization, they reach it differently. Cullen believes in the equal unification between black and white to fight racism, Giovanni on the other hand trusts the authenticity of her African roots. Further, the current dissertation reviews the different attitudes of the poets’ quest for Afro American self-acceptance and self-actualization in a psychoanalytic frame.