The Joy Luck Club: Id Versus Superego

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan is one of the best known Chinese American literary works. The major characters are four mothers, who grew up in China and then emigrated to America, and their four daughters, raised and educated in the US. The novel is about their personal experiences, and the conflicts and final understanding between the two generations. The writer of this thesis tries to explore the causes of the conflicts and their settlements with the theory of Freud, an Austrian psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology.The mothers in the novel grew up in China before the liberation in 1949. Having gone through an exceptionally long feudal period, the country was still under the influence of Confucianism, which had been established almost as a national religion. Confucianism includes a series of moral principles that regulate Chinese people's behavior. To explain in Freudian theory, Chinese culture, which pursues moral perfection, is a representative of the superego. On the other hand, Americans value individual freedom and pleasure as the goal of the country's development. Thus American culture is compared to the id in this thesis.Lined up on one side are the mothers, Chinese culture, and the superego; on the other side, the daughters, American culture, and the id. The thesis is centered upon the relations of the two sides.The mothers in the novel try to apply to their daughters the Chinese moral principles they abide by themselves. However, the daughters, almost totally American, rebel in the spirit of the id. The conflicts between the superego and the id result in the conflicts within families. The two sides finally make peace out of love, and also out of similarities they share. Like the mothers, the daughters also have the superego inside, passed on by the stories their mothers told about their lives in China. On the part of the mothers, they emigrated because they could not stand the oppressions in China. The courage and the desire to break free are the id in them. The bits of the superego in the daughters and the id in the mothers make possible the understanding between the two generations.