Analysis Of Women's Self-development Based On The Psychic Zone Theory—A Comparative Study Of Dear Life And Female Psychologist

Both Alice Munro and Bi Shumin are famous contemporary women writers describing women's life and psychological growth.Alice Munro is Canadian whereas Bi Shumin is Chinese.A comparison of literary works written by the two will reveal similarities of and differences between the Anglo-American and the Chinese cultures.This thesis is thereby a comparative study of Dear Life by Alice Munro and Female Psychologist by Bi Shumin from the perspective of psychoanalytic feminism.The purpose is to deduce something about the psychological growth of women in the two different cultures so as to gain some insights into women's issues in the two different cultures.The overall structure of the thesis runs like this.In its introduction,the thesis offers a survey of the two authors,including their life,selected fictions and critiques of their literary works.The introduction also briefly explains the technical terms of Freudian psychic zone and psychoanalytic feminism.Next,the thesis examines women's married life in three parts,namely lost id,unbalanced super-ego and ways to deal with ego-reconstruction.Following it,the thesis scrutinizes women's social life also in three parts – unquenchable hidden id,responses to id-ego conflicts and kinds of external help they resort to in order to get out of the dilemma.Women's married life and social life combine to point to the general difference between freer defiance of Canadian women to patriarchy and readier conformity of Chinese women to community pressure.The thesis lists two cultural causes of this general difference.One is historical.It is the difference between western individualism and long-standing traditional Chinese doctrines.The second is contemporary.It isthe difference between Anglo-American mobility and the relative stability of Chinese neighborhoods,which exerts a greater pressure on deviating individuals.In the concluding part,the major points of the thesis are listed and suggestions are given concerning the orientation of future research in this area of studies.The psychic zone theory disseminated by Sigmund Freud and developed by Jacques Lacan was originally applied to the male sex,ignoring women.The current study proves that its terminology and theoretical concepts can also be used as instruments to describe women's psychological growth in defiance of patriarchal suppression.