Gender And Psychoanalysis: Id, Ego And Superego

The long essay relies on both primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source of data is Chetan Bhagat’s One Indian Girl and it is the most preferred because of the post-modern setting and gender representation especially in the Indian world which tends to capture inequalities in developing countries in the twenty-first century. The secondary sources of data comprise textbooks, journals, and internet articles. The theoretical frameworks are within gender-related theories such as feminism, masculinity, and psychoanalysis.

In addition, feminism and masculinity are set as the frameworks to understand both sexes about Judith Butler and Simone De Beauvoir. Freudian psychoanalysis will be treated to unlock the unconscious and the psyche of human beings to reveal the clash of reality with façade, as well as, to access suppressed wants vs rational faculty.

Psychoanalysis will be deployed in the research to read the unconscious of the characters to have a better understanding of the text, also, to access the role of the unconscious in the gender problem. Psychoanalysis will be treated in the text about Peter Barry’s The Beginning Theory. Psychoanalysis is said to be propagated by an Austrian Neurologist, Sigmund Freud in 1885.

Barry, Peter defines “psychoanalysis as a form therapy which aims to cure mental illness.”

(70) hence, it is a form of study that access unconscious conflicts, motives, and defenses.

Sigmund Freud is said to be preoccupied with accessing the human psyche, he explained with his Oedipus complex, human needs and divided them into three phases namely: Oral stage, anal stage, and sexual stage. He also divided the human mind into three components which he called human Tripartite models which are namely: id, ego, and superego.

The Id is the human primitive impulses, like hunger, lust, and all human pleasures. The Id is said to be able to motive ego and maneuver human behavior to bring human pleasure. The Ego is the second model in the three tripartite models. It maintains balances between the id (desire) and superego(conscience). The superego is the moral part of human personality, representing conscience. The superego is the ethical and moral restraints placed on individuals by parents or guardians.

Freudian psychoanalysis contains terms like repression, projection, sublimation, and Freudian’s slip or “parapraxis”. Repression is an unconscious process of suppressing some emotions in humans, like traumatic experiences, agonies, etc. sublimation is “whereby the repressed material is 'promoted' into something grander or is disguised as something 'noble'. For instance, sexual urges may be given sublimated expression in the form of intense religious experiences or longings” (70). Freudian’s Slip explained the unconscious mind, as, the repressed emotions find the way of the human mind. He explained that through unintended actions of humans there lie the unconscious when humans said what they never meant.