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KMID : 0385319990100020262
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
1999 Volume.10 No. 2 p.262 ~ p.275
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Hee Kyeong Eun’s Short Story, My Wife’s Box, and the Structural Model of the Mind
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Cho Doo-Young
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Abstract
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The Structural Theory of Freud is relevant is understanding the psychodynamic aspect of human psychology. The theory clearly explains the phenomena that the inflation of the ego brings about mania and consequently a dull and emaciated life, the inflation of the superego causes depression and withdrawal, and the symptom of the over-dominance of the id is antisocial acting-out resulting in a disastrous life. In this respect, the short story "My Wife’s Box" by the Korean writer Hee-Kyeong Eun, the winner of 1998 Yi-Sang Award, can be taken as an exemplary work in which the Structural Theory is dramatically articulated. The plot of this story is as follows: A young housewife in her twenties, who has been married for about 5 years, is living in a high-rocketing apartment complex of newly developed bedtown. She finds no comfort in the atmosphere of city and longs for a life in harmony with nature. She wants to live passionately and artistically with her husband. On the other hand, her husband is not the one who can satisfy her psychological needs. He can be described as a workaholic, and a conformist. As a mind-executive for a company, his highest value is money and efficiency. Owing to the wife’s infertility, they have been under treatment at an infertility clinic for many years. As its emotional side effects, she is suffering from depression and anorgasmia. When the wife complains of her loneliness, the husband hurries to make an appointment for the infertility treatment, and then as a mechanical sequence, they have a sexual relationship following the direction of the doctor. This repressed peaceful life faces its crisis when she succumbs to the temptation of her neighbor housewife and comes to have an extramarital affair. When her secret adultery is found out by the husband, she falls into the deep depression and state of dissociation. Anger, jealousy, and revengefulness along with the wife’s psychiatric disorder make the husband hospitalize his wife into a mental hospital and move out of their nest. On the move, he loses his way and strays in the muddy mountain road. He has an attack of
fear at the sight of the endless tombs of cemetery, and is relieved when he see a well-paved road ahead of him. In this story, the wife represents id while the husband symbolizes ego and the sense of duty to have a baby stands for superego. In the beginning, we see the wife under the anaclitic depression, which results from the pressure on the id by the united force of ego and superego. The protest and adultery of the wife in the middle of the story show the antisocial acting-out resulting from the explosion of the bottled-up id. The following hospitalization of the wife by the husband is the punishment of id by ego and superego. After the repression and imprisonment of id, only superego and ego remain in tension, and in this stage comes up the fear of castration, which is symbolized by the fear of the husband in the cemetery. His relief at the sight of the asphalt road is the joy of freedom of the husband(id) liberated from the sense of the duty to have a baby(super ego), but it also foreshadows his future barren life. In conclusion, this story shows that the ego without id, the source of psychic energy, cannot survive.
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KEYWORD
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Literature, Psychoanalytic, Criticism
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