St. Clair: Psychoanalysis
by Sonia, Poesy, Ashley, Mahawa,
Nathan, Maya
Conscious vs. Unconscious: 1. Ying-ying's belief
of superstitions/bad omens is ingrained into Lena when she is a child.
- Lena develops an eating disorder and starves herself after what happened in "Rice Husband" with Arnold.
Selective Memory and Repression (Ling and Mayo)
- Ying-ying passes down her passive, unassertive nature down to Lena.
"And because I forgot what I wished for, that memory remained hidden from me all these many years."(Tan 19)
She believes it is her fate to end up in a miserable, unhappy marriage after she inadvertently "causes" Arnold's death by
not eating all of her food.
Ying-Ying St Clair made a wish to the "Moon Lady" when she was a child. This happened during a likely traumatic event where she fell off the boat her family was on and got lost.
"Yet today I can remember a time when I ran and shouted, when I could not stand still. It is my earliest recollection: telling the Moon Lady my secret wish" (Tan 19).
She decides to not stand up for herself against Harold.
Ying-ying represses an early childhood memory of herself freely running around, when she still knew what she really wanted and before she "lost herself." Selective memory may have cut this out of her memory for a long time.
In the end it seems that Ying-ying's memory was repressed and selected because of a traumatic event in her childhood.
Nathan and Sonia
"Perhaps he was destined to be my husband. Because I think to myself, even today, how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?" (Tan 5).
-Sonia
She is not consciously aware of the exact reason, though, and even believes that she became anorexic because it was "fashionable" at the time.
"I had become quite thin. I had stopped eating, not because of Arnold, whom I had long forgotten, but to be fashionably anorexic like all the other thirteen-year-old girls" (Tan 4). -Sonia
"And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others" (Tan 19). -Sonia
Doppelganger Effect: Ying-Ying is stressed and unable to process what actually happened after falling off the boat. As a result of her stress and inability to process what really happened.
Ying-Ying starts to believe herself to be this girl, to be safe and united with her family. She takes on this sort of persona and these traits and ignores her reality. -Ashley
Avoidance: Staying away from people or situations that make us anxious
When she was younger, Lena constantly heard conflict and yelling from a mother and daughter next door, in which she is shocked by because Lena would rather avoid conflict and repress her feelings. -Poesy
She envisions herself to be another girl that is safe and not separated from her family.
"There were some shouts from the floating pavilion, and I strained to see faces of Amah, Baba, Mama. People were crowded on one side of the pavilion, leaning over, pointing, looking into our boat...A little girl pushed her way through some legs. 'That's not me!' she cried. 'I'm here. I didn't fall in the water.' The people in the boat roared with laughter and turned away" (Tan 26). -Sonia
"The dark side of my mother sprang from the basement in our old house in Oakland. I was five and my mother tried to hide it from me. She barricaded the door with a wooden chair, secured it with a chain and two types of key locks. And it became so mysterious that I spent all my energies unraveling this door, until the day I was finally able to pry it open with my small fingers, only to immediately fall headlong into the dark chasm. And it was only after I stopped screaming—I had seen the blood of my nose on my mother's shoulder—only then did my mother tell me about the bad man who lived in the basement and why I should never open the door again" (Tan 30). -Ashley
Lena realizes that expressing your feelings is important, even if sometimes it involves conflict. Towards the beginning of Harold and Lena's marriage Lena was passive and didn't want to start an argument, but she eventually stood up for herself. -Poesy
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"I could sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ones that chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark corner of her mind. And still they found her. I watched, over the years, as they devoured her, piece by piece, until she disappeared and became a ghost" (Tan 30). -Poesy