Discussion Post 3

For discussion post three I chose to identify Katherine’s id, ego, and superego at work in the short story “The Room”. This was more challenging than I originally thought it was going to be. This story is loaded with symbolism and the examples of the id, ego, and superego are not as clear as I initially thought.

Katherine does make a conscious decision to go out and cheat on her husband, a decision that many make out a passion. The id deals with a persons raw urges, often sexual in nature, but this is not the case here. In fact, her life and marriage appear to be somewhat normal since the incident of nine years ago. Even while she is talking to the man she is planning on cheating on her husband with, she admits that her marriage is not breaking up. I feel that Katherine's id, the primal urge that is driving her in this story, is her desire to deceive her husband. She feels that she was deceived by him during the strange affair that ended with a death, and wants to get even with him. A sort of revenge, she wants to deceive him the way that he deceived her. Katherine's ego is what has suppressed this urge for this long. For many years since the incident she has suppressed this feeling of wanting to deceive her husband the way that he has deceived her. But, her ego kept her from acting on this until she felt justified. Maybe it took her nine years to rationalize the idea that cheating was the right way to go about this, or to gather the courage to actually go through with it. The one thing we do know is that her ego was eventually shaped to fulfill the want of her id. The superego in all of this is the fact that she knows what she has done is something that is viewed as unethical. She takes a sort of guilty pleasure on this, finding herself on the opposite side of social norms.

To summarize, I would say that Katherine's id is her desire to deceive her husband Phair. Katherine's ego is the mechanism that had suppressed this desire, whether it was a justification or a lack of will. Lastly, her superego is her knowledge of the socially unacceptability of the affair, she realizes that it is something that she should hide.