A Psychoanalytic Interpretation On One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey (1935-2001) is one of the most famous American novelists in the 20th century. His masterpiece One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962, was turned out to be a great success. It gained much attention of the readers as well as the critics. Aside from the novel, he also attained reputation as a counterculture hero in California. He lived in the life style of the Beats and organized the famous bus trip of Merry Pranksters, searching for new frontiers of experiences and new perceptions of life.Kesey's novel as well as his counterculture life suits the mood of the 1960s when people were tortured by the modern world with conformity and mechanism. The readers especially the youths regarded his novel as their guidance to struggle for a better way in dealing with the tension between the individual and the society.This thesis, consisting of four parts, aims to search the reason and the resolution of this tension in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest through the theories of Sigmund Freud. The first part, Introduction, concentrates on Ken Kesey's life in the 1960s as a counterculture writer, retells a brief introduction of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and summarizes the researches on this novel done all over the world. In Chapter Two, some basic psychological theories of Sigmund Freud are respectively introduced, such as topographical model of personality, structural model of personality and the Oedipus Complex. Chapter Three and Chapter Four are the center parts of this thesis, which are closely connected with each other. Chapter Three analyzes the main characters according to Freud's personality theories, while Chapter Four probes into the deeper layer of the relationship between the characters and analyzes their struggle, improvement, success and failure in resisting against their superego. The last part, the conclusion of the whole thesis, emphasizes the necessity for the balance among the id, the ego and the superego.