A living archive of the oppressed: Revisiting Taiwan's authoritarian past through Freud's “The Ego and the Id”

Abstract

This paper emerged from a sore spot—the kind of sore spot that pulses with an ancient ache, refusing to find stillness. The pain caught me in a passionate unrest, turning my pages and engulfing me in a subdued fury. Re-reading Freud's The Ego and the Id through a dialogical quest with my mother, it reveals the complexities of psychosocial troubles of identity, desires, and oppression—not solely of individuals but of an entire nation. Historical reiterations of dictatorial “thou shalt” (Freud, 1923, p. 55) echo resoundingly throughout contemporary Taiwan. If Japan stood as the foreign father—stern but devoid of the embrace of love—the subsequent rule of the Republic of China, the “biological” father of Taiwan, was characterized by militarization and violence. My inquiry repositions the father, the manifold “authoritarian fathers” of Taiwan, who fixed social relations into precise configurations of dominance and submission. Furthermore, whilst Freud primarily focused on the relationship between the ego and the super-ego, this paper highlights instead the significance of the often-overlooked relationship between the ego and id. This nuanced perspective allows us to perceive the id as a living archive of the oppressed, preserving what has been repressed but never truly forgotten.