A Psychhoanalytical Critique of Freud's Ego, Super Ego, and Id in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

All humans are locked in a constant internal battle. Part of a man's mind is driven by a lustful need to rob, rape, and even kill his fellow man; the other part of him is desperately opposing these desires, which experience in a civilized society has trained him to view as immoral. Sigmund Freud called these powerful mental forces the id and the super ego. The id is the primal human desire for sexual and violent gratification, and the super ego is society-imposed morality. Because the mind craves two contradicting things a human can never feel complete. "It is impossible," claimed Freud, "to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct." In order to live in civilized society, man must repress his instinct, his id. In her story "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson creates an allegory for the struggle between the super ego and the id in the human psyche. Using the lottery itself as a symbol, she illustrates the feral needs of the id by creating a village whose rabid need for violence moves them to stone one of their own neighbors each year. She also shows us the super ego's desperate want of tradition by presenting this slaughter as an event that is acceptable by society, similar to a holiday. The lottery itself represents both the super ego and the id; it contains both of them in a peaceful embodiment. Although this seems to cleverly rid humanity of the mental battle between these two forces, the story's ending proves that the super ego and the id can never live harmoniously with humanity's ethical rights to justice and life.

Mankind's most base desires are controlled by the id. Most of these desires are violent. Jackson shows the primeval lust for blood through many of the villagers in her story. The lottery is an annual ritual of the village. Each summer all the families gather in the square to converse and watch their children play as they wait for Mr. Summers to take the stand and begin the event. Each household must pick one slip of paper from the black box; then, the household with the winning paper takes part in a miniature lottery to determine which family member has won. That person is then stoned to death by the rest of the village. This is not, at first, presented as demented or twisted in any way. The women congregate and gossip, while the children playfully gather stones. Jackon describes one child, a little boy named Bobby Martin, who is so busy playing with his friends that he "duck[s] under his mother's grasping hand and [runs], laughing, back to the pile of stones," which he would later use to help kill the chosen villager (693). The description is so innocent, so filled with childish naiveté and life, that one could not imagine it as being filled with cruel intent. This, though, is part of the horror. Even in children the id's desire to kill gains power. Later in the story Jackson defines the id's control of this ceremony even more. When the time for murder draws near, Jackson writes that "although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones" (699). This terrifying statement shows the real lusts of the id: it cares not for rituals and the plans of society, it merely wants to massacre other humans. Jackson clearly crafted this story as a commentary on the vain desire for destruction harbored in the human mind. "By setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village," Jackson explained, she hoped "to shock the story's readers with a graphic demonstration of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives" (692). She uses the lottery as a powerful symbol to manifest the needs of the id; it gives the villagers a justification to fulfill their savage need to spill blood.

The super ego is governed by the morality society sets upon it. Contrasting the bestial desires of the id, the super ego is the civilized part of the human mind. It craves the satisfaction of human relations and the comfort found in old traditions. The lottery is one such tradition. It is "conducted - as [are] the square dances, the teen-age club, [and] the Halloween program - " every year (693). Like any other annual holiday, it is looked upon casually, perhaps with nervous excitement. It certainly is not looked upon as strange or wrong. One woman, Mrs. Hutchinson, confides in her friend that she "clean forgot what day it was" (695). Then they share a good laugh. Later Mrs. Hutchinson playfully urges her husband up to grab his slip of paper, and the people around her are amused by her teasing, giddy behavior. While the lottery is not necessarily a time for celebration, it is an event beloved by most of the people and not something to be forsaken. When rumor passes that "the north village [is] talking of giving up the lottery," one of the oldest village members, who clings to the tradition and old ways, comments, "Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while" (696). This, of course, shows how deeply engrained in the village the lottery is. The implication Jackson makes by writing this line into her story, though, goes much further. The lottery in the traditional sense, after all, symbolizes the super ego, the civilized part of humanity; in the murderous sense, however, the lottery is symbolic of the very barbaric id. The old man's words are ironic, then, for he has stated that by giving up the civilized tradition of giving into their most savage instincts, the village will return to its primeval state, living in caves without any form of society or civilization.

The society Jackson creates has managed to merge the cravings of the id with the needs of the super ego. They've found a balance that seems to work. The tradition and morality justifies the bloodshed at the end of each lottery; thus both battlers in the psyche are satisfied, and the neurosis that affects all humanity because of the laws and boundaries of civilization is cured through a moral tradition of violence. Jackson, through her fictional village, has solved the mental disease that corrodes the minds of all society. Yet she has created a horrific place to live. Mrs. Hutchinson, who chattered so whimsically with her friend Mrs. Delacroix and who playfully teased her husband as he rose to pull his slip of paper from the lottery's black box, exemplifies the inhumanity and injustice that comes with living in a world where morality and murder co-exist as brethren. When it is shown that it is indeed her family who has drawn the winning slip, she falls into terrified irrationality. "I think we ought to start over," she complains frantically and argues that her husband was not given enough time to draw any paper he wanted (698). The crowd gently tries to console her by explaining they "all took the same chance" (697). Nothing can change the family's fate. Each member, down to the youngest child, is given a slip. When Tessie Hutchinson finds that she has the slip that means death, her scream of "It isn't fair! It isn't right!" marks her final words. Those words prove, though, that it would indeed not be fair to live with such a tradition. It should not exist because, as John Locke said better than anyone, all humans have a natural right to "life [and] liberty" (Locke). The lottery violates that right, as well as justice. Mankind understands that and, for the most part, withholds such tendencies towards violence; the price he pays, however, is the neurotic conflict inside his psyche.

When Shirley Jackson wrote "The Lottery" she touched one of the basic struggles of the human mind. Man longs to destory man. Millions of people, for example, were tortured and exploited during the Holocaust, and millions of people were willing to torture and exploit without qualms. "The Lottery" could just as easily have been set in this time period; the parallels, after all, are certainly there. Hitler created a society in which the cruel tastes of the id could be quenched with blood without the moral protest of the super ego. Anti-Semitism allowed Nazi Germany to kill without remorse. Jackson's fictional village created a similar setting. Jackson's story, however, showed us why, in a truly ethical and just society, this conflict between the id and the super ago should exist. When these two forces coincide, terror reigns. The lottery, with its beloved tradition and horrible violence, symbolizes and nurtures the need of both the super ego and the id; it also proves that they should not exist together in harmony. Someone will be hurt; someone will find that it violates the rights and ethics that were written down for all humans thousands of years ago by the first civilized people. Even then, people strongly held to some innate right they felt they deserved, the right Locke later described as a God-given right to life; thus a man will always cry Mrs. Hutchinson's dying words should he be killed merely to satisfy another man's desires. "The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization," stated Freud. Jackson proves with her story, though, that no matter how civilized a man may be, he still harbors some desire to throw stones. Many people who read her story when it was initially published in the New York Times exemplified that desire. After the debut of "The Lottery," Jackson received many letters from people asking her "where these lotteries were being held, and whether they could go there and watch" (Jackson, 1508).