On April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted four white police officers of beating African American Rodney King. Six days of upheaval followed, during which Korean American shopkeepers in South Central Los Angeles found themselves trapped between Black neighbors who saw them as exploitative outsiders, white institutions that withheld protection from violence, and media that reduced their trauma to the single image of a Korean man firing a gun from a rooftop.¹ They were neither fully victim nor perpetrator, neither insider nor outsider, rather suspended in contradiction. To understand the psyche, one must turn to Sigmund Freud’s structural model of id, ego, and superego. The id is one’s instinctual desires for pleasure and immediate gratification. The ego mediates between the id and external reality, finding acceptable means to satisfy desire without danger. The superego internalizes moral authority and punishes the ego for transgressions of societal norms through guilt and shame. Freud assumed the superego forms within a unified cultural world, but for Korean American shopkeepers in 1992 the superego faced impossible demands: assimilate into whiteness, answer to Black grievance, survive as an immigrant, and maintain a coherent selfhood.² Asian American identity formation creates a perpetually unresolved psychic liminality as the superego, fractured by contradictory gazes, internalizes demands that cannot be synthesized. Claudia Tate’s critique of psychoanalytic universalism, Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the racialized psyche, Claire Kim’s account of racial triangulation, Samir Dayal’s concept of diasporic consciousness, Anne Cheng’s theory of racial melancholia, David Eng and Shinhee Han’s mapping of intergenerational transmission, and Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities reveal how the fractured superego operates across individuals and collectives.
 
Claudia Tate’s article, “Freud and His ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans” exposes the racial violence embedded in classical psychoanalysis’s universal claims. Tate argues that Freud’s model assumes a single, coherent superego because psychoanalysis, “[has] so tightly focused on bourgeois gender constructions and the presumption of whiteness.”³ This assumption erases people of color in psychodynamic theory and masquerades whiteness as humanity itself. Tate’s analysis of Freud’s “negro” joke, in which Freud likens himself to a hungry lion awaiting his patients whom he referred to as “negroes,” reproduces the power dynamics of slavery within the analytic relationship itself. She writes, “Freud has established (however unconsciously) an equation between the analyst/patient relationship and the most brutal form of the master/slave relationship, in which the slave is only a piece of meat to satisfy the master’s ravenous appetite.”⁴ The psychoanalytic scene becomes structurally analogous to the plantation, where the racialized Other is consumed by white authority. For Black subjects, psychoanalysis cannot be directly applied without a fundamental restructuring to account for how race constitutes the psyche, as the superego internalizes multiple contradictory gazes rather than a single set of norms. The assumption of a unified superego thus functions ideologically to naturalize white subjectivity as psychic health. Tate’s critique makes clear that a psychoanalytic approach to a racialized subject necessitates dismantling the universalist pretensions of the field and recognizing psyche as constituted in relation to its social world.
 
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is the first major attempt to correct psychoanalysis’s racial blindness. Fanon argues that the superego is corrupted by racist domination, creating an inferiority complex in the colonized subject. The Black child in the Antilles learns to see himself through the white colonizer’s eyes, internalizing a moral consciousness that requires the removal of his own Blackness. As Fanon writes, “moral consciousness implies a kind of scission, a fracture of consciousness into a bright part and an opposing black part. In order to achieve morality, it is essential that the black, the dark, the Negro vanish from consciousness. Hence a Negro is forever in combat with his own image.”⁵ Consequently, the ego ideal becomes whiteness itself as the Antillean schoolboy speaks of “our ancestors, the Gauls” and identifies with “the explorer, the bringer of civilization, the white man who carries trust to savages—an all-white truth.”⁶ Yet this ideal is inherently doomed because though “subjectively, intellectually, the Antillean conducts himself like a white man,” he will always remain a Black man.⁷ The gap between subjective identification and objective racial positioning creates a permanent psychic wound. Despite his insight, Fanon’s analysis remains limited by the Black-white dichotomy. His framework cannot account for subjects in intermediate positions within racial hierarchies. Asian Americans, for instance, are simultaneously included and excluded in ways that Fanon’s binary cannot conceive. While Fanon establishes that the superego is racialized by domination, an alternative framework is needed for subjects who are neither fully oppressed nor fully privileged.
 
Where Fanon’s binary falls short, Claire Kim’s observation of racial triangulation and Samir Dayal’s concept of diasporic consciousness explain how Asian Americans navigate contradictory gazes. Kim demonstrates that Asian Americans are positioned as permanently foreign to whites, yet superior to Black Americans through the model minority myth. This position is historically established through specific policies, such as wartime incarceration. During World War II, General Dewitt justified the internment of Japanese Americans by stating, “while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”⁸ Just two decades later, journalist William Petersen attributed Japanese American success to “Tokugawa values” that linked them to the “alien culture of Japan.” He made this claim despite the fact that the Japanese American population was then “almost entirely of native-born U.S. citizens” as Japanese immigration had been barred from 1924 to 1965.⁹ Hence, Kim concludes, the model minority myth valorizes Asian Americans while ostracizing them as perpetual foreigners. Dayal captures the psychic consequences of this impossible positioning through diasporic consciousness. The diasporic subject occupies a space neither fully inside nor outside the nation, suspended between identities. Dayal writes, “The diasporic, always in the waiting rooms of the nation-space, is preserved at least from the illusion of a fixed identity and a prefabricated cultural role.”¹⁰ However, this preservation is not liberatory. It is not chosen ambiguity but enforced suspension from coherent selfhood. The Asian American superego internalizes these contradictions: the white gaze demands assimilation but withholds belonging, the co-ethnic gaze demands loyalty and authenticity, the gaze of other minorities sees complicity with white supremacy, and the self-gaze will never meet its own standards.
 
This psychic condition is what Anne Cheng, in The Melancholy of Race, theorizes as racial melancholia; the punishment of the ego by the superego. Drawing on Freud, Cheng distinguishes melancholia from mourning: mourning gradually relinquishes a lost object, while melancholia entails the ego’s incorporation of the lost object. The melancholic subject refuses to displace its desires from its lost ideal, instead swallowing it whole and incorporating it as part of the self. However, the lost object is indigestible, and so begins to haunt the psyche from within. For Asian Americans, the lost melancholic object is full citizenship, the promise of belonging that the nation continuously withholds. This ideal is internalized in unresolvable form rather than renounced. Cheng writes, “the subject sustains itself through the ghostly emptiness of a lost Other,” clinging to what was never truly possessed.¹¹ This spectral drama transpires within the fractured superego and becomes the site of cruel self-punishment. Cheng notes that, “since the melancholic subject experiences resentment and denigration for the lost object with which [they are] identifying, the melancholic ends up administering to [their] own self-denigration.”¹² Thus, self-hatred and compulsive assimilation characterize the Asian American psyche. The superego cannot remain intact with such irreconcilable demands: be successful but not too successful, be American but not too American, honor your heritage but don’t be too “ethnic,” be the model minority but remember you are foreign. Each demand incorporates a different gaze, and the superego internalizes each one without synthesizing them into a coherent moral authority. The psyche becomes racially melancholic and haunted by a citizenship that is promised yet foreclosed.
 
David Eng and Shinhee Han, in Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, expand on racial melancholia, showing how the fractured superego transmits intergenerationally. The ideal of full citizenship is lost twice: first through historical exclusion, second through the perpetual foreigner. Unresolved racial melancholia in adults then passes from parents to children as a psychic inheritance. This intergenerational dynamic appears in Eng and Han’s clinical research on Elaine, a Korean American woman who sought treatment for depression and suicidal ideation. Elaine’s immigrant parents struggled in the U.S. to achieve the success they had hoped for. Their failure to “achieve a standard of living and a level of social acceptance greater than what they could have putatively achieved in Korea—is a loss transferred onto and incorporated by Elaine for her to work out and to repair.”¹³ However, Eng and Han observe that this repair is impossible, and instead ask “do children of immigrants ‘repay’ this sacrifice only by repeating and perpetuating its melancholic logic—by berating and sacrificing themselves?”¹⁴ The answer is devastatingly affirmative. Asian Americans attempt to satiate their fractured superego by mimicking the model minority, but this is doomed as the superego’s demands are contradictory. As Eng and Han state, “mimicry can operate only as a melancholic process.”¹⁵ Parents shift from good to bad objects as the child recognizes that parental sacrifice demands an impossible repayment, and that parents themselves cannot live up to impossible standards of whiteness that the child is asked to mimic.
 
Shifting from family to nation, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities shows how the fractured superego operates on a collective level. Anderson argues that nations are imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”¹⁶ This imagination creates a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that is precisely what racialized subjects are excluded from.¹⁷ The superego internalizes norms indiscriminately. It cannot distinguish between a genuine promise and a structurally withheld one, so it punishes failure to belong when belonging was never achievable. The Asian American subject is invited to imagine the American community, to consume national narratives, but is stopped at the threshold. The “waiting room” of nation-space that Dayal describes is as far as the diasporic subject is allowed to go. Anderson’s analysis of national monuments illustrates the melancholic dimension of this exclusion. He writes about the cenotaphs and graves of Unknown Soldiers, “void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.”¹⁸ The power of the monuments comes from the shared imagining of the dead soldier belonging to “us,” rather than the actual person buried. By contrast, the symbols of Asian America offered by dominant culture, namely the model minority myth and perpetual foreigner stereotype, do not emerge from a mutual “we” but are imposed from the outside. The American dream is a ghostly imagining void of substance for those excluded. The superego, having internalized this national image as moral authority, now punishes the ego for failing to inhabit a belonging that was never truly offered. To be excluded from the “we” is to inhabit the shadow of the nation’s imagining. Racial melancholia is an inevitable byproduct of national identity, for it is what remains when the nation produces an imagined community of belonging while simultaneously disavowing those it excludes.
 
The Korean American shopkeepers of South Central Los Angeles did not just experience a riot but the structural contradiction that psychoanalysis, in its classical form, cannot comprehend. Caught between Black neighborhoods that read them as hostile, a white power structure that refused to offer protection and actively weaponized their position, and a media that flattened their suffering into a single damning image, they were neither fully victim nor perpetrator. This is the terrain of the fractured superego: a psychic apparatus barraged by irreconcilable demands because the social world itself refuses reconciliation. Tate unmasks psychoanalysis’s white universalism; Fanon identifies how racist domination wounds the psyche; Kim and Dayal map the impossible positioning of the Asian American subject; Cheng theorizes the melancholic incorporation of citizenship continuously withheld; Eng and Han trace this melancholia generationally; and Anderson reveals what is trapped in the shadow cast by the nation’s imagined community. Together, these thinkers dismantle the concept of a unified superego and replace it with a collective model of racialization, contradiction, and melancholia. The Rooftop Koreans’ bullets were a wound made visible. It was the fractured superego’s last, failed attempt to salvage a self that was never allowed to simply belong.
 
 

Notes

  1. Elaine H. Kim, “Home Is Where the Han Is: A Korean American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals,” Social Justice 20, no. 1/2 (1993): 7.
  2. This is not to minimize Black grievance, which was justified (Latasha Harlins was shot by a Korean storeowner not long before the verdict), but to recognize that for Korean Americans it functioned as another demand in an increasingly difficult situation.
  3. Claudia Tate, “Freud and His ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans,” JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (1996): 58.
  4. Tate, “Freud and His ‘Negro,’” 54.
  5. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Pluto Press, 2008), 150.
  6. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 114.
  7. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 114.
  8. Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics and Society 27, no. 1 (1999): 116.
  9. Kim, “Racial Triangulation,” 119.
  10. Samir Dayal, “Diaspora and Double Consciousness,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 29, no. 1 (1996): 51.
  11. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press, 2000), 10.
  12. Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 9.
  13. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2018), 49.
  14. Eng and Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, 50.
  15. Eng and Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, 45.
  16. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006), 6.
  17. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.
  18. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9.
     

Bibliography

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Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford University Press, 2000.
 
Dayal, Samir. “Diaspora and Double Consciousness.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 29, no. 1 (1996): 46–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/1315257.
 
Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans. Duke University Press, 2018.
 
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Pluto Press, 2008.
 
Kim, Claire Jean. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics and Society 27, no. 1 (1999): 105–138.
 
Kim, Elaine H. “Home Is Where the Han Is: A Korean American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals.” Social Justice 20, no. 1/2 (1993): 1–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766728.
 
Tate, Claudia. “Freud and His ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans.” JPCS: Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (1996): 53–62.