Midge from a Freudian Lens

  Tiffany Midge has brilliance in her writing that demonstrates comedy in a unique combination of real anecdotes, ironic sayings, and a captivating style in which she incorporates a direct discourse with her audience. As I have experienced while reading comical writing with prior exposure to the author’s parlance, reading Midge’s writing superimposes a relationship with her audience that made me feel connected to her as if she were reading her first draft to me from her desk. It is incredibly personal. 

While I read “Conversations with My Lakota Mom”, I continually felt her humor and relationship with different maternal figures in the snippets of conversation she supplies. I also was continually thinking of Freudian Relief Theory during this particular amalgamation of conversations. Specifically, this essay reminded me of the relationship the ego undertakes with the super-ego. Freud says 

“Genetically the super-ego inherits the parental function; it often holds the ego in strict subordination, and still actually treats it as the parents...treated the child in his early years. We obtain a dynamic explantation of the humorous attitude, therefore, if we conclude that it consists in the subject’s removing the accent from his own ego and transferring it on to his super-ego. To the super-ego, thus inflated, the ego can appear tiny and all its interests trivial, and with this fresh distribution of energy it may be an easy matter for it to suppress the potential reactions of the ego” (Freud 114). 

In my interpretation of Freud, I take his analysis to be a form of pseudo-science that is grounded in observational psychoanalysis rather than that of clinical authority. That being said, I believe this part of Freud’s scrutiny is apparent in “Conversations with My Lakota Mom.” Throughout the six examples, Midge confabulates, a theme arises in which Midge as the narrator takes a more concrete--and traditional to her audience--mindset that is continuously incongruous to her Lakota mother’s responses. In their juxtaposition, Midge takes on the role of the ego, a role in which the audience may relate to and understand more forthrightly than that of her mother. Contrastingly, the mother takes on the super-ego and adopts a, while less informed in mainstream pop-culture, less serious but wise demeanor and thus reminds Midge (and the audience, transitively) to consider a less dramatic and rigid perspective on life. 

Furthermore, the Lakota Mom and the super-ego, as Freud champions, minimizes the supposed understanding of the world the ego has and predisposes the ego to take itself less seriously and with a more nuanced appreciation for life. An example of this appears in ‘Conversations with My Lakota Mom, No. 5’, in which Midge and her mother discuss her mother’s infatuation with an ‘Ind’n actor.’ Throughout the short dialogue, while attempting to discern the identity of the man her mother speaks of, Midge offers names of actual Native actors that have appeared on the big screen. The comical element of the dialogue is revealed when the actor is forsooth Kevin Costner. Midge mistakenly takes her mother’s supposed assumption of his native heritage to be true, to which she is met with, ‘Well he played one on TV.” The humor of this dialogue is effective because the presumptive notion is that Native peoples should be vexed by the Pretendian. However, by juxtaposing this with a different perspective, the Lakota Mom circumvents the ‘right way’ of thinking of Pretendians and suggests that she likes the man’s appearance nonetheless. This in turn is the superposition of the super-ego’s ability to deflate the assumptions of the ego and remind it that there are alternative routes of Being and thinking that can be undertaken. 

Midge constructs this lesson throughout “Conversations with My Lakota Mom” brilliantly and comically while still being able to proffer lessons from, and admiration for,  the wise Lakota Mom and her relationship with her younger, green, daughter.