Ego and Cash

In Sigmund Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud writes, “In the first case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have” (Freud 439). In Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue,” a father castrates his son’s identity by giving him a feminine name. The father does this purposefully. We note this at the end of the song with the line:

Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you Sue.

In his childhood, Sue had to mature quickly, molding the armor of his sexual identity against society’s taunts, having to “fight my whole life through.” Sue remarks,

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,

This is a wonderful song to look at through a Freudian lens, because it shows how the father played with the Ego, which in turn alters Sue’s personality or outward manifestations—that into a tough guy who “grew up mean.” You could argue that Sue’s physical and internal manifestations are an example of what Freud calls a hysterical symptom. Freud writes, “We have heard that identification is the earliest and original form of emotional tie . . . where there is repression and where the mechanisms of the unconscious are dominant, object-choice is turned back into identification—the ego assumes the characteristics of the object” (Freud 439). In the end, we note how Sue consciously and unconsciously identified with his father who gave him a name which castrated his identity—but ultimately made him a stronger individual in the long run.

Work Cited
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.