Psychoanalysis and Star Wars: The Force Awakens: What the Film Says about Gender Ideology

Star Wars is a major film franchise and has been part of United States’ pop culture for decades. This paper will look at the first film in the newest Skywalker trilogy. This paper defines psychoanalysis as a method for studying the media text, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It then defines the substructures of psychoanalysis, including Freud’s id, ego, and superego, and their relation to the film, as well as Jung’s archetypes of the hero, sidekick, and shadow element. It then gives a brief discussion of the characters Kylo Ren, Rey, and Finn, including defining characteristics such as personality traits, clothing styles, gender, race, and class, and then it gives a quick synopsis of the film, touching on key plot points in relation to the three characters. The research then moves into analysis of these characters using psychoanalysis through Freud’s substructures and Jung’s archetypes before the research moves on to discuss the ideology of the film in relation to gender