International Journal of Arabic-English Studies (IJAES) Vol.24, No.2, 2024 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v24i2.592 Ego Quest from Impoverishment to Reconciliation in Velina Houston’s Japanese American Play Kokoro (True Heart): A Freudian Reading Lamia Fahim, Areeg Ibrahim and Samia Abou Alam Helwan University, Egypt Received on 4.5.2023 Accepted on 13.10.2023 Early Online Publication: 5.11.2023 Abstract: Japanese Americans’ struggle to achieve integration into the American mainstream culture has its powerful impact on their psychological well-being. Socially reserved and family oriented, the Japanese are challenged to cope with the mainstream American individualism and independence. Signs of melancholia, based on Sigmund Freud’s theories, are investigated in Kokoro (True Heart) (2004) written by the Japanese American playwright Velina Hasu Houston. The Japanese American protagonist, Yasako Yamashita, battles with cultural nonconformity and social remoteness which have provoked an aggressive superego incorporated in her mother’s ghost to govern and manipulate her world. The study aims to interrogate how the domineering superego succeeds in exhausting Yasako’s stranded ego driving her to commit parent-child suicide “oyako-shinju.” Although the suicide attempt has highlighted the problematic cultural gaps within the American society, nevertheless it has pinpointed the importance of resolving Japanese minority cultural differences. Velina Houston’s Kokoro (True Heart) does not only offer an astounding psychological insight into Japanese Americans’ battles with a melancholic ego fragmentation and deprivation indicated in symptoms of ambivalence, anxiety, compulsive repetition, sense of guilt and sense of inferiority, but it, also, advances solutions for ego reconciliation and self-conformity. Keywords: ego impoverishment, Freud, Japanese American, Kokoro (True Heart), melancholia, Velina Hasu Houston 1. Introduction Japanese Americans have been psychologically contending with identity construction as they straddle two ever-shifting sets of cultures. Japanese American Velina Hasu Houston (1957-) is an internationally celebrated American playwright of a multicultural descent; her father was African-American/Native-American and her mother was Japanese. In Contemporary Playwrights of Color, Ruthie Ostrow (2021) stated that “Houston proudly identifies as a multicultural, multiethnic person” and her “theatrical repertoire is largely inspired by her multicultural identity and Japanese heritage”. In Kokoro (True Heart) (2004), Houston gives a full delineation of a Japanese wife and mother struggling to get adapted to the mainstream American culture. Yasako Yamashita’s strong yearning for Japan, a dearth of affectionate connections with a hostile surrounding and her husband’s infidelity have incited her psychological struggle. Yasako’s superego representing