Psychoanalytic Critique of My AntoniaAbstract: This essay uses psychoanalysis as an interpretive strategy for reading My Antonia by Willa Cather. Freud's famous theory - the Oedipus complex - and Lacan's Mirror Stage theory are used as ways of approaching the novel. I use psychoanalytic criticism as a means to interpret My Antonia by Willa Cather because I find some similarities between My Antonia and Peter Pan, between this and The Awakening by reading Critical Theory and Practice: A Coursebook by Keith Green. In light of Freud's Oedipus complex, like Peter Pan who sees Windy as a lover and a mother, and who develops his sexual identity through this complex, Jim Burden also has a maternal lover, Antonia, and finally gets to take his sexualized and gendered identity in this world. According to Lacan's Mirror Stage, like Edna Pontellier she wishes to return to the memory of her childhood, to return to the world of the Imaginary, in which "sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking in the green meadow again; lazily, aimlessly , without thinking and without guidance" (Chopin 520), Jim Burden recalls his childhood lived in the great central plain of North America where he feels that he and Nature are one, but, unlike Edna who goes back and does not return , Jim enters the realm of the Imaginary and returns to the Symbolic, experiencing the process of the Mirror Stage. These are the reasons why I try to apply psychoanalysis in the interpretation of the novel. General ideas will be provided after the summer of the novel. Willa Cather's My Antonia begins with Jim Burden's "An Endless Journey Across the Great Prairie of North America" ​​(Cather 5), a journey backwards... halfway through the paper. .....sometimes you find yourself behaving in a bad dream" (Cather 158). After this, he feels that he will never want to see Antonia again; and he hates her as much as he hates Cutter. This incident pushes Jim to leave. Antonia and going to Lincoln to study. The relationship between psychoanalysis and My Antonia by Willa Cather has not been defined. I hope this essay is the first step in seeing this wonderful novel from a new perspective. Works Cited Cather, My Antonia Boston : Hougton Mifflin, 1988. Chopin, Kate. The Norton Anthology of American Literature & Practice: A Textbook New York: Routledge, 1996. Wright, Elizabeth Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice,1984.