Presentation Information
[P-20-06]Chi-Chi from Dragon Ball: An ICD-Informed Psychoanalytic and Cultural Analysis of Maternal Anxiety and Marital Imbalance
*Tejbir Singh Deol1, Kyle McMullen1, Madhusudan Dalvi1,2 (1.King's College London(UK), 2.Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust(UK))
Keywords:
Cultural Psychiatry,Psychiatry,Media,Social perceptions,Anime
Background and Methodology
This study employs a qualitative, interpretive methodology that combines ICD-11-informed psychiatric semiotics, classical Freudian and object-relations psychoanalysis, and cultural psychiatry. The analysis involves close textual reading of Chi-Chi’s portrayal across the original Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball Super anime series. Chi-Chi’s behaviours, dialogues, and relational dynamics are examined through the lens of symbolic symptom representation. Rather than giving a formal diagnosis, the study explores how her traits echo psychiatric categories and how these are mediated through gendered cultural scripts.
Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Framing
Chi-Chi’s recurring behaviours symbolically resemble traits within Generalised Anxiety Disorder under ICD-11, including pervasive worry, anticipatory fear, and emotional dysregulation. Her rigid insistence on academic excellence and structured domesticity reflects features of Anankastic Personality Disorder. These symbolic parallels are used to explore narrative constructions of maternal hypervigilance in emotionally unstable households. Psychoanalytically, her insistence on order functions as displacement for frustration with her emotionally absent partner, Goku. The loss of her marital identity in favour of maternal compliance indicates repression and superego dominance. Goku operates as an unstable attachment object, shaping Chi-Chi’s anxiously overfunctioning maternal persona.
Cultural and Ethical Dimensions
Chi-Chi’s depiction sits between East Asian ideals of filial duty and Western critiques of emotional labour. Her assertiveness is pathologised, while male emotional detachment is valorised. This contrast reveals gendered asymmetries in how emotional expression and responsibility are received. The portrayal raises ethical concerns around the romanticisation of neglectful masculinity and the burden of caregiving imposed on female characters in popular media.
Conclusion
Chi-Chi symbolises a culturally mediated psychological response to abandonment and unreciprocated caregiving. Her representation reveals deeper ethical tensions in how female distress is interpreted across media traditions.
This study employs a qualitative, interpretive methodology that combines ICD-11-informed psychiatric semiotics, classical Freudian and object-relations psychoanalysis, and cultural psychiatry. The analysis involves close textual reading of Chi-Chi’s portrayal across the original Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball Super anime series. Chi-Chi’s behaviours, dialogues, and relational dynamics are examined through the lens of symbolic symptom representation. Rather than giving a formal diagnosis, the study explores how her traits echo psychiatric categories and how these are mediated through gendered cultural scripts.
Psychiatric and Psychoanalytic Framing
Chi-Chi’s recurring behaviours symbolically resemble traits within Generalised Anxiety Disorder under ICD-11, including pervasive worry, anticipatory fear, and emotional dysregulation. Her rigid insistence on academic excellence and structured domesticity reflects features of Anankastic Personality Disorder. These symbolic parallels are used to explore narrative constructions of maternal hypervigilance in emotionally unstable households. Psychoanalytically, her insistence on order functions as displacement for frustration with her emotionally absent partner, Goku. The loss of her marital identity in favour of maternal compliance indicates repression and superego dominance. Goku operates as an unstable attachment object, shaping Chi-Chi’s anxiously overfunctioning maternal persona.
Cultural and Ethical Dimensions
Chi-Chi’s depiction sits between East Asian ideals of filial duty and Western critiques of emotional labour. Her assertiveness is pathologised, while male emotional detachment is valorised. This contrast reveals gendered asymmetries in how emotional expression and responsibility are received. The portrayal raises ethical concerns around the romanticisation of neglectful masculinity and the burden of caregiving imposed on female characters in popular media.
Conclusion
Chi-Chi symbolises a culturally mediated psychological response to abandonment and unreciprocated caregiving. Her representation reveals deeper ethical tensions in how female distress is interpreted across media traditions.