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The Contestants
CG Jung spent his whole live
investigating the symbols in dreams and imagination found in himself and
the patients he analysed. Through a series of tests and introspection, he
developed an intricate system of the human psyche and its ultimate connection
withthe entire of humanity, called the Collective Unconscious (later). His
work has been known as analytical psychology and is still popular in many
parts of the world, most notably Japan.
Persona 2 is a game. Don't
be fooled, a game with plot and characters that can kick the ass of a good
deal of novels and movies, and look good doing it. In a series of Serial
Experiments Lain (the grandmother of all Jung in Anime/games)-ish philosophical
ponderings the game explorers mostly the psyche of the characters and their
relation to the rest of the world, the collective unconscious. And concludes
that subjective and objective aren't that seperated after all. Yum.
A match made in heaven? Let's
just see!
Philemon with Order
of Fries
As noted before, Jung spent
most of his life in exploration with the psyche, and thus met many different
figures (which he called archetypes, more later) during the course of that
voyage. None had as much impact on him, however, as the being who calledhimself
Philemon.
That's right, the butterfly
avatar of good in Persona has its root in actuality. When the psychologist
broke up with Freud he had to stop relying on Freud's theories and discover
his own in a term he called "Active Imagination". After meeting a variety
of characters, Jung met a mysterious being with horns and wings, which called
itself Philemon.
Jung writes:
Philemon represented
a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him,
and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly
that it was he who spoke and not I. . . .
Psychologically, Philemon
represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times
he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking
up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call aguru.
(183-85)
Philemon had an unarguable
impact on Jung. He taught Jung about psychic objectivity, that the psyche
is real and further pursuation should be done. And, according to the psychologist,
had a distinct Pagan flavor to his dialogues (which brought a whole bunch
of bull arguments from that trash mate....I mean, 'book' by Richard Noll)
Jung writes:
He said I treated
thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like
animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added,
"If you should see people in a room, you would not think you had made those
people, or that you were responsible for them."
It doesn't take take a stretch
of imagination to think of Persona's Philemon as saying some of these things.
And he's the main guide to the heroes. This is the most obvious one.....
Help! We're collectively
unconscious!
.......other than this one.
C'mon, what much can be said about similarities? Philemon and Nyarlathotep
'reign' over a space which connects all humans called (ta-da!) the collective
unconsciousness.
The history of how this wisdom
was discovered is pretty interesting. When analysing patients, Jung saw some
reoccuring mythological symbolisms in their various dreams and fantasies.
One of his patients, most notably, had dreamt up of an image that Jung was
convinced he couldn't have known about it before, since that mythology had
not been translated at his time. And there was a dream where the psychologist
was in a many storied house, the lower the level the older the design grew.
Until the basement looked something of a stone house with many buried skulls
in it.
This dream was supposed to
represent the levels of consciousness, with the basement being the archaic
system found in all humans. The better diagram, in my opinion, is that of
the island. Island on top of the water represents the ego (normal consciousness),
the submurged part of the island was the personal unconscious, and the sea
itself- the collective unconscious. It is not unusual for mystics to describe
the collective unconsciousness a 'great oceanic consciousness' and indeed
Tatsuya does call it an ocean at the end.
Shadow boxing. Ouch.
Obvious reference numero trois.
Shadows to Jung were the parts of the human personality that was constantly
repressed due to it's unfavorableness in society. It is the undesirable,
and sometimes malicious, part in all people. To the person, the greatest
evil in the world is his own shadow. In dreams, they usually appear exactly
like the dreamer except with darker tones of skin, younger, usually naked,
wild or aggressive. One who is uncritical of himself will find it unbearable
to encounter his shadow personality and the truth of evil. This is the
first archetype encountered in the unconsciousness.
It doesn't take much to connect
this to the Shadows in both Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment. But since
most people are unfamiliar with IS, EP references will be primary. The encounter
with the heroes' shadows were usually accompanied by a revelation about the
character that was repressed or ignored (like Katsuya's resentment of being
a cop instead of his dreams of being a chef) and met with hyperbole criticism.
Only with acceptance were the shadows able to be defeated. Well, that and
a good attack on their asses.
Something less discussed is
the cultural shadow. Jung uses Nazis (*cough*InnocentSin*cough*) as example
for how a society at whole can give into their shadow selves, usually under
a great leader, and turn to what the whole world views as evil. The honor
of this goes to none other than Nyarlathotep, the devil archetype or the
shadow of all humans.
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