What unites Fullmetal Alchemist, Evangelion, and Persona 5? What is the connection to SEGA’s old video game Nights into Dreams? The answers are linked to the concepts of the collective unconscious and the shadow self.

Less well known to the general public than Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis, Carl Gustav Jung and his analytical psychology have deeply influenced Japanese creators. Is it because of his use of myths and the I Ching, the Chinese “Book of Changes”? One thing is certain: his concepts of Animus and Anima, masculine and feminine archetypes, can recall the Yin and Yang of Taoism and other elements of Asian cosmogony.

For Jung, aesthetic productions are conscious projections of material from what he calls the collective unconscious, the shared imagination of all humanity, from which archetypes of thought (the tree of life, the wise old man, etc.) originate. He notably studied folk tales and alchemical allegories as representations of psychic mechanisms.

Carl Jung theorized the idea of the “Persona,” which designates the social mask that everyone wears and that changes depending on the different people with whom one interacts. He designates as “the Shadow” the elements that are repressed and kept apart from consciousness. The latter corresponds to an archetype often represented as a negative double of the hero.

These different concepts are at the heart of several key series from the 1990s, which continue to influence pop culture production today.

Exploring the Psyche

Released on the Sega Saturn in 1996, Nights into Dreams is an action game in which two teenagers, Elliot Edwards and Claris Sinclair, must prevent the destruction of Nightopia (the world of dreams) and its counterpart, the real world.

The developers specified that the two characters relate to Jung’s Animus and Anima. Nights, the character the player controls, is a representation of the Shadow, flying through Elliot and Claris’s dreams to gather the energy needed to defeat the evil ruler of the dream world.

Its appearance deliberately evokes the fool, the king’s jester (or joker in English), which is linked to an archetype identified by Jung: the trickster. Present in many folklores, this liminal and equivocal character serves as a mediator between the divine and human worlds.

That same year saw the release of the first installment of the Persona video game series developed by Atlus. The games take up the concept of Persona to make it both a game mechanic and a narrative element: the protagonists can move through a parallel world where they use a different personality that materializes in the form of a character.

In Persona 5, the high school hero becomes Joker by unleashing his Shadow in the alternate universe corresponding to the psychic world. With his companions, he forms the group known as the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. He can thus enter individuals’ psyches to fight their shadow self and thereby change their real-world behavior. The developers thus take up the trickster archetype that served as the model for Nights.

Confronting One’s Shadow

In the case of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), the animated series by Studio Gainax blends science fiction, Kabbalah, and analytical psychology. The hero is regularly confronted with his double (his Shadow) in an empty train car that symbolizes his psyche, while the final episodes show him in the midst of analysis as he faces his desires and fears.

Director Hideaki Anno himself underwent therapy and had paid tribute to the pioneers of psychology in the series Gunbuster (1988) through naming: the robot pilot from Russia is named Jung Freud.

In Fullmetal Alchemist, each protagonist who has broken the taboos of alchemical practice finds themselves facing a mysterious bodiless being who guards the gate to the alternate world. This being always greets them with the same speech, which ends with “I am you,” and can represent the negative version of the character: their Shadow.

In a way, this theme of the alter ego that one must learn to control is at the heart of many series. In Naruto (1999-2014), the hero can negotiate with the nine-tailed demon imprisoned within him, and in Bleach (2001-2016), Ichigo is confronted with his negative twin, Zangetsu.

By taking up Carl Jung’s ideas, Japanese creators help perpetuate the archetypes of the collective imagination, which partly explains the appeal of these fictions to non-Asian audiences.