There’s been an essay or two on the symbolism of Persona 4, but I haven’t seen any that talk about what might be the most obvious influence on the game’s story: Jungian psychology. I thought I would give it a shot.

Be warned, we’re going to be talking about plot spoilers below the cut. If you’re playing but you’re not past the second set of dungeons, you might want to skip this.

First, here’s a brief overview of the game’s setup for those unfamiliar with Persona 4.

Your character moves from the city to a sleepy village in rural Japan, where the peace is soon shattered by a series of unexplained murders.

Your new schoolmates and you soon discover that the victims are being drawn into another world, where they’re confronted by a yellow-eyed doppleganger, dubbed a “shadow self.” This other self is a representation of the victim’s unacknowledged fears and impulses.

Here, Jung and the Persona games closely match, though the games portray the shadow selves a bit more literally.

In Jungian psychology, the shadow is the “part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts.”

An unacknowleged shadow can be quite dangerous, in both the game and in the psychological model. In the psychology, a person who refuses to recognize their repressed impulses will project those same feelings on those around them and cause themselves sigificant mental anguish. In the game, it’s a little more straightforward: When denied, the shadow selves go berserk and try to kill the victim and anyone else nearby.

It’s important to note that the shadow isn’t an “evil” version of a person, nor is it exactly their “true self” as the shadows of the game will sometimes claim. It’s the part of a person that they refuse to even consider about themselves.

For instance, in Persona 4, tough guy Kanji’s shadow takes the form of a lisping, flamboyant doppleganger in a loincloth who holes up in a bathhouse.

This doesn’t mean that Kanji is secretly attracted to men, as he himself says. Deep down, however, he’s more than a little worried that his suppressed artistic side might mean he is. Rather than deal with that, he stuffs his inner conflict deep down inside… until it takes a tangible form and tries to beat the snot out of him.

The the real world, acknowleging one’s shadow as part of one’s self can be extraordinarily painful, but can give you considerable insight into yourself and those around you. In the game, acknowleging the one’s shadow is necessary to stop its rampage even after subduing it in a boss fight. Once it’s conquered, it becomes an ally rather than an enemy, and transforms into the titular persona.

The persona in Jungian psychology is, as in the games, a person’s outward mask. Like the shadow, it’s not a “true self”, nor is it necessarily a lie. A persona is how a person would like to be seen by the world. It’s a mask they wear that mediates between the inner world and the outer one.

Likewise, the personae as they are described in the game are “the facade used to overcome life’s hardships.” Seen from that perspective, it’s no surprise that, say, the athletic Chie’s persona is a version of the powerful female warrior Tomoe Gozen, wearing the iconic Bruce Lee jumpsuit from the kung fu movies that she adores.

The Jungian persona isn’t necessarily a mythological figure as the ones in the Persona games are. The Jungian archeypes like the trickster, however, fit the bill more closely.

(Jung’s archetypes also had a profound effect on mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a title that would suit the main characters of Persona 3 and 4 quite well, seeing as how they have the unique ability to summon hundreds of different personae.)

It seems undeniable that Persona 4’s plot uses Jung as a foundation, but I think that writing choice has an interesting side effect: It makes the characters considerably more compelling than the ones in an average RPG.

When writing fiction, it’s handy to create character types from Jung-derived personality categorizations like the Briggs-Meyers test. The shadow is also a valuable thing to think about when creating heroes and villains.

The Persona 4 characters aren’t much different than the standard anime tropes. You’ve got your yamato nadeshiko in Yukiko, your genki girl in Chie, and so on. But thanks in part to how their suppressed impulses are explored in the plot, they’re more than cardboard characters. For instance, Yukiko may outwardly be a model of a traditional demure Japanese woman ready to endure for the sake of her family, she inwardly wishes her family’s inn would fail so that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about abandoning it to pursue her own dreams.

Maybe that’s a bit much to think about a video game, but there you have it. You should hear me talk about what Pac-man is a metaphor of.

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