With the arrival of Persona 5:Royal, we could revisit
the experience of the original game Persona 5, release in 2017.
However, with much more contents
with much more deepth and
using we decided to make an analysis
comparing the themes introduced in the beginning of the game Persona 5
with the ideas of Sigmund Freud.
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Last week, I was finishing the first castle in the Persona 5 game, and a thought stuck in my head
how can there be such a large portion of our mind, that we do not control, that we do not have access to and that,
even so, influences us a lot, both in our actions and and in our personality?
And while I was playing this game,
I was reading for the first time a well-known author: Sigmund Freud, in the text: Malaise in Civilization, from 1930.
 
n this text, the psychoanalyst shows us the consequences of living in a society,
how the civilizing process ends up repressing our characteristics provided by instinct.
 
There is an eternal contradiction between our desires and the desires of society
it is impossible for Freud to live in a civilization and to have all our institutional impulses sated.
However, here we are and here I am playing a game that shows the consequences that a person's distorted desires can cause and how civilization reacts to it.
But what about that?
 
Let's first talk about the Persona 5 game. It's a JRPG - Japanese RPG - developed by Atlus.
He takes place in Tokyo and we accompany the protagonist "Joker", after he is transferred to another school and his friends,
who awaken Persona's powers and become secret vigilantes of the unconscious.
 
Together, they fight against Shadows, physical manifestations of the subconscious desires of adults, which are inside the palaces, materialized spaces of the subconscious.
 
Right at the first meeting, and already warning: we will deal with some spoilers of the first 15hrs of the game,
we see volleyball teacher Kamoshida, a notorious player and an important member of the school.
There, they discover how the depraved desires have turned them into a horrible human being
who physically, verbally and psychologically harass their students and are only maintained by their fame.
In this introduction alone, you can already see how psychology and psychoanalysis are very present in this game.
Now, to continue with our brief analysis, let us introduce the psychoanalyst in question.
Freud, born in 1856 and died in 1939,
was a neurologist, psychiatrist and is considered the founder of what we now know as psychoanalysis.
His works provoked such an influence in the twentieth century, in all branches of knowledge,
that it is difficult not to know or not to have heard of the work and that psychoanalyst
It follows a long philosophical tradition - which goes from Plato (427 BC - 347 BC) when he divides the world into the material world and the world of ideals,
Descartes (1493-1541)
and also Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), with his book The World as Will and Representation
and he himself admits to not having created anything new, he just continued this long tradition.
In this context, he was the first to fully commit to the subject,
using this long intellectual path to discover the abysmal depths of the unconscious, to discover where our emotions and decisions come from.
In his most famous book, “Malaise in Civilization”,
Freud presents the way in which civilization itself is responsible for the individual's neuroses,
for her constant unhappiness and poor adequacy to it
The unhappiness caused by society is the most costly for the individual to understand.
How can the individual be the main responsible for our unhappiness,
especially the mechanism that protects us from nature and makes us live longer and, theoretically, better?
Exploring this, Freud sees two drives that are essential to the way organic life works: the drive of life and the drive of death.
The two act together;
the first, derived from libido, would be responsible for uniting us with other individuals.
The second comes from the individual's own limited existence, from his inevitable and continues to fall towards death, as Schopenhauer would say.
Freud will say the following:
Now, I believe, the meaning of cultural evolution is no longer obscure for us
They present us with the struggle between Eros and death, an instinct for life and an instinct for destruction, as it unfolds in the human species.
This struggle is the essential content of life,
and that is why cultural evolution can be briefly designated as the vital struggle of the human species.
We are a cleaved - divided subject.
Freud points out that we need two pronouns in order to refer to ourselves: an "I" and an "it"
And in civilization, our sexual drives are repressed and moved to other ends,
producing the culture of society; all this, so that we can live in society.
That way, Freud points to three major points where our suffering comes from:
- the arrogance of nature, which threatens us;
- fragility of our body;
- por fim, a influência das normas na família, no Estado e na Sociedade.
The last being the most difficult for the individual to accept.
With that, we can see the extent to which our suppressed,
suppressed drives and desires can reappear and dominate our personality.
In the game, Professor Kamoshida physically harasses several students verbally and
is only kept in school due to his Olympic victory, his famous career as an athlete.
The characters, when attacking his distorted self,
make him suffer the influences of himself, what Freud would call Super-Me,
a part of the regulatory conscience that oppresses and regulates these desires,
making him regret his actions, and deliver yourself to school.
Finally, ending this short analysis, we can conclude that the cool thing about this game is the presentation of the dichotomy
f our desires and of what society stipulates for us - a relationship that will never cease to exist.
When we confront Kamoshida he is subjected to the ethics of civilization and the rules of the cult,
and suffers the evils of having promoted actions that society disowns and repudiates.
How can we do to live in the least painful and repressive way possible?
This is something that we will not be able to know yet,
but the fact is that we cannot forget that a good portion of us is made by institutional desires.
which are very important for our happiness and well-being.
So, whem we plan or think
in living in a society we have to keep the fact
the well-being of the individual, in his senses
and in the instincts
A civilization
that does not put in count the desires
provided by the instinct, that uses only the reason to dictate the well being of the people
will have to face the constaly unhapiness of the people.
