BTS Delve into Jungian Analytic Psychology
The essence of the lyrics of many pop songs is often analysed extensively. I don't know when it started but The Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was soon regarded as a paean to LSD -
"Newspaper taxis appear on the shore
Waiting to take you away
Climb in the back with your head in the clouds
And you're gone"
But how many lyrics have delved considerably into Jungian analytic psychology? BTS new album due out this week is titled "Map of the Soul: Persona". This has been brought to the attention of 75 year old Dr Murray Stein of the Jung Institute of Evanston, Illinois.
It's not just the album title, though: BTS's lyrics delve into Jungian concepts of the psyche, ego and collective unconscious - with a particular focus on the idea of Persona.
"Persona is a reference to the theatre," explains Dr Stein. "It's the Latin word for the masks that actors wore on the stage - and we all put on masks, in a sense, when we go out into public.
"It's part of being a social animal: Our need to get along with other people, our need to be polite, our need to be part of a group.
"In some cultures this is more important than others, and I must say in the Asian cultures of Korea and Japan, where BTS originate, persona is an extremely important part of their lives.
"How you present yourself, how you address other people, how you locate yourself in the social world - as a younger brother, or a student, or a professor - all of this is really very prominent in their consciousness and their functioning as people in their society."
BTS plunge straight into this concept on Map of the Soul's opening track.
"'Who am I?' is the question I've had all my life / And I'll probably never find the answer," raps Kim Nam-joon, discussing how praise for his on-stage persona stops him addressing his flaws and getting to know his true self.
Jung was the founding father of analytic psychology who proposed and developed the concepts of extravert and introvert personalities, and the power of the unconscious. Dr. Stein's studies were condensed into a book titled "Jung's Map of the Soul". When told about BTS' upcoming album, he had to look up who BTS were! His reaction to the new album? "I was floored!"
Dr Stein recognises the band's struggle to balance their public and private life as "the persona trap" - a condition that can trigger serious psychological problems.
"It's a very important topic because young people who find their personas inadequate, or feel like they're not fitting in, are very vulnerable to mobbing (bullying) or to suicidal acts - so I think BTS addressing that is very timely and important for their audience."
The band continue to grapple with these ideas of identity throughout Map of the Soul: Persona.
Mikrokosmos talks about deriving self-worth from within; while Jamais Vu looks at our tendency to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
Dr Stein explores the lyrics in-depth in a recent episode of the Speaking Of Jung podcast *, where he explains how Map of the Soul is an album full of "longing and struggling for authenticity" that resolves on the final track, Dionysus, with the band "breaking out of persona traps" and reaching an awakening.
BTS have a habit of issuing albums in trilogies. So another two based on Jungian theory may be in the works.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-47965524
* For anyone interested, Dr. Stein's hour-long podcast which talks about BTS can be heard here. It is episode 42 which you can download or hear by clicking on the link in the middle of the article.
https://speakingofjung.com/podcast/2019 ... f-the-soul
I was quite impressed with Kim Nam-joon, RM as he’s called — I guess he’s the leader of the BTS group — when he spoke at the United Nations. What impressed me about that was that he kept the distinction, carefully, between who he was a boy growing up in a small village outside of Seoul, Korea and who he is publicly and famously now. You know, a star in the firmament of the entertainment world. If he were to identify with that role totally, he would lose contact with himself, with the boy he was, with the human being that he is. He would be ungrounded.
BTS address the United Nations
