If you are anything like me, then you grew up idolizing Goku. Watching him defeat new enemies, each time having to reach new power levels to do so, was an exhilarating experience. And then he went super saiyan for the first time and - after picking up the pieces of brain on the floor left over from your head exploding - most of us proceeded to go in some private place where no one could hear us, and attempt to do it ourselves. For me was the swimming pool.
That got me thinking... What is it about Goku that made him such a compelling character? Why does his character speak to us on such a deep level? In short, why do we love Goku so much?
To answer this question we are gonna have to consult a pipe smoking Swiss Psychologist, a globetrotting American mythologist and an obligatory picture of Goku looking totally shredded.
First let’s stick of pipe in our mouth and venture back to 1920’s where Carl Jung is thinking pretty deeply about stuff. Besides popularizing ideas like archetypes and the collective unconscious - Carl Jung was also the father of analytical psychology. Jung thought that the main purpose of the individual was to expand consciousness and achieve self actualization. He also suspected that we were all unconsciously doing this as a group - moving the collective baton forward through shared struggle and integration.
A core part of individuation - Jung thought - was confronting and integrating The Shadow. The Shadow is the aspects of our personality that we try to repress, actively disown, or never learned how to properly integrate. We therefore shove these aspects down into our unconscious - and avoid coming into contact with them in our daily life.
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