Welcome back to Weekly Cultural Critic [which seems to be turning into monthly cultural critic, but whatever]. After playing through FF7 for the third time, I decided it was time to tackle the never-ending series head on. Hope you enjoy!
Intro
In the same way that it is possible to take a character like Batman and create a psycho-biography, it might be possible to understand video game characters through a similar lens. Ewan Kirkland, who specializes in the semiotics of new media, once said that psycho-analyzing Silent Hill was like “shooting Freudian fish in a barrel.” Final Fantasy would be another particularly robust series for psychoanalysis: screen memories, false memories, amnesia, and filial conflicts are central themes to each iteration of the franchise. In fact, sometimes the analysis is almost too easy: the Oedipal conflicts of certain characters are the central devices of both Final Fantasy 7 and 10. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, it might be possible to understand the psychodynamics and metaphoricity of the plot at play in these games. (Spoilers ahead!)
The Oedipal Triangle
While no Freudian text specifically lays out the laws of the Oedipus complex, throughout his career Freud developed this theory or sets of theories. According to Freud, when a child is born he sees the mother as his first object of affection: the mother is the thing that gives the child sustenance. In fact, before the child has a concept of mother, he sees himself as part of his mother, he has no sense of self and other. As the child gets older, the father interjects himself in the relationship in order to preserve the incest taboo and out of jealousy that his wife gives towards the child; the child sees the father as preventing or breaking the union between mother and child. The father becomes an object of both scorn and love (ambivalence plays a huge part here); the father both protects and punishes the child for his actions towards/on/with/in the mother. The child sees the mother as an object that gives pleasure (breast feeding is pleasurable), the child wants the mother, this desire can be described as sexual. Only later in development, because of penalties enacted by the father, can the child chose a woman other than his mother (but in the image of his mother) as a love object: this is how most males become heterosexuals. The issue is that most people, especially neurotics and hysterics, play out the drama of their Oedipal complexes throughout their entire lives, literally and metaphorically. It is important to remember that the Oedipal triangle goes in all three directions: the mother battles for/between affection/persecution from the child, the child battles the father for the affection of the mother, the father battles the child for the mother but also protects the child.
In Final Fantasy 7, Sephiroth discovers that his “mother” is the extra-terrestrial being Jenova. Sephiroth is considerably more powerful than his father (Hojo) and most other people on the planet. The rest of the plot, is, essentially, Cloud trying to prevent Sephiroth from “reuniting” with his “mother” (read: fucking her). The weight of this incestuous sin is so great that it could bring about “the end of the world.” The incest taboo, at least in this universe, is so heavily penalized that entire planets are crushed under it’s power.
In Final Fatansy X we have two separate Oedipal conflicts that are (aberrantly) resolved. The entirety of the plot is spent trying to destroy Tidus’s father, Jecht. In the symbolic language of the game, the tyrannical father is transmogrified into the punishing figure of Sin. Tidus must battle his jealous and angry father his entire life: the final boss-fight of the game is the only possible resolution of his Oedipal conflict. His father, internalized after his disappearance and then re-externalized as Sin, both follows and pursues Tidus, leaving a mess of destruction behind him. Tidus must literally murder his father, as he has always (since childhood) wanted to do.
Similarly, Anima, Seymour’s mother, is a secret summon that can be obtained by Yuna. Seymour becomes the victim of his own Oedipal complex: he obtains his mother, as he obtains an object, and uses her. Having obtained his mother, having committed a metaphorical incestuous sin by “obtaining” her, he becomes evil and threatens the world: again the incest taboo is seen is a destructive force that can destroy people or planets. The aesthetics of the design of Anima are morphologically ambiguous, both phallic and vaginal (both oblong and cavernous) – the effeminate Seymour, whose own sexuality is certainly ambiguous, is expressed in this design. The Anima, in Jungian psychoanalytics, is the repressed feminine part of any male: Anima, Seymour’s mother, is the feminine part of Seymour that he tries to keep hidden (most of Anima’s body is underground, revealed only during the summons overdrive attack).
Screen Memories, Repression, and Amnesia
Screen memories are certain (if not all) memories from childhood that have been retro-actively altered and imbued with symbolic significance. They function similar to a dream in that they express a repressed infantile wish. In a screen memory, the actual memory meets the fantasy half way: a person remembers, as a child, being in a field with lots of yellow flowers. The flowers, in reality, may or may not have been yellow but the memory retains or selects the color yellow because yellow has symbolic significance in relation to a repressed desire or wish.
Considering that almost every important character in Final Fantasy has amnesia (Cloud, Tifa, every playable character in FF8, Zidane, Tidus, etc…) the screen memory becomes an important plot device. In Final Fantasy 7 almost all of Cloud’s personality is constructed by fantastical screen memories: the Nibelheim scene is essentially a screen memory. In this scene cloud remembers himself as Zach because he wants/wanted to be Zach. Cloud was literally present for the scene, however his fantasy altered the memory to express a wish. Tifa alters the same memory in a similar way: she does not interject when Cloud retells his false version of the memory: she wants the screen memory to be the “true” memory. Remember: this conflict is only sorted out when Tifa visits Cloud’s unconscious within the lifestream; the “real” memories were always there, just repressed. Tifa acts as a psychoanalyst, excavating hidden memories to relieve Cloud of his hysterical symptoms (hearing voices, headaches, ear ringing, etc…). This sort of confusion points to an important concept in Freud: to the unconscious there is no difference between truth and fiction cathected with affect. That is to say, if someone believes a fiction hard enough: it eventually becomes the truth for them, a truth that is even truer than the truth. (This, by the way, is implicit in the structuring of all fetishes.)
In Final Fantasy 8, there is a ponderous plot point involving amnesia. Towards the end of the game we find out that all of the characters had, at one point, been orphan companions in a foster home. The characters had all forgotten this memory: the explanation being that the Guardian Forces destroy certain memories; a person must sacrifice their memory for the power of the summon. But could it be, instead, that the memory of the foster home, although seemingly warm and comfortable, was repressed by all the characters and not destroyed by mystical forces? Surely, for a child, being parent-less in an unfamiliar land is a scene of great anxiety: perhaps no mystical forces were needed to obliterate a memory of such intense emotional power. Only the force of repression. Or, instead, that the Guardian Forces are a metaphor for repression: a power that destroys memories but also keeps us alive. Without repression, a person would be crushed under the weight of their anxieties, just as the player would be crushed by monsters without the GF.
(In fact: a whole essay could probably be written on the transformation of “Matron” into “Sorceress Edea”; Virgin/Whore complex, Oedipal conflicts [mother as villian], etc…)
Metaphoricity, Psycho-analysis, and Video Games
Like literature, there is a certain problem with giving psychoanalytic readings of fantasy texts. Does psychoanalysis simply find itself where it wants to or was it always already there? A specific problematic of this kind could be seen in the question: Is Sin a metaphor for the father or is he the actual father, or somehow both? Andre Green, on the subject of metaphors in tragedy, says: “Tragedy is the metaphor of dream. The language of tragedy is not the language of dream: it is its obscure double. […] It is as if the whole tragedy represents the associations of the dream” (“Orestes and Oedipus” 361, my emphasis). Could we say the same of fantasy? It seems that psychoanalytic readings often occupy a space between metaphor and literality: there is a bizarre fluctuation of metaphoricity within any fantasy or mythological text. This kind of oscillating metaphoricity itself is a kind of schizophrenic logic: mythical logic and the conventions of mythology in tragedy conflate, distort, confuse, and obfuscate the difference between metaphor, magic, psychical structures, and “actual” or “external” reality. The symbolic order goes through a complete break-down, internal structures and external structures slip in and out of themselves manifested in the interactions of the magical in the human world.
[Hope you enjoyed this one. As always DMG->MP is interested in what you have to say. Any commissions, suggestions, ideas, thoughts, submissions, comments, or replies can be left in our ask box or email addresses!]
-eric
