The Summer Hikaru’s Self System Arrived
(Spoiler Alert) I have always been a fan of anime from early childhood, initially it started off as a desire to just watch cartoonish things (this is often why anime is dismissed as unserious). But as I matured, I continued my love for anime. I have learned to admire the art and messaging implemented within the shows. I believe “The Summer Hikaru Died” is a great example of well-executed storytelling that engages an audience to think beyond the surface and ask questions that require depth and nuance.
To summarize this anime without going into too many details and spoiling. “The Summer Hikaru Died” is about a young man named Yoshiki and his childhood best friend Hikaru. While the circumstances are left a mystery, Hikaru dies, and his body is taken over by an unknown entity throughout the depiction of the anime. It is unclear what has taken over Hikaru‘s body, and if it’s benign or malevolent. This information is also unknown to the entity itself. This concept gives us a unique start to someone’s developmental history when applying psychoanalytic theory. Many of the psychological schools of thought require us to look at what an individual‘s parents have taught them to be good or bad, and these messages shape a person’s identity. However, in the case of this new version of Hikaru, while he carries all of his memories and uses them to inform the way he navigates through life, he himself was not raised by Hikaru’s parents. The only person who knows his true identity is Yoshiki. The question is: what is his true identity? Who is Hikaru‘s true self, or his self-system made from?
This anime works to answer this question through all 12 episodes. I found myself asking: Is this a new Hikaru because he appears to have a different consciousness? Or is it the same Hikaru with different experiences because he carries all of the same memories? Within the anime, approximately 98% of the people he interacts with have not noticed how he has changed. Other characters may comment on small differences, but for the most part, he is able to blend within society seamlessly without setting off any alarm. This also includes the people who know him well: his family and friends.
As a psychotherapist, I think applying psychoanalytic theory to this anime can be useful. Many of the models within psychoanalysis stem from Freud’s “Drive theory”, and it does appear that whatever entity Hikaru is, it shares similar drives to “aggression and violence”, something Freud discussed regularly. While Hikaru may have these instinctual motivations, what really shapes who he becomes in society is “anxiety”. I think it would be more appropriate to apply interpersonal theory to the development of this new version of Hikaru. As mentioned prior, he doesn’t learn this from his parents, but instead learns this from his friend, Yoshiki. Sullivan‘s interpersonal theory breaks down the self system into: disintegrating traits or the “bad me,” integrating traits or the “good me,” and experiences or traits that are so bad that they’re not integrated into the self identity at all, or the “not me”.
This self-system is learned by the new Hikaru based on Yoshiki’s reaction to his behaviors. One of the most crucial lessons he learned is how valuable life and death are to the human experience, something he initially had no foundational experience with. Through this, he developed his “bad me”, his tendency to draw malevolent entities towards him, in addition to this, and his drive for aggression has been filtered into the “bad me” part of his self system. His “not me” likely stems from the memories that Hikaru does not have access to from his past. Throughout the anime, he unlocks more memories that revolve around what exactly this new entity is. It could be argued that the reason those memories were not readily accessible, like his childhood memories with his best friend, was that this information would destabilize his sense of self as a newfound human. One might gather that this explains why those memories are locked away or repressed. His “good me” is who he is learning he is now, separate from who Hikaru was in the past. Even further, he realizes that his own personal preferences differ from what the original Hikaru preferred. This new Hikaru has his own experiences that he is creating independently with his friends and family.
What I find interesting is that all of these components of his self-system are still developing because the story happens over the course of a year. All of the information he’s learned about who he is as an individual occurs in such a short span of time that his perceptions are bound to change and expand as he continues to live his life as a human being. Given the expansive possibilities, I am convinced this is why I love watching anime. At times, people end up missing the art form, the beauty and depth that anime like this provide, because they are so caught up in the story being told through animation, which Western society can view as childish. It is my hope that this different description and perception of anime encourage others to try something new. Art often imitates life, and there’s a lot to be discovered. With anime like this, we are able to see various parts of our self-system reflected in characters’ good, bad, and not-me. If we can learn to accept their parts in turn, we may be able to accept our own.
