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Last year during a psychotherapy session, a client was talking about his adolescent daughter's obsession with a boyband. When his daughter took her mother and brother to see them in concert, they were also smitten. The client wondered what it was about these young Asian men, their mercurial androgynous look, make-up, and ever-changing hair colour, that left his daughter spellbound. They had even inspired her to learn Korean. My client looked surprised when I indicated that I knew about the K-pop group BTS and approvingly added that their latest album was based on Jungian psychology.
Analytical psychology has BTS to thank for creating a converstation and bringing some of Jung's ideas to the top of the billboard charts. Given that BTS has over 26.3 million twitter followers (Turak 2020), the youthful emissaries have brought Carl Jung to a new generation worldwide with their latest album Map of the Soul: 7 (2020a) selling more than 4.1 million copies in the first nine days after its release (Wikipedia 2020).
With songs and music videos specifically looking at persona, ego and shadow, this seven member K-pop group has demonstrated that their music, which is largely in Korean, can speak to a generation regardless of language, country, culture, religion, gender and age. At the 2020 Golden Globe Awards, the celebrated and prize-winning director Boon Joon-ho noted that while his work has been receiving world-wide recognition and his movie Parasite (, reviewed in this issue) swept the awards scene, his Korean counterparts BTS have had three thousand times the amount of power and influence (Dodson 2020). I wonder if decades from now we will look back on our current times and credit BTS as having a major influence in bringing Jung's ideas to a new generation. In this review I will introduce you to BTS and how they are putting analytical psychology on the map.
BTS (Korean: 방탄소년단) is an acronym of Bangtan Sonyeondan that literally means ‘Bulletproof Boy Scouts’. The seven member K-