With this groundwork in place, I show how the main characters of Returnal-Helios, Selene, and the Astronaut-can be read as representing these core psychological elements within the context of one single mind.

I begin this analysis by sketching the basic psychoanalytic model of the mind as subdivided into the id, ego, and superego, along with the fundamental principles that are understood to motivate them. The result is a work of art that shows how video games can move beyond our typical common-sense ideas about “worldbuilding” and “solipsism” to create a haunting portrait of the basic tensions that define and motivate a human psyche. I want to convince you here that Returnal has taken the literary potential of psychoanalysis one step further: instead of merely making its characters amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation, Returnal shows how a world, story, set of characters, and the agency of a player can be used to represent the psychoanalysis of a single mind.

Even if original psychoanalysis’ grasp on real people is dubious, the thought goes, it can give us a lens through which to understand complex characters and, by extension, the stories in which they’re embedded. Perhaps less commonly recognized yet better grounded in the modern world is psychoanalysis as a mode of literary interpretation: because Freud’s method of understanding and diagnosing real people focused on interpreting the psychological implications of representational content like their dreams, some literary critics have adopted these interpretive methods to infer the psychology of characters in stories based on their behavior and perspective on the world. On the one hand, it paved the way for psychiatry and the treatment of mental health issues, and variants of the framework are still used in some practices today on the other hand, many of its theoretical peculiarities (especially Freud’s) are considered in the modern world to be antiquated at best and malignantly confused at worst. The 20th-century movement of psychoanalysis, commonly understood to have originated with the work of Sigmund Freud, is famous and infamous depending on the context. Sigmund Freud (far left) and Carl Jung (far right) at Clark University on September 10, 1909, for a series of lectures on psychoanalysis. A Comprehensive Theory of Majora’s Mask.

Dead space salvage hive mind