What is the #PERSONA Challenge?

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The teaser trailer for BTS’s highly anticipated upcoming album featured only BTS leader RM and was almost-three-minutes-long. In it, RM asks existential questions with lyrics like…

“Who am I? The question I had my whole life. Who am I? The question which I probably won’t find the answer to my whole life.”

These lyrics echo the title of the album, which the group has revealed is inspired by Carl Jung’s theories of psychology. Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. He was close friends with Freud, but their friendliness dissolved as their philosophies grew more and more different.

Frued believed that humans were motivated mainly by sexual energy, whereas Jung believed humans were motivated by spirituality, intellect, and creativity. Some of Jung’s central concepts revolve around the idea of individuation—or the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self conscious and unconscious elements informed by past experiences and future aspirations.

BTS’s Persona trailer explored a lot of these concepts.

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“The ‘me’ that I want myself to be, The ‘me’ that people want me to be, The ‘me’ that you love, And the ‘me’ that I create, The ‘me’ that’s smiling, The me that’s sometimes in tears, Vividly breathing each second and every moment even now.”

This deep dive into self examination sparked an online trend, where Army members began sharing their own self-reflective stories.

Thousands of tweets rolled in of fans sharing their stories of personal growth, which shows that wrestling with identity and purpose is normal and even though it can be a struggle, waiting on the other side is a truly beautiful person inside and out.

The Persona album has already amassed an incredible 2.6 million pre-orders worldwide in just five days. MAP OF THE SOUL: PERSONA is due for release on Friday 12th April via BigHit Entertainment.

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