Bangtan Herman Notes: The Power of Seven

At a pottery workshop with ARMY friends last month, while our hands were busy building pots and mugs, we were marveling at something we could suddenly articulate: BTS was designed to grow individually without growing apart. As separate clay projects took form side by side, the metaphor felt unavoidable. It is rare to witness fullness without fracture, change without loss.

That moment stayed with me long enough to send me back to Murray Stein’s Map of the Soul: Persona, Shadow & Ego in the World of BTS. The book is grounded in Jungian psychology, particularly the framework of individuation: the lifelong process of becoming whole through the integration of persona, shadow, and ego. Stein, a Jungian scholar, wrote with evident excitement about BTS’s thoughtful adoption of Jung’s ideas. This was the Map of the Soul era, when BTS was preparing for a world tour that would never come because of the pandemic.

I think, one of the most striking creative choices of this era lies in the rap line tracks themselves, Persona, Shadow, and Ego. Each song samples an intro from BTS’s earliest albums. Skool Luv Affair for Persona; O, RUL8 2! for Shadow and 2 Cool 4 Skul for Ego. This is not nostalgia nor is it just a creative design. It is musical intertextuality: BTS treats their own discography as a living text, returning to earlier works to make meaning of the present one. In Jungian terms, this is individuation, but in song and in sound. The present self revisiting its origin points, not to discard them, but to integrate them.

Stein reflects that “the number 7 completes things,” and that completion signals not an ending, but a time to rest after immense creative labor. In hindsight, Chapter 2 feels less like interruption and more like care. Care for the self. Care for the other. Rest became part of the work.

Seven, Stein reminds us, is also a prime number that is indivisible except by itself. In BTS’s 7, it exists as a single entity not by suppressing individuality, but by safeguarding it.

When I first read this book, it was during the pandemic, and I was a Baby ARMY learning alongside my ARMY daughter, who gently guided me through songs, names, and histories. I read Stein then with curiosity. I return to him now with recognition. Watching BTS today, sometimes alone, sometimes together with ARMY Daughter or with ARMY friends,I see the truth of Jung’s insight made visible: separation does not undo the whole. It deepens it. Seven remains prime. Seven is one. One is seven.

Apobangpo! Purple and true!