Psycho Mantis (FOXHOUND’s psychic): The telepath who looked for love in his father’s mind and found only hatred

In Metal Gear Solid (Konami, 1998), Meryl Silverburgh leads Solid Snake to the Commander’s Room on Shadow Moses. Suddenly she clutches her head, asks him if he likes her, begs him to hold her and ends up pointing her gun at him. Snake knocks her out, and out of nowhere a thin figure appears, in a trench coat and a gas mask: Psycho Mantis, the psychic of the FOXHOUND unit. Before the fight, he speaks to you, not to Snake. He reads your console’s memory card and, if it is there, informs you that you like Castlevania. He tells you whether you save your game often. He asks you to put your controller on the floor, as flat as you can, and makes it vibrate until it crawls. But the scene that explains Mantis comes at the end of the fight, when he is already dying.

// The theoryCrime as the symptom of a childhood drama

Sigmund Freud never wrote a criminology, but he left the pieces from which criminological psychoanalysis was built. The first is repression, which he described in 1915: what consciousness cannot bear is pushed out of it, but it does not disappear, and it returns disguised as a symptom. The second is the place he gave to parricide, which in “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928) he called the principal and primal crime of humanity and of the individual. His heirs applied this to crime: John Bowlby, in “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves” (1944), found among young thieves a group of “affectionless characters” marked by early, prolonged separations from their mothers. Anna Freud completed the map in 1936 with the defense mechanisms, among them projection: attributing to others what one cannot tolerate in oneself.

// The subjectThe man who cannot bear his own face

The game builds Mantis in three moments. The first is the possession of Meryl: his music plays while he controls her, and the Codec warns Snake not to shoot her but to knock her out. The second is the fight in the Commander’s Room. Mantis dodges every attack because, as the game itself explains, he is reading your controller’s moves, and the remedy you get over the Codec is to step outside the screen: plug your controller into controller port 2. The room holds statues with their faces wrapped in leather bands. According to the Codec, they reproduce Mantis’s real face, he despises the sight of his own disfigured face, and seeing it suddenly might break his concentration. When he is losing, he plays his last card: he orders Meryl, awake and under his control again, to stand where Snake can see her and blow her brains out. Snake stops her.

The third moment is his death. (Spoiler warning.) Defeated, Mantis says that in the minds of thousands of men and women he found the same selfish and atavistic desire to pass on one’s seed, and that this is why there is war. Then he tells of his childhood: the first mind he entered was his father’s, and he saw nothing but disgust and hatred for him; his mother had died in childbirth and his father despised him for it; he thought his father was going to kill him, and at that moment he lost his future and his past. Snake asks whether he burned his village down to bury that past. Mantis does not deny it: he answers that Snake has suffered the same trauma. Snake, too, killed his father, Big Boss. He admits that he never agreed with Liquid’s revolution and only wanted an excuse to kill as many people as he could. He asks for his mask to be put back on, because without it other people’s thoughts force their way into his mind, and before he dies he uses his power to open the hidden door behind the bookcase. He says it is the first time he has ever used his power to help someone.

// The crackThe same trauma, two fates

The first crack is opened by the game itself. Mantis tells Snake they are the same, that they suffered the same trauma, and yet Snake does not want to kill as many people as he can. If the same origin scene produces a mass killer and a man who is not one, it is not enough to explain the first. This is Karl Popper’s classic criticism of psychoanalysis: its concepts explain everything after the fact, the killer and the man who is not, and so they cannot be put to the test. The game also offers another explanation: the Codec says that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mantis worked for the FBI as a psychic profiler and that, on the case of a serial killer, he went too far into the murderer’s mind and became just like him. There is no father there: there is contagion.

Nor should the tragedy absolve him. Explaining Mantis is not excusing him. He rules out the alibi himself when he admits that Liquid’s revolution did not interest him and that he only wanted an excuse to kill. And his last scene shows that the choice was there: the man who used his power to possess Meryl and make her put a gun to her own head could also use it to open a door. He did it once, as he died.