Toy Story 5: Fear, Ideology, Identity, and Truth

Spoiler warning: this essay contains major plot details from Toy Story 5.

Clinical note: This is a cultural, interdisciplinary analysis. It does not constitute psychological diagnosis, prescription, or therapeutic treatment.

1. Lilypad: The Box That Came in the Mail

Bonnie is eight years old. She is shy, she has trouble making friends and, as Jessie observes, she plays differently from other kids her age. So her parents do something perfectly reasonable: they give her a frog-shaped children’s tablet, Lilypad, which comes with a social network for kids called the Pond. The intention is good. They want their daughter to connect with someone.

The toys watch the box arrive. They watch Bonnie open it. And over the days that follow, they watch the screen carry off the hours that used to be theirs.

What happens next is an adventure movie. What happens in that first instant is something else, and that is what I want to write about.

The toys are perceiving something real. Bonnie is drifting away from playing with them. Lilypad was designed to capture her attention. Their place in the girl’s life really is under threat.

Fear does not begin with a lie. It begins with a truth.

The problem appears when that truth starts growing until it explains everything.

2. When a Truth Becomes Too Big: Totalizing Thinking

In Toy Story 1, Buzz Lightyear’s arrival triggers a similar mechanism in Woody. Buzz is not received as a possible companion but as a threat to the place Woody occupied in Andy’s life.

And the threat exists. Buzz is new, shiny, and fascinating. Andy sleeps with him. Woody is not imagining that his position has changed. His error does not consist in seeing something false, but in allowing a partial truth to become the whole truth. Buzz can no longer be, all at once, naive, vulnerable, generous, irritating, and brave. For a while he can only be one thing: the one who has come to take his place.

That is what I will call, in this essay, totalizing thinking.

It is not simply being wrong, nor having strong convictions. Thinking becomes totalizing when one part of reality acquires the power to explain the whole, and every new piece of information must be fitted to a conclusion already reached.

In the mentalization tradition there is a concept that describes well what lies underneath: psychic equivalence. In that state, what happens inside me stops feeling like a perspective and takes on the weight of reality itself. If I feel that you despise me, then you despise me. If I experience your disagreement as an attack, then your intention was to attack me.

My experience no longer represents the world. It is the world.

That is where the distance between what I see and what is there disappears. I no longer think “this is what, with the information I have, I believe is happening,” but “this is what is happening.” A contradiction then stops being a piece of information and becomes a threat.

This is not relativism. That our perspectives are partial does not mean they are all worth the same: there are better-established facts, interpretations incompatible with the evidence, real dangers, and decisions that must be made. The problem begins when we stop distinguishing reality from our representation of it.

Fear does not need to invent the danger. It can recognize it correctly and still destroy our capacity to calibrate it.

A tablet can capture a child’s attention without being only an isolation machine. A newcomer can threaten our place without being only an enemy. A policy can do real harm without everyone who defends it being evil or stupid.

Totalizing thinking eliminates those “ands.” It cannot tolerate that something be dangerous and valuable, that a decision be necessary and costly, that someone be wrong and still show us something we had not seen.

It does not make a statement false. It severs it from its limits.

3. Identity and Certainty: The Zones Where We Stop Playing

Two people in front of a painting. One sees a door opening; the other, a door closing. They can argue and end up seeing both. The second reading does not need to destroy the first.

Now change the object. A political leader. A religion. A war. How to raise children. A topic where you already know which side you are on.

Then the texture changes. There are no longer two readings correcting each other, but one correct description and one mistaken one; the other person is deceived or acting in bad faith.

What is decisive is not only that the topic changed. What changed is the relationship between that belief and my identity.

When a belief is relatively separate from what I am, I can treat it as a hypothesis: I examine it, I modify it, I abandon it without feeling that I disappear with it. When it has fused with my identity, it stops being something I have and starts being something I am. Disagreement changes in nature: the other person is no longer contradicting an idea — they are threatening a border.

Erikson located in adolescence the tension between identity and role confusion. James Marcia later described the moratorium: the period in which adolescents explore versions of themselves without yet taking on stable commitments. Kernberg used “identity diffusion” for something different: the difficulty of integrating contradictory representations of oneself and of others. A similar surface, two different depths.

Between those extremes there is a spectrum — not of whole persons, but of zones. Someone can be reflective at work and rigid about politics, tolerate scientific uncertainty and be unable to bear it when raising their children.

I notice it in myself with uncomfortable ease. I can discuss a clinical case for an hour, change my mind twice, and thank the person who contradicted me. And I can lose that same capacity at my own dinner table, in three minutes, over a political comment from someone I love. It is not that I know less there. It is that something of mine is at stake there.

We do not have a single relationship with uncertainty. We have internal maps with zones of varying stability.

4. Political Neuroscience: The Amygdala Doesn’t Vote

There is a piece of research worth bringing in carefully, because it is often used to do exactly what this essay questions.

In 2011, an MRI study found that greater political conservatism was associated, on average, with greater gray-matter volume in the right amygdala — implicated in threat processing — and greater liberalism with greater volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, linked, among other functions, to conflict and error monitoring. A preregistered 2024 replication, with around a thousand participants, upheld the first association, though with a small effect, and did not confirm the second.

It is tempting to turn this into the diagnosis of an electorate. That would be a mistake. These are average associations, not individual destinies, and no one has settled the direction of causality: we do not know whether certain dispositions influence political orientation, or whether years of exposure to particular environments modify the brain.

Nor is the amygdala a “fear center” that switches on and off. The studies do not show that it produces dogmatism or certainty.

The study does not demonstrate the mechanism I am proposing. What follows is a hypothesis about mental states: when a situation is processed as a threat, the space for treating our perceptions as partial shrinks. Attention narrows, ambiguity becomes intolerable, and the system needs to decide quickly what is safe, what is dangerous, and which side to be on.

That capacity is indispensable: without it, our ancestors would have gone on dialectically examining the animal in the bushes until they became its lunch. But a logic that is useful in the face of immediate danger can become destructive when it organizes social life.

The amygdala doesn’t vote.

There are no Republican minds and Democratic minds as separate natures. There are mental states that anyone can enter when something important seems to be in danger. The same person can think with nuance about monetary policy and become absolute when talking about their children.

Fear is not the only road to rigidity: shame, resentment, or loyalty can be roads as well. But they all narrow thinking when something central is experienced as threatened. It is not fear that destroys reflection. It is fear that can no longer be thought.

5. Deng Xiaoping and the Cat That Catches Mice

There is a phrase associated with Deng Xiaoping, derived from a Sichuan proverb: it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

The phrase suspends the identity question — what kind of cat this is — in order to ask what it does. It forces us to judge a practice by its effects, even when it comes from the side we do not identify with.

In China, that displacement made it possible to stop demanding that every measure first be socialist or capitalist. Market and planning stopped functioning as incompatible identities and could be combined in hybrid ways according to the problems they had to solve. Ideology did not disappear, but it lost part of its power to decide in advance which solutions could be thought.

That is what makes the example interesting for the West: it offers not a model to copy, but an invitation to step out of the totalizing boxes of left and right. Thinking dialectically does not mean choosing a midpoint; it means allowing elements considered incompatible to enter into a new composition.

Pragmatism, however, cannot become total either. A policy can be efficient and unjust; before asking whether it works, we have to decide what counts as a result, whom it works for, and who pays the costs. Nor is this about romanticizing the Chinese state or ignoring its authoritarianism.

The question of how does not eliminate the question of what. It keeps the cat’s identity from answering, in advance, every question about its actions. The difficulty may lie in the model; it may also lie in the categories with which we look at it.

6. Technology and Play: What Toy Story 5 Refuses to Totalize

Let’s go back to Bonnie’s room.

Toy Story 5 had a structure readily available: the toys versus the screen, true play versus technology. For much of the movie, that seems to be the direction.

But Pixar refuses to turn Lilypad into a villain. The tablet monopolizes Bonnie’s attention and exposes her to other girls’ mockery; a children’s platform is not neutral just because it is shaped like a frog. At the same time, it opens a space of connection for a girl who could not manage to connect and, when it becomes aware of the harm, it steps aside.

The movie does not say that technology is innocent. It says that it is not only guilty.

There is an even better detail. In the house Jessie arrives at, there are old electronic toys led by Smarty Pants. They too were once the new thing; they displaced others, and they ended up abandoned in favor of yet another technology.

Today’s enemy is tomorrow’s displaced. A position is not an essence: it is a place within a sequence.

The movie does not resolve the conflict by declaring that the toys were wrong — their fear had grounds — nor by defeating Lilypad in order to restore a screenless past. Bonnie finds a friend, and neither the toys nor the tablet has to disappear.

That solution preserves the contradictions without letting any single one of them explain the whole field. It keeps a partial truth, even an important one, from erasing the other dimensions before they have been heard.

7. Mentalization and Circularity: The Loop

All of this has a practical problem. If totalizing thinking depends less on content than on the state from which we think, how do we recognize that we have entered it?

There is a fairly reliable signal: circularity.

In a dialogue that thinks, something the other person says changes what I say next. It may not convince me, but it forces me to sharpen or correct. In a dialogue captured by fear, the arguments rotate: there is a great deal of motion and no displacement.

It resembles what sometimes happens in an anxiety attack, when someone keeps repeating “why is this happening to me?” The question is no longer looking for an answer: it is a symptom in the shape of a question.

If in ten minutes neither of you has said anything the other could not have predicted, you are probably no longer investigating together, but defending positions. That may be necessary — but it is worth knowing.

This can be turned into a weapon: accusing the other person of speaking from fear, or of not thinking, usually reveals more about the accuser than about the accused.

Each of us has privileged, though fallible, access to our own experience. No one can dictate from outside what you feel. But neither are we transparent to ourselves: we can call anxiety conviction, call shame indignation, or call the need for certainty lucidity. A closed interpretation of the other destroys the very thing it claims to want to recover.

Whoever diagnoses other people’s rigidity over and over, without allowing anything to modify the diagnosis, has already entered the same loop. The tool used as superiority indicts the one who wields it.

There is another signal, one I learned from a supervisor. When someone pressures us to answer immediately, that urgency is not merely an annoyance: it tells us something about what is happening in the field. It can close a question before a third possibility has a chance to appear.

The right response is not always to speed up in order to prove that we have clarity. Sometimes it is to go deliberately slower.

What urgency can take from us is not only time. It is the capacity to think.

8. What Bonnie Didn’t Have to Choose

This essay does not propose distrusting all of our convictions, nor does it claim that the truth always lies at a midpoint. There are victims and there are those responsible. There are false statements. There are urgent decisions and limits that must be defended.

It is not about giving up taking sides, but about preserving, even as we choose, the possibility that our position has not yet exhausted reality.

The difference is not between having a position and not having one. It is between a position that can work and a position that can only be defended.

The problem is that, from the inside, the two feel exactly the same.

A clinical rule inspired by Fonagy sums it up elegantly: when we doubt whether we understand the other person’s mind, we are probably still mentalizing. When we are completely sure we have understood it, we probably no longer are.

It is an uncomfortable sentence because it is useless for winning an argument. It only works inward, and precisely when we need it most is when we are least able to apply it: certainty does not feel like certainty. It feels like seeing clearly.

Bonnie did not have to choose between an entirely true world and a false one. She learned to move in a world where different facts, needs, and risks coexisted without canceling one another out: the tablet that isolated her and connected her, the toys that loved her and needed her attention, the friend who had not yet appeared.

We rarely have that luck. Most of the time we do not know whether we are facing a real threat or a truth that has grown too big. And by the time we find out, it is almost always after the fact.

That leaves only one thing to do in the meantime, and it is not pleasant: to be a little more suspicious of the ideas that make us feel lucid than of the ones that make us doubt.

Fear does not need to lie to us.

It only needs to stop telling us the rest.

Want to Go Deeper?

At The Crossover Project, we care about the rigor behind the mix. These are some of the sources that support this collision between psychoanalysis, epistemology, neuroscience, and popular culture.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self. Other Press.

The text where mentalization stops being a clinical intuition and becomes a systematic model. Especially useful is its description of psychic equivalence: that state in which what we feel stops being a perspective and takes on the weight of reality.

Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson; Marcia, J. E. (1966). “Development and Validation of Ego-Identity Status”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3(5), 551–558.

Best read alongside Erik Erikson’s Identity: Youth and Crisis. Marcia describes the moratorium as exploration without stable commitment; Kernberg uses identity diffusion for the difficulty of integrating contradictory representations of oneself and of others.

Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C. & Rees, G. (2011). “Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults”. Current Biology, 21(8).

The original study on political orientation, the amygdala, and the anterior cingulate cortex. Its results should be read as average correlations, not as a neurological classification of voters.

Petropoulos Petalas, D., Schumacher, G. & Scholte, H. S. (2024). “Is Political Ideology Correlated with Brain Structure? A Preregistered Replication”. iScience, 27(10), 110532.

A larger replication that found a small association between conservatism and amygdala volume, but did not confirm the finding concerning the anterior cingulate cortex. A good example of how research can preserve part of a finding while forcing us to qualify another.

Allison, E. & Fonagy, P. (2016). “When Is Truth Relevant?”. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 85(2), 275–303.

A text especially close to this essay’s thesis: it examines the relationship between truth, certainty, and mentalization, and shows how both undue certainty and extreme uncertainty can shut down thinking.

What Is The Crossover Project?

A space where ideas that don’t usually share a room collide. Not to dissolve their differences, nor to produce easy answers, but to observe what appears when psychoanalysis, science, philosophy, and popular culture stay inside the same conversation long enough.

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Oscar Rey de Castro is a psychoanalyst, a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and of the Peruvian Psychoanalytic Society (SPP). The Crossover Project is his editorial adventure, where psychoanalysis collides with popular culture.