Psychoanalytic reflections on the problem of trying to be perfect

By Oscar Rey de Castro, Psychoanalyst — IPA / SPP Member

Clinical note: What follows is a cultural and cross-disciplinary exercise. It is neither a clinical diagnosis nor a therapeutic prescription.

I

One Piece has more than 1,100 episodes. It just came back with a new arc after a production hiatus. It’s been on the air for over twenty-five years. In an era where an eight-episode series already feels long, why would a thirteen-year-old decide to start watching One Piece? And strangely enough… it happens. Kids get hooked and so do adults. Season two of the One Piece live-action has been a tremendous hit.

And there’s something even stranger. In every anime there are main arcs and filler. It’s part of the format: episodes where the main plot doesn’t move forward and a lot of people might prefer to skip them (like those who prefer Dragon Ball Z Kai over Dragon Ball Z). In One Piece the filler feels almost as good and engaging as the main arcs. The arcs can be long, but they don’t get boring. With all that said… what makes One Piece so good?

I don’t think there’s a single answer to that. But I’m going to try to offer a psychoanalytic reading that can add to the many other perspectives that explain the success of the series, and it has nothing to do with the animation, the fights or the gears that Luffy keeps unlocking.

The Straw Hats are pirates who don’t steal. They always have money problems. Their captain falls asleep at the worst moments, is impulsive and tends to get his crew into very serious trouble. Obviously, they’re not citizens within the legality of the world order either — they’re wanted. They don’t fit neatly into either category within the age of pirates.

Let’s look at the characters: A bounty hunter swordsman sentenced to death. A navigator who seems like a traitor. A pathological liar, extremely cowardly. A cook absolutely addicted to tobacco. A doctor who is not quite animal, but not at all human either. An archaeologist considered a serial killer, deeply dangerous. A cyborg who was addicted to speed. A skeleton musician who spent fifty years alone after dying.

Each one carries wounds and deep imperfections. The bonds between them are built on those wounds and their dreams. Everyone knows where each person limps and where each one shines. They don’t play the game of selling themselves as perfect beings. They don’t pretend to be more than what they are. And that’s why the filler doesn’t feel like filler: each arc exposes the characters’ wounds and the group goes through them together. Not despite the imperfections. Through them.

Why do we like One Piece so much? What if what hooks us is not that they’re strong but that they’re real?

That question matters. And not just because of the anime.

II

Let’s look at Luffy through different eyes. Let’s think of him as a recruiter.

Luffy doesn’t recruit like an MBA. He doesn’t care about the pedigree on a CV or the talent management pipeline. Although he picks people who stand out brutally in some specific skill, the person’s talent is usually going to waste. He doesn’t look for talent on LinkedIn. He looks for people who are hitting rock bottom and/or in extreme situations.

They definitely don’t pass a competency-based selection interview to evaluate their soft skills. If we evaluate them with social media categories, the Straw Hats have every “red flag.”

But Luffy reads each member’s dreams and realizes they can align with the crew’s. Luffy recruits from the wreckage of the system and by doing that, gets every one of them willing to die for each other.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott talks about how a mother doesn’t need to be perfect or ideal — she needs to be good enough. Luffy does something similar: he’s definitely not a perfect recruiter, much less the perfect captain. Luffy chooses imperfect members to build a good enough crew and by doing that escapes the game of trying to build something too perfect.

That doesn’t exempt him from exercising his role as captain when necessary. He’s capable of firing Usopp when he puts the crew’s chain of command at risk. At the same time, he has the fortitude to keep going when he has to watch his brother die in his arms.

Our thesis is that what draws us to Luffy and his crew is their authenticity. He doesn’t pay for what people sell. And since he doesn’t go around measuring himself against some ideal image, seeing the real value in each person comes naturally. In the end the two things go together: whoever doesn’t need to fake being perfect doesn’t demand perfection from the person next to them either.

Once we’ve developed this, it would be worth asking whether Luffy’s model exists only in anime or whether there are real-world situations where this could work. The next valuable question is whether we can take something from Luffy’s model for our own lives.

III

Peru is a country that loves football, but that almost never stands out on the world stage. At the end of 2002, a little-known club started putting together its roster for 2003, the year it would participate in the recently inaugurated Copa Sudamericana.

The club is called Cienciano and it had an unusual strategy: sign veteran players who had been promising in their youth and had faded over time.

Their coach, Freddy Ternero, and their president, Juvenal Silva, did something very similar to what Luffy does: they bet on recovering lost potential. They brought in footballers who still had dreams, who were afraid of being about to burn out, and gave them something no big club had given them: a second chance. In a way similar to Luffy, they managed to form a team that eliminated Santos from Brazil and beat River Plate from Argentina in the final. Rarely in the history of world football has a team been seen with that mystique and that grit.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a worker between 55 and 64 stays at a job for 9.6 years — three and a half times longer than someone between 25 and 34. When someone hires you at the point where the market gave up on you, your level of gratitude and commitment to the company tends to be higher.

In a national survey by the SHRM Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute, 85% of HR professionals reported that employees with criminal records performed at the same level —or better— than those without. The pattern is the same: the expelled student, the veteran player, the person coming out of prison, Zoro, Nami, Robin, the Cienciano players — all share the gratitude of being chosen when nobody else would have picked them. As we can see, the path that generates that authenticity is very different from the path of placing incentives in your salary package.

So the question is: if this works, why does the system do exactly the opposite?

IV

The recruiter posts a LinkedIn ad for a new position at the company. Describes it as challenging and as the perfect growth opportunity for the applicant. The applicant knows the interview will ask for a success story. Knows they’ll have to frame it with the STAR acronym: Situation, Task, Actions, Results. The recruiter sells the position like it’s the last job you’ll ever need. You’ve arrived. And if not, from here you climb. The applicant has built a whole career pipeline: high school volunteering, education centered around a high SAT or above 35 on the IB. Choosing a prestigious university, keeping the GPA as high as possible. Everything in perfect order. Recruiter and applicant play the same game: both oversell.

Same thing happens on Hinge. Best photos, restaurant previously researched as a good setting. Successful, interesting, and attractive. In this game, both are recruiters and applicants at the same time. It’s dangerous if either one relaxes during dinner and tells their date they haven’t spoken to their parents in over three months. The perfect script doesn’t include that yet.

The façade is perfect even if the interior doesn’t quite match it.

It’s not a scam. Psychological aptitude tests are called “maximum performance” tests. The person is expected to give their best possible showing. Personal branding is basically that: learning to inflate an image so it looks better than the original. And we probably forget it’s just a game.

The pressure to project the perfect image can lead to hiring the perfect candidates. And, to be the perfect company, to rationalizing corporate policies to measure performance. If we were truly recruiters, we would identify “high potential” and “high performance” employees and fire the bottom 10% every year after the performance review. The company that took this game to its maximum level was Enron and we all know how that story ended.

What if Enron wasn’t the exception? What if it was just the company that got caught?

The logic of ideal growth has prescriptions even for your social life: Have lunch at least twice a week with people who add to your corporate life. This same logic leads us to listen to influencer gurus who give us tips on red flags for dropping the people we’re seeing. Unfortunately it’s not irrational behavior. Irrational would be showing yourself as imperfect when the other person presents themselves as if they were. But achieving a pseudo-balance where both participants present themselves as what they truly are not can end up being something much more dangerous.

By doing so, we create a bubble. A bubble not so different in structure from a financial bubble: the price of what you project pulls away from what you actually are. The difference is that financial bubbles occasionally have the decency to burst. The bubble of the ideal self doesn’t burst. It holds. Gets paid in installments. And nobody declares bankruptcy.

And the bubble always has two faces. We don’t only inflate our image — we demand that someone meet and live up to our ideal image, because whoever measures themselves against stars ends up measuring everyone against stars. But if we loosen one face, we probably loosen the other too.

Winnicott describes a phenomenon he called the false self: when colonized excessively by the parents’ ideal fantasies, the child generates an adaptive façade to look functional, but not authentic. That adaptive façade ends up becoming a golden castle where we can end up prisoners and isolated.

We know that for health purposes, feeling lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and the U.S. Surgeon General has classified it as an epidemic. I would say that the cost of living in the image of the ideal sadly brings us closer to this epidemic of loneliness.

Rigorous selection matters, but it can’t colonize all of life. There are mistakes and there are mistakes; there are frequencies and intensities. Accepting the imperfect is not naivety or complicity. It’s not losing common sense when these dimensions enter the small daily evaluations.

V

The Argentines have a phrase that’s becoming popular across Latin America: “te banco.” Untranslatable in a single word. It means something like: I hold you up, I put up with you, I’m with you on this. It’s not admiration… I can be the bench or the seat you need, but it implies that in a bad moment I’ll still be here.

Luffy “backs” his crew. He doesn’t ask Robin to stop running — he tells her he wants to hear her say she wants to live. He doesn’t ask Usopp to stop hiding behind his Sogeking mask — he confronts him when he needs to confront him, and waits for him when he needs to wait. Not because he’s wise. Winnicott also talks about how a developmental achievement for a child is that the destructive appears in them, and that their parents can survive (really and symbolically) that destructiveness.

Giving the interview to the applicant who might have potential, even if they’re not perfect, or having the common sense to tell the difference between a red flag and a human imperfection — these are small acts that bring us closer as humans. We deflate the bubble in the everydayness of small actions.

Carl Schurz, a nineteenth-century statesman, once wrote: “Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.”

That distinction is valid: it doesn’t deny the importance of ideals but at the same time puts them in the right place. Luffy holds Zoro’s dream of becoming the greatest swordsman not as a demand, but as a shared heading. The dream is a direction of travel, not a starting condition. The bubble is what happens when you treat the star as if it were actually a destination, or worse, when we believe that we ourselves are the stars.

The question is not who adds to your life. The question is what kind of bond we create when we take the optimization game too seriously.

I’m probably not explaining why One Piece is extraordinary. I admit I’m a fan and that already biases me. But I believe authenticity is one of the things that hooks us, even if it’s not the only one. And I should say, for the sake of what I’ve written, that all of this applies directly to this very essay. Even to the project thecrossoverproject.blog itself. It’s a constant dilemma. It’s impossible not to use AI as a style editor, especially when the project is bilingual and as an author I’m not a native English speaker. The temptation to sound perfect is always there. I try, sometimes with more success and sometimes with less, to preserve the voice of this project.

Authenticity is uncomfortable. The perfect display window is reassuring. Until it breaks.

Want to Go Deeper? At The Crossover Project we care about the rigor behind the mix. If you want to explore the sources behind this collision of organizational psychology and psychoanalysis: On employee tenure and the gratitude of second chances: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024). Employee Tenure in 2024. USDL-24-1894. On the performance of employees with criminal records: SHRM Foundation & Charles Koch Institute (2021). Getting Talent Back to Work. On the true self and the false self: Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. Hogarth Press. On the loneliness epidemic: U.S. Surgeon General (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.

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