Akihito Tsukushi’s Made in Abyss is more than a visually stunning anime and manga—it is a labyrinthine psychological case study. At first glance, the story of a young girl named Riko descending into a colossal chasm to find her mother appears to be a classic adventure narrative. Yet beneath its charming character designs and lush backgrounds lies a brutal examination of human vulnerability. The Abyss operates as a living symbol for the unconscious mind, forcing its explorers to confront trauma, mortality, and the insatiable drive to know what lies beyond. This article reframes the series through the lens of contemporary trauma psychology and curiosity research, revealing how the quest for meaning often unfolds in the darkest of places.

The Abyss as a Psychological Landscape

The Abyss is not merely a hole in the ground; it is an active psychic terrain that mirrors the structure of the repressed mind. In psychoanalytic terms, descending into the Abyss resembles a forced regression into layers of buried experience—memories, fears, and unprocessed pain that refuse to stay buried. Each layer imposes a progressively severe “Curse” on those who ascend, making retreat psychologically and physically devastating. This one-way journey echoes what trauma theorists call the intrusion of traumatic memory: the deeper one goes into the psyche, the harder it becomes to return unchanged, and the more the past pollutes the present.

The series maps this vertical descent with unsettling precision. The first layer, the Edge of the Abyss, allows easy return and mostly mild physical effects—comparable to the surface-level anxieties people manage daily. By the fourth layer, the Goblets of Giants, ascending triggers intense pain and hemorrhaging, symbolizing how confronting deeper emotional wounds can make everyday functioning nearly impossible. The fifth layer’s Sea of Corpses introduces sensory deprivation and existential dread, while the sixth layer, the Capital of the Unreturned, carries a curse that strips away humanity itself. This architecture mirrors the concept of complex trauma, where early and repeated exposure to adverse experiences fundamentally alters one’s sense of self. Just as a cavern delver cannot ascend without paying a physical toll, survivors of profound trauma often find that revisiting the past destabilizes the carefully constructed self they have built to function.

The Curse as Neurobiological Wound

The “Curse of the Abyss” finds a startling parallel in the neurobiological reality of trauma. When a person experiences a life-threatening event, the brain’s amygdala triggers a fight-or-flight response, while the hippocampus struggles to properly encode the memory, often fragmenting it. Ascending through the Abyss produces immediate, layer-specific symptoms—nausea, hallucinations, bleeding—that mimic the somatic flashbacks of PTSD, where the body reacts as if the traumatic event is happening in the present. The sixth layer’s curse, which results in a complete loss of self, mirrors the severe dissociation seen in depersonalization and derealization disorders. Thus, the Abyss externalizes what many trauma survivors know intimately: the body keeps the score, and some wounds are too deep to simply “climb out” of without permanent change.

Trauma and Resilience in the Face of the Unknown

Nearly every character in Made in Abyss carries visible or invisible scars, and the series refuses to romanticize their suffering. Rather, it presents trauma as a transforming agent—sometimes leading to monstrous actions, sometimes to extraordinary compassion. This duality is crucial for understanding the psychological credibility of the story.

Physical Trauma as a Gateway to Understanding

Riko’s body is a map of her determination: she survives poisoning in the fourth layer, endures a broken arm, and later faces a life-threatening injury that requires her friend Reg to amputate part of her forearm. These moments are not gratuitous; they illustrate the physical cost of pursuing meaning beyond the familiar. In trauma therapy, the distinction between pain that overwhelms and pain that can be integrated is critical. Riko integrates each injury because she has a clear purpose and a supportive companion. Her scars become a narrative of agency rather than victimhood, a phenomenon psychologist Richard Tedeschi describes as posttraumatic growth—the positive psychological change that can follow adversity when the individual finds meaning in the struggle.

Emotional and Psychological Trauma: Bondrewd and the Corruption of Care

The character of Bondrewd, the White Whistle delver of the fifth layer, personifies the darkest outcome of unresolved trauma. His scientific curiosity, stripped of empathy, leads him to use children—including his own adopted daughter Prushka—as disposable cartridges to bypass the Abyss’s curse. From a psychological standpoint, Bondrewd displays traits consistent with malignant narcissism and a profound emotional detachment, likely forged in his own earlier descents. He genuinely loves the children he sacrifices, yet that love is instrumentalized. This cognitive dissonance mirrors the mind of an abuser who cannot recognize the other as a full subject. Bondrewd’s inability to process his own pain from the Abyss turns him into a perpetuator of trauma, showing how curiosity unmoored from compassion becomes tyranny. For a deeper exploration of how betrayal trauma warps attachment, readers can consult research on betrayal trauma and attachment.

Nanachi and Mitty: The Stopped Grief

Perhaps no arc captures the intersection of trauma and care better than that of Nanachi and Mitty. Transformed into a hollow—a narehate—Mitty loses her human form and speech but retains an immortal body that suffers endlessly. Nanachi, who loves Mitty, is forced to witness this state. Their bond becomes a vivid illustration of “ambiguous loss,” a concept coined by therapist Pauline Boss to describe grief without closure. Nanachi’s eventual act of releasing Mitty through Reg’s Incinerator is both a mercy and a profound personal trauma. It reflects the reality that genuine healing sometimes requires confronting pain so profound that it shatters a previous self. The series never pretends that Nanachi walks away healed; instead, she integrates this loss into a continuing search for meaning, aligning with the psychological idea that grief is not a stage to complete but a process of reconstructing identity.

Curiosity: The Double-Edged Sword of Human Nature

If trauma is the gravitational force pulling characters downward, curiosity is the muscle that pushes them into the darkness. Riko’s desire to find her mother Lyza the Annihilator is not born of naive optimism but of an existential itch—a need to comprehend a world already marked by absence. This drive aligns with what psychologist Todd Kashdan calls “curiosity as a fundamental human strength,” but the series complicates that picture by showing how easily curiosity morphs into compulsion.

Adaptive vs. Maladaptive Curiosity

Research on curiosity distinguishes between a healthy appetite for novel information (diversive curiosity) and a rigid, anxiety-fueled need to resolve uncertainty (intolerance of uncertainty). Riko dances on the edge between the two. Her willingness to leave the safety of Orth, knowing full well that the Abyss might kill her, flirts with maladaptive risk-taking. Yet her curiosity remains adaptive because it is anchored to relationships—she wants to know her mother, and she wants Reg to discover his origins. In contrast, Bondrewd’s curiosity has become wholly maladaptive, dissociated from relational ethics. This split illustrates a core psychological truth: curiosity flourishes into wisdom only when it remains connected to empathy and shared humanity. For a thorough breakdown of how curiosity can be cultivated safely, the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley offers evidence-based insights on adaptive curiosity.

The Abyss as an Object of Epistemic Hunger

The Abyss itself is an epistemically hungry environment—it doles out relics and creatures that defy physics and biology, constantly rewarding explorers with new questions. This design hooks into the brain’s dopamine-mediated reward system: uncertainty itself becomes intoxicating. The series thematically suggests that human beings are wired to descend, not because we seek safety, but because we are narrative creatures who need to make sense of chaos. When Riko declares that the Abyss is “calling” to her, she is articulating what philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called the dizziness of freedom—the vertigo we feel when staring into infinite possibility, a state that can either liberate or annihilate the self. An interview with series creator Akihito Tsukushi, as discussed in an Anime News Network feature, reveals that this pull toward the unknown was a deliberate thematic core, inspired by Tsukushi’s own childhood fascination with maps and unexplored caves.

Companionship as a Coping Mechanism

No journey into the Abyss succeeds alone. The series systematically emphasizes that relationships are the primary buffer against the corrosive effects of trauma. Riko and Reg’s bond evolves from co-adventurers to an interdependent system where each compensates for the other’s vulnerabilities: Riko supplies the strategic knowledge and relentless will, while Reg provides physical protection and an almost childlike emotional honesty. This mutual reliance mirrors what attachment theorists call a “secure base”—a presence that allows for exploration without annihilation anxiety.

The Dyad as Emotional Regulation

Reg’s amnesia and robotic body make him an outsider, yet his confusion opens space for Riko to externalize her own fears. By explaining the Abyss to Reg, she organizes her own chaotic emotions into a coherent narrative—a process central to trauma recovery known as narrative exposure therapy. When Reg carries an injured Riko, or when Riko reassures Reg after he uses the Incinerator, they are co-regulating each other’s nervous systems. The quiet moments in the series—sharing meals, tending wounds, listening to each other’s breathing—are psychologically profound. They show that healing happens not in grand epiphanies but in the small, consistent acts of presence that rebuild trust in the world. Nanachi’s later integration into this dyad creates a triad capable of more complex emotional processing, a microcosm of the community support that research consistently identifies as the strongest protective factor against chronic PTSD.

The Abyss and Identity Formation

Descending into the Abyss is synonymous with shedding one’s former self. The delver ranking system—from Red Whistle to White Whistle—is not a mere hierarchy; it is a cartography of ego dissolution and reconstruction. Lyza the Annihilator, Ozen the Immovable, and Bondrewd the Novel are all individuals who have been hollowed out and remade by the Abyss. Riko’s journey is therefore a coming-of-age narrative written in scar tissue, a process psychologist Erik Erikson would recognize as the forging of identity through crisis. The Abyss does not just test who you are; it installs a new operating system, one built to withstand depths that shatter the unprepared.

White Whistles as Transformed Selves

A White Whistle is a Life Reverberating Stone carved from a person who has willingly given their life for another. This object becomes the physical conduit through which a delver activates relics, but its symbolic weight is even greater. To carry a White Whistle is to internalize the sacrifice of a beloved other, a burden that permanently alters one’s sense of agency. Riko’s eventual possession of Prushka’s White Whistle—after Prushka gives herself to save Riko—completes this arc. She now contains a literal echo of someone else’s sacrifice, and her identity can never again be solitary. This interpenetration of selves reflects what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called the ethical responsibility for the Other, a welcome antidote to the radical individualism that often pervades adventure stories. Made in Abyss insists that the strongest selves are always relational, built from bonds that death cannot entirely sever.

The Role of Sacrifice in Personal Growth

Sacrifice in this world is rarely clean or heroic; it is intimate, messy, and often involuntary. Ozen’s survival through her many delver teams, many of whom died, illustrates the survivor’s guilt that accompanies longevity. Prushka’s transformation into a cartridge is an act of love so twisted by Bondrewd’s conditioning that audiences are left unsure whether to mourn or rage. The series suggests that sacrifice is not inherently redemptive; it becomes meaningful only when it is freely chosen and integrated into a continuing narrative of care. This distinction echoes Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, which posits that finding meaning in suffering is the primary motivational force in human beings—but only when that suffering is embraced voluntarily for a greater purpose. Riko’s willingness to face the Abyss’s horrors, not out of self-destruction but out of love for her mother and for Reg, transforms her suffering into a source of identity rather than mere pain.

Finding Meaning in the Abyss

Made in Abyss refuses to offer a tidy resolution. Its characters, by the end of the animated journey, are still descending, and the manga continues to push into increasingly unsettling territory. This structural openness is itself a psychological statement: there is no final layer where all questions are answered and all wounds are healed. The search for meaning is an ongoing, perilous descent requiring constant renegotiation with trauma.

For audiences, the series serves as a dark mirror. We are all delvers of our own internal abysses, encountering layers of memory we cannot ascend without consequence. Yet the persistent message is not one of despair. Riko’s unwavering awe—her ability to still see beauty in the inverted forest of the fourth layer, in the fluffy fur of a hollow—demonstrates the resilience of wonder. Curiosity, when held in tandem with compassion, remains the most powerful light source in the dark. As viewers, we are invited to sit with our own discomfort and to recognize that the monsters we fear are sometimes the very emotions we have exiled. A detailed thematic analysis by academic Susan Napier, although focused on other series, offers a broader framework for understanding how anime often treats trauma and memory through liminal spaces, a concept perfectly embodied by the Abyss itself.

Ultimately, the meaning found in Made in Abyss is not a treasure chest at the bottom but the courage to keep descending alongside others. The search is the meaning. And that, as terrifying as it is, is perhaps the most honest psychotherapy the medium has ever offered.