The Persona
Always be yourself, express yourself, and have faith in yourself.
Do not go out and look for a successful
personality and duplicate it.
Your
Persona is the social
mask that you
wear in public. It is the part of
the ego that is turned out toward the world, is the image you wish to present,
and is made up of both your expectation and your interpretation of the public’s
expectation of your behavior. In
social settings a well-adjusted person naturally presents these modified social
masks.[1]
It is both[2]:
1. The good impression we wish to display, and
2. The false impression we use to create an image that we are not.
What goes on behind the mask is
then called “private life”
The hidden danger is that the persona can be mistaken by ourselves to be our true nature and we end up believing we are what we pretend to be while the true Self slowly fades away under this entity. The persona by no means is a true identifier of who the person really is.
So
the persona is a certain complicated system of behavior which is partially
dictated by society and partially dictated by the expectations or the wishes one
nurses oneself. Now this is not the real personality. In spite of the fact
that people will assure you that this is all quite real and quite honest, yet it
is not. Such a performance of the persona is quite all right, as long as you
know that you are not identical to the way in which you appear; but if you are
unconscious of this fact, then you get into sometimes very disagreeable
conflicts. Namely, people can't help noticing that at home you are quite
different from what you appear to be in public. People who don't know it stumble
over it in the end. They deny that they are like that, but they are like that;
they are it. Then you don't know—now which is the real man? Is he the man as he
is at home or in intimate relations, or is he the man that appears in public?
A properly
functioning persona must take account of three factors:[4]
1. The
ego ideal or
wish-image which every human being bears within him and on which he would like
his nature and behaviour to be modeled.
2. His particular
environment’s view of an individual ‘after its own heart’
3. The physical and
psychic contingencies which limit the realization of these ideals.
"I was part of that strange race of
people aptly described as spending their lives doing things
they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to
impress people they dislike."
We
therefore tend to assume that this increase comes only from without, thus
justifying the prejudice that one becomes a
personality by
stuffing into oneself as much as possible from outside.
The professional man is irretrievably condemned to be
competent.
“Thank God I’m Jung
and not a Jungian”
“The demands of propriety and good
manners are an added inducement to assume a becoming mask.
What goes on behind the mask is
then called “private life.”
This painfully familiar division of
consciousness into two figures, often
preposterously different, is an incisive psychological operation that is bound
to have repercussions on the
unconscious.
The construction of a collectively
suitable persona means a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine
self-sacrifice which drives the
ego straight into identification with the
persona, so that people really do exist who believe they are what they pretend
to be. The ‘soullessness’ of such
an attitude is, however, only apparent, for under no circumstances will the
unconscious tolerate this shifting of the centre of
gravity[5]”
“Among the consequences of identifying with a persona are: we lose sight of who
we are without a protective covering; our reactions are predetermined by
collective expectations (we do and think and feel what our persona “should” do,
think and feel); those close to us complain of our emotional distance; and we
cannot imagine life without it.”
The man with the persona is blind to the existence of inner realities, just
as the other is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the
value of an amusing or fantastic playground. ... If, however, I take the
line that the world is outside and inside, that reality falls to the share of
both, I must logically accept the upsets and annoyances that come to me from
inside as symptoms of faulty adaptation to the conditions of that inner world.
The
term “mask” indicates that it is not the essential nature of an individual that
is concealed behind the exterior and that a certain impression is the result
when seen from the outside. To some extent, therefore, the
persona forms a façade and is usually so constituted as to be suitable to the
society in which the individual lives; for this reason Jung considers it a
segment of the collective psyche. This means
that the
individual appears merely as a member of a race, clan, professional class, etc.,
and not as a human being with his own unique characteristics.
Such a persona comes into existence more or less automatically, since the human
being belongs to a
particular nation and a particular family or class whose
traits of character and way of life he shares. The original
psychic condition of children is one of just such participation or identity with
the surroundings, and differentiation from the environment only comes about
through increasing consciousness. TGL 59
It is not for nothing that our age calls for the redeemer
personality, for the one who can emancipate himself from the inescapable grip of
the collective and save at least his own soul, who lights a beacon of hope for
others, proclaiming that here is at least one man who has succeeded in
extricating himself from that fatal identity with the group psyche.
For the group, because of its unconsciousness, has no freedom of choice,
and so psychic activity runs on in it like an uncontrolled law of nature.
There is thus set going a chain reaction that comes to a stop only in
catastrophe. The people always long for a hero, a slayer of
dragons, when they feel the danger of psychic forces; hence the cry for
personality. TDoP 178
“It is,
as its name implies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns
individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual,
whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks.”
Whereas the persona is apperceived as the individual both subjectively and by others, it is actually just a mask of the collective psyche since the persona is nothing more than a compromise between the individual and his community.
Development of the Persona begins with absorbing qualities that belong in the collective that we integrate into our personality in order to ‘get along’.
The persona is a ‘compromise’ between the individual and the collective. The persona is made of ‘pieces of the collective’ that the ego integrates into its self for the benefit of social interaction and adaptation.
The persona is a segment of the collective psyche.
Art
reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers
man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to
make.
…When we analyze the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche. Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be.
…He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he.
To develop one’s
Personality is indeed an unpopular undertaking, a
deviation that is highly uncongenial to the herd, ...
an eccentricity smelling of the cenobite, as it seems to the outsider.
One
could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality
one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is. In any case
the temptation to be what one seems to be is great, because the persona is
usually rewarded with cash.
Unfortunately, most of us grew up in a world governed by the ‘great educator’ who prides ‘himself’ on creating a breed of ‘mass-men’. A person whose persona is controlled by his environment’s opinion is in absolute danger of becoming ‘one of the herd’ and being unable to differentiate both his conscious and his self from the herd . The persona encompasses not only psychic qualities, but also forms of social behaviour and our habits of personal appearance, posture, facial expression, etc.
The dreamer is a
distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the
safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special,
dimly audible call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as
without, she has had to make her way alone, through difficulties not commonly
encountered, “through slummy, muddy streets”’ she has known
the dark night of the soul, Dante’s
“dark wood, midway in the journey of our life,” and the sorrows of the pits of
hell:
This personal story line that people with overly inflated Personas have in which they are compelled or driven to speak and act in ways that are guided by calculating statistical probabilities of social success I have termed - Personopera.
Now, the ideal for the student in
There is a second kind of mask that Yeats and his wife call the antithetical
mask. And so, it begins to get exciting. Just at the age of
middle adolescence, when you come to maturity, there begins to dawn on you the
prospect of your own life, which is not the same as that which society put upon
you. “They never saw me before! I am a
unique thing. There are great things in me, and, by gosh, I’m
going to find out what they are!” And so you discover the
problem of finding your own myth.
Mr and Mrs. Yeats work out this conflict between the primary and antithetical masks through the image of the twenty-eight days of the month. On the first day of the cycle, it’s dark – you are born. You begin to grow, mostly in darkness. Nature and society urge you to move on, bearing the primary mask.
[1] The old Greek word for someone who is acting (as in a play) is Hypocrite
[2] “The persona is a complicated system of relations between the individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. That the latter function is superfluous could be maintained only by one who is so identified with his persona that he no longer knows himself; and that the former is unnecessary could only occur to one who is quite unconscious of the true nature of his fellows” BW Anima and Animus, page 166, par 305.
[3] As in: hardening. It is the walls of separation that keep the Self unrealized. Self-realization comes from disintegrating the boundaries that divide the Self into components.
[4] The psychology of CG Jung, Jolande Jacobi © 1973 p. 28
[5] BW
Anima and Animus – page 167 – par 305/306.