Mana-Personality

The mana-personality is the figure the ego becomes when it identifies with the archetype of “the extraordinarily potent” — the hero, the wise old man, the priest, the analyst, the leader (Jung 1953, par. 388). Jung borrows the term from Lehmann’s monograph on Polynesian mana, where it names the impersonal supernatural power a person, object, or place may carry.

Within analytical psychology the mana-personality marks a specific phase of the individuation process. After the anima has been recognized as an autonomous complex and depotentiated — converted from “Mistress” to “a function of relationship between the conscious and the unconscious” — the energy that previously animated her does not vanish. It transfers. “Clearly the man who has mastered the anima acquires her mana, in accordance with the primitive belief that when a man kills the mana-person he assimilates his mana into his own body” (Jung 1953, par. 376).

The result is a temporary identification with the archetype: the ego now carries what previously possessed it. Jung is emphatic that the development is structural and almost universal in advanced analytic work — “I have never yet seen a fairly advanced development of this kind where at least a temporary identification with the archetype of the mana-personality did not take place” (Jung 1953, par. 389). It is the form inflation takes at the moment of greatest danger, because the patient now has access to genuine power and is most apt to mistake the access for ownership.

Liberation from the mana-personality requires making conscious the contents that compose it: the dominants of wisdom, magical knowledge, esoteric privilege. The alternative is concretization — projecting the archetype outward as an extramundane “Father in Heaven,” which Jung warns is its own structural inflation, “giving the unconscious a preponderance that was just as absolute” (Jung 1953, par. 394).

Relationships

Primary sources

jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953, pars. 374–394)