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Persona

Persona

The persona — Latin for the mask worn by an actor, rendering Greek πρόσωπον — is in carl-jung‘s formulation the psychic function by which the ego adapts to the collective. It is the face turned outward, the role played in public, the compromise between the individual’s singularity and society’s demand.

Jung’s canonical formulation: “The persona… is the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the manner he assumes in dealing with, the world. Every calling or profession, for example, has its own characteristic persona… Only, the danger is that people become identical with their personas — the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice… 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” (Jung, CW 9i, pp. 122–123).

The persona is necessary. Without it the ego cannot function socially, cannot enter a profession, cannot move between the domestic and the public worlds. Jung grounds this empirically in jung-psychological-types: “A change from one milieu to another brings about a striking alteration of personality, and on each occasion a clearly defined character emerges that is noticeably different from the previous one” (Jung 1921). Each milieu requires a persona; most people have several.

The persona is also dangerous. Identification with the persona — the ego’s collapse into the role — is a chief source of modern neurosis. “A man cannot get rid of himself in favour of an artificial personality without punishment” (Jung 1953, jung-two-essays-analytical, §307). The socially competent man fully identified with his public role typically suffers a private collapse; the domestic self pays the cost of the persona’s success.

The work of individuation proceeds through differentiation of the ego from the persona — not dissolution, but recognition that the role is a role. The persona is structurally paired with the shadow (what the mask conceals) and with the anima as its inner counterpart (the inward face).

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