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Persona Identification

Persona Identification

Persona identification is carl-jung‘s name for the pathology in which the ego has collapsed into the persona — has forgotten that the public role is a role and taken the mask for the self.

Jung’s description in jung-two-essays-analytical is one of the sharpest in the Collected Works: “These identifications with a social role are a very fruitful source of neuroses. A man cannot get rid of himself in favour of an artificial personality without punishment. Even the attempt to do so brings on, in all ordinary cases, unconscious reactions in the form of bad moods, affects, phobias, compulsive ideas, backslidings, vices, etc. The socially ‘strong man’ is in his private life often a mere child where his own states of feeling are concerned; his public discipline (which he demands quite particularly of others) goes miserably to pieces in private” (Jung 1953, §307). The public and the domestic self, in persona identification, are split — the strength of one purchased by the weakness of the other.

The mechanism is compensation. What the persona refuses, the shadow must carry; what the public self suppresses, the domestic self must release. Jung’s clinical vignette about “a very venerable personage — in fact, one might easily call him a saint” whose wife came to consult him on the fourth day illustrates the structural law: “any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis” (Jung 1953). The persona’s contents are not destroyed; they are relocated — often onto an intimate who then bears them as symptoms.

The treatment is not the destruction of the persona but its differentiation from the ego: the recognition that the mask is a mask, that the role is a role, and that the self who wears the mask is not identical with it. This is the opposite of the therapeutic vogue of radical authenticity; the persona is not to be cast off but to be known as persona.

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