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. His "happiness in his work" assumes a woeful countenance at home; his "spotless" public morality looks strange indeed behind the mask-we will not mention deeds, but only fantasies, and the wives of such men would have a pretty tale to tell. As to his selfless altruism, his children have decided views about that. 308 To the degree that the world invites the individual to identify with the mask, he is delivered over to influences from within. "High rests on low," says Lao-tzu.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung's Lao-tzu citation is not decoration. "High rests on low" names a structural fact about the psyche: whatever is built upward has weight beneath it, and that weight is not dissolved by the building — it is compacted. The persona, the socially legible self, does not neutralize what it displaces. It pressurizes it.
The pattern Jung describes has a specific texture worth noticing. The public discipline, the spotless morality, the selfless service — each of these is a version of the same logic: if I perform this well enough, consistently enough, the inner disarray will not speak. The affects, the backslidings, the compulsive ideas are not failures of will. They are the inner life's response to being crowded out. They are what the soul says when it cannot say anything else.
The wives and children Jung mentions so drily are the unwilling witnesses to the ratio's collapse. They live on the low that holds the high up. They receive what the world never sees — not because the man is a hypocrite in any simple sense, but because the psyche is not deceived by social grammar. It keeps accounts. The private sphere is where the ledger is read aloud, in moods and fantasies and the particular coldness that lives behind spotless public warmth.
Carl Gustav Jung·Two Essays on Analytical Psychology·1953