Jung's phrase "two-dimensional reality" is the one to press on. It isn't a dismissal — he grants that the name, the title, the office are real, that the world actually does cohere around them — but reality has a depth axis, and the persona lives entirely in the plane. It is flat in the specific sense that it carries no interiority: it is legible from outside in a way the psyche never is, built precisely so that legibility can substitute for the thing it represents.

What the passage quietly insists on is the collaborative nature of the fabrication. "Others often have a greater share than he" — which is to say the persona is not even fully yours to dismantle, because it was never fully yours to construct. The person behind a title did not, in most cases, sit down and engineer a mask; they participated in a negotiation in which social pressure did most of the drafting. The compromise was struck before they arrived at sufficient self-knowledge to negotiate otherwise.

This is where the second dimension becomes binding rather than merely thin. A persona that society shaped more than the individual himself did cannot simply be removed by an act of will or insight. What remains when it loosens is not the true self waiting patiently beneath — it is the far more unsettling question of what the individual actually is when no compromise is organizing the answer.