Persona and Classical Role Theory

The Jungian persona is the modern psychological name for a figure the classical tradition had already articulated in two distinct registers: dramaturgically, as the prosopon or mask worn by the actor; and ethically, in Stoic philosophy, as the role that fate assigns and the self plays.

The dramaturgical register: in classical Greek theater the prosopon was the rigid mask that fixed the character’s emotional register and marked the ritual separation between actor and role. The Latin persona, deriving from per-sonare (to sound through), named the same object. Jung’s etymological gloss — “the word persona is really a very appropriate expression… since it originally meant the mask worn by an actor, signifying the role he played” (Jung 1953, jung-two-essays-analytical) — is an etymology that runs from modern psychology through Latin theater to the Greek stage.

The ethical register: the Stoics took the theatrical metaphor and made it a figure for the human condition. Epictetus’s formulation, preserved in Sorabji‘s analysis: “the Stoic holds that we can decide to locate ourselves either in externals or in our proairesis — let us say in our will. Once our self is our proairesis, it will have become inviolable” (Sorabji 2000, p. 245). The proairesis — the rational capacity for moral choice — is the self that is not the mask.

The Jungian move preserves the Stoic structure without adopting its metaphysics. Where the Stoic says self = proairesis, mask = externals (including body), Jung says ego = the complex that may or may not identify with the persona. The persona is necessary (Stoics: the role must be played well); identification with the persona is pathological (Stoics: the role must not be confused with the self).

What the Stoics articulated as ethics, carl-jung articulates as clinical psychology. What Epictetus prescribes to the philosopher (place your self in proairesis, not in externals), Jung prescribes to the patient (differentiate the ego from the persona). The depth tradition’s language has changed; the structural teaching is the same.

The homeric-plural-self supplies the pre-philosophical precedent. In the Homeric world, the external face — the kleos-aphthiton of the hero — is the self, because no consolidated interior has yet distinguished itself from the public record of action. bruno-snell‘s Discovery of the Mind traces the Greek movement from this archaic outward-facing self to the interior self of the philosophical tradition — the very movement by which the persona becomes recognizable as persona, as distinct from the inner life it presents.

Sources

• carl-jung: persona as mask and as segment of collective psyche (Two Essays 1953, §245).
• edward-edinger: hypocrite as Greek for actor; persona as the ego’s outward face (Science of the Soul).
• Sorabji, Richard: Epictetus’s proairesis as the Stoic self distinct from the externals (Emotion and Peace of Mind 2000).
• gregory-nagy: kleos as the Homeric self wholly given in the outward face (Best of the Achaeans 1979).
• bruno-snell: the Greek movement from outward-facing to interior self (Discovery of the Mind 1953).