Persona (psychology)

The persona, for Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, was the social face the individual presented to the world—"a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual".

The development of a viable social persona is a vital part of adapting to, and preparing for, adult life in the external social world. "A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona; identification with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development. Thus for Jung "the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas—the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice." The result could be "the shallow, brittle, conformist kind of personality which is 'all persona', with its excessive concern for 'what people think'"—an unreflecting state of mind 'in which people are utterly unconscious of any distinction between themselves and the world in which they live. They have little or no concept of themselves as beings distinct from what society expects of them'. The stage was set thereby for what Jung termed enantiodromia—the emergence of the repressed individuality from beneath the persona later in life: 'the individual will either be completely smothered under an empty persona or an enantiodromia into the buried opposites will occur'.

"The breakdown of the persona constitutes the typically Jungian moment both in therapy and in development"—the "moment" when "that excessive commitment to collective ideals masking deeper individuality—the persona—breaks down... disintegrates." Given Jung's view that "the persona is a semblance... the dissolution of the persona is therefore absolutely necessary for individuation." Nevertheless, its disintegration may well lead initially to a state of chaos in the individual: "one result of the dissolution of the persona is the release of fantasy... disorientation." As the individuation process gets under way, "the situation has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality, with no false veils or adornments of any kind."

One possible reaction to the resulting experience of archetypal chaos was what Jung called "the regressive restoration of the persona", whereby the protagonist "laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality... pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience." Similarly in treatment there can be "the persona-restoring phase, which is an effort to maintain superficiality"; or even a longer phase designed not to promote individuation but to bring about what Jung caricatured as "the negative restoration of the persona"—that is to say, a reversion to the status quo.

...
Wikipedia