The Persona – the Mask of the Soul

MOST OF US STRUGGLE MOST OF OUR LIVES TO BECOME AUTHENTIC, to find and actualize our “true selves.” The struggle typically begins during the sturm und drang, the “storm and stress,” of adolescence, but no one fully quiets the storm as a teenager. If you’re fortunate, your teenage struggles lead to a relatively stable adult identity with which you’re able to face the world. If you’re terribly unfortunate, the storms leave you disintegrated and isolated.

The face you show to the world is your persona. In Jungian thought, the persona is a functional complex that mediates between one’s psyche and the outer world. “Persona” is a theatrical term, derived from the Greek word for the mask an actor wore on the ancient stage. These masks not only identified which characters the actors played (the dramatis personae), but also, because each had a tube at the mouth, amplified the actor’s voice, giving each actor a mega (large) – phone (voice).

While the mask you wear in the world may feel false, it is necessary. In fact, we each need a wardrobe of masks to help us adapt to the variety of social situations we encounter in our daily lives. In other words, a well-adapted persona needs to be situationally flexible, because we need to be able to play different social roles in different situations.

Nevertheless, the persona, per se, is not your “true self.” Living behind the mask is your ego, an inner identity complex with more facets than any one mask can present to the world at any one time. Looking still deeper within, beyond the ego, Jungians see the shadow (an unconscious alter-ego) and the “soul-spirit” figure (technically called the anima-animus). As the persona mediates between the individual psyche and the collective outer world, so the soul-spirit mediates between the individual psyche and the collective inner world, the world of the archetypal figures.

None of these functional complexes, however, are the “true self” at the center of the psyche. Jung called the structural core and essence of the soul simply the self — or if you prefer, the Self. The self presents itself to the ego, to the “I,” as a “higher,” more “spiritual,” more “powerful” personality, as a “divinity.” (Notice how our language becomes unavoidably metaphorical when referring to this dimension of the soul.) Jung, in fact, observed that images of the self are empirically and phenomenologically indistinguishable from images of God — or of the Godhead, or of Dao, or of Brahma, or of Buddha nature.

The persona, therefore, is the extraverted face of the personality. It faces out and interacts with the outer world, the collective world of relationships, family, groups, society, and material objects. If the persona’s masks are more transparent than opaque, more flexible than rigid, it will be an authentic manifestation of your “true self,” not only an image of your ego, but also a face of the self as it radiates through your personality into the world.

Read more about C.G. Jung and Analytical Psychology on the Jung Page.