Glossary: Persona

A person’s mask. A socially acceptable façade one uses when dealing with the world, primarily based on one's dominant function. It’s “both a protective covering and an asset in mixing with other people. Civilized society depends on interactions between people through the persona…” “It is, as its name implies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks…” “To the extent that ego-consciousness is identified with the persona, the neglected inner life (personified in the shadow and anima or animus) is activated in compensation. The consequences, experienced in symptoms characteristic of neurosis, can stimulate the process of individuation.” (1)

There's a danger of confusing one’s persona with one’s self, especially if the persona has been well rewarded (or if one is an extrovert, as a result of the extrovert’s tendency to focus on the external world). A persona is valuable when dealing with the outside world but interferes with individuation if one identifies with it; in the same way that one’s animus or anima is one’s link with the unconscious, one’s persona is one’s connection with the outer world, and is positive only when it fulfills this task.

The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

- “Concerning Rebirth,” CW 9i, par. 221

There are indeed people who lack a developed persona… blundering from one social solecism to the next, perfectly harmless and innocent, soulful bores or appealing children, or, if they are women, spectral Cassandras dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood, never knowing what they are about, always taking forgiveness for granted, blind to the world, hopeless dreamers. From them we can see how a neglected persona works.

- “Anima and Animus,” CW 7, par. 318

When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche. Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he.

- “The Persona as a Segment of the Collective Psyche,” pars. 245f

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, obsessive ideas, backsliding vices, etc. The social "strong man" is in his private life often a mere child where his own states of feeling are concerned.

- “Anima and Animus,” par. 307

There is, after all, something individual in the peculiar choice and delineation of the persona, and… despite the exclusive identity of the ego-consciousness with the persona the unconscious self, one's real individuality, is always present and makes itself felt indirectly if not directly. Although the ego-consciousness is at first identical with the persona - that compromise role in which we parade before the community - yet the unconscious self can never be repressed to the point of extinction. Its influence is chiefly manifest in the special nature of the contrasting and compensating contents of the unconscious. The purely personal attitude of the conscious mind evokes reactions on the part of the unconscious, and these, together with personal repressions, contain the seeds of individual development.

- “The Persona as a Segment of the Collective Psyche,” par. 247

(1) Jung Lexicon