The Jungian Persona: What Are the Masks We Wear?

We’ve all come to recognize that we tend to hide different aspects of ourselves in various social settings. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, called this phenomenon ‘the persona’. The persona is an integral part of Jung’s model of the psyche. According to him, “the persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society” (Jung, 1928). It is not a real thing, but rather a carefully crafted personality that mediates one’s interactions with the world. Originally a term for acting masks in ancient Greece, the persona has the dual function of creating a specific impression on other people and hiding one’s true nature.

It develops in childhood as we learn that certain traits are rewarded while others are punished. We develop a false self-image according to our growing awareness of social norms and expectations. No matter how authentic we may like to believe we are in our social interactions, our personas can never encompass the totality of who we subjectively experience ourselves to be but can only serve at best as a representation.

The persona is not just a conscious manifestation of the conformity or social archetype (i.e. a collective inclination towards masking ourselves in social situations), but a mask of the collective unconscious itself. Jung held that what we deem as personal is, in fact, collective. The persona is “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” (Jung, 1989). The defining characteristic of the persona is that it is a false construction, assumed whenever we deal with other people. However, the persona is not negative in itself, for it is an integral and necessary aspect of our experience as social beings. The danger only comes when it is not developed along the journey of individuation, which is the name of Jung’s model of psychological development. 

The Negative Side of the Persona

The primary danger that the persona has on our development springs from our tendency to identify with it. Typically, “the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is” (Jung, 1940). Following Jung’s analogy of acting masks, our identification with the persona is akin to an actor believing that he is the character role he plays. A common example is one’s identification with one’s profession. As Jung notes, “every calling or profession has its characteristic persona… a kind of behavior is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavor to come up to these expectations” (Jung, …). When we identify with our professional persona, we mistake something we do for who we are. The same applies to social roles and, indeed, to any self-identification we assume.

Jung also emphasized that the persona casts a shadow. The socially accepted traits we identify with make us suppress our less desirable traits, which become part of what Jung calls the shadow. The shadow is not necessarily negative, but it may as well be. According to Jung, our identification with the persona of a ‘good’ person is superficial so long as we haven’t accepted and integrated our capacity for the evilest acts. 

Jung outlines several characteristics of the developmental process of the persona. After the stage of identification, Jung argues that the persona must disintegrate. Disintegration could happen through natural misadventures, where we are confronted by situations that are so against who we thought we were that we start questioning our habitual identification with the persona. Alternatively, it could happen through Jungian analytical psychotherapy. Jung describes disintegration as a situation that “has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality, with no false veils or adornments of any kind’ (Jung, 1954).

Disintegration causes chaos, and Jung outlines three ways that people can react to it. The first is negative restoration, where one regressively goes back to identifying with the persona as if nothing happened. The second is absence, where one remains without a persona and, as a result, becomes completely withdrawn from society. Jung warns that the absence of a persona will lead to s extreme suffering. Thirdly, he outlines the characteristics of positive restoration, which is the optimal outcome along the journey of individuation. In this stage, the persona becomes “a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self” (Jung, 1989). 

After restoring the persona, one can consciously wear a ‘mask’, grounded in a greater sense of authenticity, without identifying with it. Developing the persona is integral to Jungian psychology. As he notes, “the aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images [archetypes] on the other” (Jung, 1928).