Persona

Definition

The persona, in Jung’s usage, is the part of the personality that is built for other people. It is the attitude a person adopts to meet the demands of a family, a profession or a society, together with the social ambitions of their own that those demands serve, and it is made of collective material: the manners, roles and opinions a milieu expects. Jung took the word from the mask of the ancient actor, and the comparison is exact in one respect. A mask presents a character; it does not pretend to be the actor. The persona is a functional complex that exists for adaptation and convenience, and Jung was clear that everyone has one and that social life depends on it.

The problem he described is identification: the ego mistaking the mask for the whole person, so that a man is his office or a woman her role, and nothing of the individual gets through. Two things then follow in his account. What the persona excludes does not disappear but collects in the shadow, so that persona and shadow stand in a compensatory relation. And the more completely a person identifies with the outward attitude, the more they are driven from within by its opposite, which he called the anima or animus. The persona is thus the first of Jung’s figures a person meets, and the one least often recognised as a figure at all.

History

The term appears in 1916, in the essay published in French as “La Structure de l’inconscient” and in English the following year as “The Conception of the Unconscious”, where it names what is left of the collective psyche once analysis has sorted the personal from the impersonal:

The term persona is really an excellent one, for persona was originally the mask which an actor wore, that served to indicate the character in which he appeared. — C. G. Jung, “The Conception of the Unconscious” (1916), in Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed. (C. E. Long, Ed., 1917), Gutenberg #48225

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An actor’s mask, and no more: Jung does not say Greek or Roman, and the etymology from per-sonare, to sound through, belongs to his commentators. The 1916 text is printed in the Collected Works as Appendix II of volume 7 and should be cited there; the parallel passage at CW 7 ¶245, which anthologies often give as the source, is the 1928 rewriting. In that first statement the persona is only a mask of the collective psyche that simulates individuality, and its dissolution in analysis releases a dangerous sense of godlikeness; the tone is sharper than anything Jung wrote later.

The definition belongs to Psychologische Typen (1921). It sits not under its own heading but inside the long definitions entry on “Soul” (Seele, no. 48), where Jung starts from the observation that people change character with their milieu, “angel abroad, devil at home”, and argues that such a person is not individual but collective (CW 6 ¶798–799; Stein 1998). The mask so adopted is the persona, and the definition stuck:

The persona is thus a functional complex which has come into being for reasons of adaptation or of necessary convenience, but which is not identical with the individuality. The functional complex of the persona relates exclusively to the relation to objects. — C. G. Jung, Psychologische Typen (1921), Definitions, “Seele”, editor’s translation; Gutenberg #61543; CW 6 ¶801

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The entry pairs it with the anima, the inner attitude, and sets the rule that the two complement each other, the ruthless tyrant inwardly at the mercy of every mood (CW 6 ¶804).

The 1928 essay “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (CW 7, Part II) reworked the 1916 material into the form most readers know, with a section on the persona as a segment of the collective psyche (CW 7 ¶245–246, as given by Sharp 1991) and the formula that the persona is a kind of mask, designed to make an impression on others and to conceal the individual’s true nature (CW 7 ¶305, as quoted in Toyoda 2021). After that it recurs only in passing: as “the persona, the mask of the actor” in the 1934 lecture on the archetypes (The Integration of the Personality, 1939, p. 69), and in “Concerning Rebirth” as the sharpest of his formulas, that the persona is what in reality one is not, but what oneself and others think one is (CW 9i ¶221, as quoted in Sharp 1991). Aion (1951) does not treat it, and the later elaborations are the work of his followers.

The debate

The persona is the least contested of Jung’s figures because it names something everyone can see, and the argument has been about its value rather than its existence. Jung’s own writing carries both verdicts: the 1916 essay treats the mask as a collective fiction that analysis must dissolve, the 1921 definition as a normal complex formed for adaptation. The post-Jungians have on the whole chosen the second. Daryl Sharp (1987) calls the persona “both a useful bridge socially and an indispensable protective covering” and reserves the pathology for identification: to believe one is nothing but the person one shows to others is to deny one has a shadow, and “the brighter the light, the darker the shadow”. Stein (1998) adds that the persona is a complex with considerable autonomy, traces its two sources to the expectations of society and the social aims of the individual (CW 6 ¶798), and makes the integration of persona and shadow a matter of self-acceptance rather than unmasking. Mario Jacoby (1990), writing on narcissism, keeps Jung’s warning: a persona that feeds self-esteem from collective roles instead of individuality produces self-alienation. Fordham’s developmental school, in Samuels’s summary (1985), derives the persona, with the anima and animus, from the infant’s early state of identity with the mother; W. C. Hudson (1978) had earlier set the persona beside the psychoanalytic defence mechanisms.

Two outside comparisons are usually made. Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) describes social life as performance, with front regions where a part is played and back regions where it is dropped; an independent parallel worked out in sociology without reference to Jung, and free of any claim about an inner opposite. Donald Winnicott’s “false self” (1960) is often set beside the persona, but the construct is different: a defensive organisation built in infancy, when a mother’s impingements force the child into compliance and a true self is hidden, rather than a role an adult ego has adopted. Jacoby (1990) brings Winnicott into the comparison and treats the two as neighbours rather than synonyms.

The critique follows from these comparisons. Where popular writing turns the persona into a “false self” to be stripped away, it pathologises ordinary social role, which Jung in 1921 and every later Jungian writer treated as necessary, and it borrows Winnicott’s clinical term for a non-clinical phenomenon. The persona is a mask; the question Jung asked was only whether the wearer knows it.

Empirical status

Narrow. One instrument exists. Yurtsever (2020) built a 14-item self-report persona scale, explicitly from Jung, with four factors (social mask, social influence, identity, role), on 226 Turkish bank managers and two further Turkish samples of about 110; internal consistency and four-week retest were acceptable, and self-ratings correlated with peer nominations. Its limits are plain: a single author, snowball samples in one country, exploratory factor analysis only, no replication, and publication in an open-access journal of modest standing. It shows that people can rate themselves on mask-like behaviour; it does not test Jung’s claims about the shadow or the anima behind the mask. The adjacent mainstream work is social psychology’s research on self-presentation, descended from Goffman rather than Jung: Snyder’s self-monitoring scale (1974), which measures how far people adjust their expressive behaviour to the situation, and Leary and Kowalski’s two-component model of impression management (1990). It establishes that people manage the face they present and differ in how much they do so; it says nothing about what lies behind it.

Appearances

The first appearance is the word itself. Samuels, Shorter and Plaut (1986) derive it from the Latin for the mask worn by actors in classical times; Stein (1998) places it on the Roman stage, with the actor’s voice projected through the mouth of the mask, Jacoby (1990) on the Greek. Luigi Pirandello has often been read through the concept: Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), whose hero has lived so long inside an emperor’s name that the mask is the only self he has, belong to the same years as Jung’s definition. Neither was written with any knowledge of it, and Jung nowhere cites Pirandello. Stein (1998) reads the bishop’s nightmare in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), in which he tears at a mask that will not come off and takes his face with it, as the exact image of persona identification. Outside psychology the word has a second life: Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (1999) introduced the “persona” of software design, a fictional composite user, which owes nothing to Jung. Readers should note that in every case “persona” is a reading applied after the fact; only the dramatists’ masks were there first.

Sources

• Jung, C. G. (1916). The conception of the unconscious. In Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (C. E. Long, Ed., 2nd ed., 1917). Baillière, Tindall and Cox. Project Gutenberg #48225. The German revision appears as “The Structure of the Unconscious”, CW 7, Appendix II.
• Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychologische Typen. Rascher. Definitionen 48 “Seele”. Project Gutenberg #61543. English: Psychological Types (H. G. Baynes, Trans., 1923); CW 6, Definitions, “Soul”, ¶798–799, ¶801, ¶804. Princeton University Press, 1971, ISBN 978-0-691-09770-1.
• Jung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. CW 7, Part II; ¶245–246 as given by Sharp (1991), ¶305 as quoted by Toyoda (2021).
• Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter 3, p. 69; the chapter was revised into CW 9i.
• Jung, C. G. (1950). Concerning rebirth. CW 9i ¶221, as quoted in Sharp (1991).
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Persona”; online at https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
• Toyoda, S. (2021). Persona. International Association for Analytical Psychology. https://iaap.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Persona.pdf
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0864-4. Chapter 4, p. 88.
• Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-7102-0915-3. Entry “Persona”, p. 107.
• Sharp, D. (1987). Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-30-4. “Typology and the shadow”, pp. 94–96.
• Hudson, W. C. (1978). Persona and defence mechanisms. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 23(1), 54–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1978.00054.x
• Jacoby, M. (1990). Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-06464-4. Pp. 69 and 87–88.
• Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter 5.
• Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, Monograph No. 2. Revised edition: Doubleday Anchor, 1959, ISBN 978-0-385-09402-3; Penguin edition, ISBN 978-0-14-013571-8.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965). Hogarth Press; Karnac reprint, ISBN 978-0-946439-84-3; Routledge digital edition, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429482410-12
• Snyder, M. (1974). Self-monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 526–537. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0037039
• Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression management: A literature review and two-component model. Psychological Bulletin, 107(1), 34–47. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.107.1.34
• Yurtsever, G. (2020). Measuring social personas. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 8(6), 111–124. https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2020.86011
• Cooper, A. (1999). The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Sams. ISBN 978-0-672-31649-4.
• Pirandello, L. (1922). Three Plays (E. Storer & A. Livingston, Trans.). Dutton. Project Gutenberg #42148. Contains Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV.