Persona
The role a person presents to the world, shaped to what their position and society expect. It is necessary and normal; the problem is identifying with it so fully that there is no one behind it.
What drives it
Lets a person function in roles and protects private life from public demand. Over-identification protects against the anxiety of not knowing who you are without the role.
How it shows
Work
Every leader has one. The concern is when it never comes off: the CEO who talks to his children in the register he uses with the board; the consultant who cannot say what they enjoy outside work; collapse or depression after retirement, an exit or a lost title. Speech is generic and polished, heavy with the organisation's phrases.
Relationships
Partners complain they never meet the real person: 'You're doing your work voice.' Social life is performance; intimacy feels like being off duty and therefore empty or threatening.
Self
Notice how you feel when the role is unavailable: on holiday, at a party where nobody knows your job, after leaving a company. Restlessness or a sense of being no one points to persona identification.
What tells it apart
False self (Winnicott): A persona is a role the person can, in principle, take off; a false self is the whole personality organised around compliance, with emptiness underneath even in private. Ask how they feel alone on a Sunday: a persona-identified person is bored or restless, a false-self person often feels unreal.
Impression management: Impression management is deliberate and situation-specific, and the person can tell you what they are doing; the persona becomes a problem when it is no longer chosen and the person cannot say what lies behind it.
Self-monitoring: High self-monitors switch style to suit each audience; a rigid persona keeps the same style across audiences because the role has become the identity.
A test
Ask the person to describe themselves without reference to their job, role or achievements, and watch whether they can.
Questions to carry
- Asked to describe themselves without their job, role or achievements, what can the person say?
- Who am I on a day with no role to play and nobody watching?
Go deeper
- Read: Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung and colleagues, 1964. The one book Jung planned for general readers, finished by his colleagues after his death.
- Watch: When Someone Lives Too Much in Your Mind, Jung at Night, YouTube. A narrated take on why one person can take up so much room in our thoughts, in Jung’s terms. We haven’t checked its quotes against Jung’s own writing.
How strong the research is
clinical. Jungian concept; research on self-monitoring and impression management shows role-adapted self-presentation is real and measurable, but Jung's account of over-identification with the persona is clinical.
Where it comes from
Carl Jung, 1928 (The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious)
On the family tree: Carl Jung
Sources
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)
- C.G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffé, Man and His Symbols (1964)
- Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche (1991)