For the growing child, the development of a viable social persona is a vital part of adapting to, and preparing for, adult life in the external social world. '
A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona;
identification with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development'.[2]
Thus for Jung 'the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas - the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice'.[3]
The result could be 'the shallow, brittle, conformist kind of personality which is "all persona", with its excessive concern for "what people think"'[4] - an unreflecting state of mind 'in which people are utterly unconscious of any distinction between themselves and the world in which they live.
They have little or no concept of themselves as beings distinct from what society expects of them'.[5]
The Enantiodromia - the emergence of the repressed individuality from beneath the persona later in life: 'the individual will either be completely smothered under an empty persona or an enantiodromia into the buried opposites will occur'.[6]
'that excessive commitment to collective ideals masking deeper individuality -
'laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality...pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience'.[11]
Similarly in treatment there can be 'the persona-restoring phase, which is an effort to maintain superficiality';[12] or even a longer phase 'designed not to promote individuation but to bring about what Jung caricatured as "the negative restoration of the persona" - that is to say, a reversion to the status quo'.[13]
Absence of the persona
'the streaming in of the unconscious into the conscious realm, simultaneously with the dissolution of the "persona" and the reduction of the directive force of consciousness, is a state of disturbed psychic equlibrium'.[15]Those trapped at such a stage remain 'blind to the world, hopeless dreamers...spectral Cassandras dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood'[16]
'is not only achieved by work on the inside figures but also, as conditio sine qua non, by a readaptation in outer life'[17] -
including the recreation of a new and more viable persona.
To 'develop a stronger persona...might feel inauthentic, like learning to "play a role"...
but if one cannot perform a social role then one will suffer'.[18]
Thus one goal for individuation is for people to 'develop a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society but does not collide with nor hide their true self'.[19]
Eventually, 'in the best case, the persona is appropriate and tasteful, a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self'.[20]
Later developments of the persona concept
'a mask or shield which the person places between himself and the people around him, called by some psychiatrists the persona '.[21]
to avoid unwanted entanglements or promote wanted ones'.[22]
the social archetype of the conformity archetype',[25]
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The "False Self" was, for Winnicott, a defense designed to protect the True Self by hiding it. He thought that in health, a False Self was what allowed a person to present a "polite and mannered attitude" in public.[3] But he saw more serious emotional problems in patients who seemed unable to feel spontaneous, alive or real to themselves in any part of their lives, yet managed to put on a successful "show of being real". Such patients suffered inwardly from a sense of being empty, dead or "phoney".[4]
Helene Deutsch had described the "as if" personalities who have 'succeeded in substituting "pseudo contacts" of manifold kinds for a real feeling of contact with other people: they behave "as if" they have feeling contacts with people'.[5]
Winnicott's own analyst, Joan Riviere, had memorably explored the concept of the masquerade - of 'the mask of the narcissist..."the trait of deceptiveness, the mask, which conceals this subtle reservation of all control under intellectual rationalizations, or under feigned compliance and superficial politeness"'.[6]
Freud himself, with his late theory of 'the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications',[7] had produced a theory of 'the Ego, which does bear some comparison with the False Self'.
[8] Erich Fromm, in his The Fear of Freedom distinguished between original self and pseudo self[9], the latter being a way to escape the loneliness of freedom, at the cost of losing the original self.
Carl Rogers had independently highlighted Kierkegaard's much earlier claim that 'the deepest form of despair is to choose "to be another than himself". On the other hand "to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair," and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man'.[10]
[edit] Winnicott's conception
'Other people's expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one's being'.[11]as a defense against an environment that felt unsafe or overwhelming because of a lack of reasonably attuned caregiving.
The danger is that 'through this False Self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real'.[13]
a 'child whose potential aliveness and creativity has gone unnoticed...concealing an empty, barren internal world behind a mask of independence'.[14]
'Winnicottian False Self is the ultimate defence against the unthinkable "exploitation of the True Self, which would result in its annihilation"'.[15]
Compliance and imitation are the costly results'.[18] Some would indeed consider that 'the idea of compliance is central to Winnicott's theory of the false self',[19] and add, paradoxically, that 'concern for an object is easily a compliant act'.[20]
Where the motherer is not responsive to the baby's spontaneity, where instead 'a mother's expectations are too insistent, they can eventually result in compliant behaviour and an impaired autonomy',[21] as the baby has 'to manage a prematurely important object....The False Self enacts a kind of dissociated regard or recognition of the object; the object is taken seriously, is shown concern, but not by a person'.[22]
'Kohut offers essentially the same program' as Winnicott in his descriptions of 'the narcissistic disorders in which he specializes....Like Winnicott's "false-self" patients, these patients develop a shoddy armor (of a "defensive" or "compensatory" character) around their maimed inner core'.[25]
to be...the maintenance of even the diseased remnants of the self is preferable to not being, that is, to accept the takeover of another's personality rather than his actively elicited responsiveness'.
he stressed that 'there is a decisive difference between the support of selfobjects that are sought after and chosen by a self in harmony with its innermost ideals...and the abandoning of oneself to a foreign self, through which one gains borrowed cohesion at the price of genuine initiative and creative participation in life'.[27]
[edit] Lowen
Main article: Alexander Lowen
Since the superficial self represents submission and conformity, the inner or true self is rebellious and angry. This underlying rebellion and anger can never be fully suppressed since it is an expression of the life force in that person. But because of the denial, it cannot be expressed directly. Instead it shows up in the narcissist's acting out. And it can become a perverse force.[28]
[edit] Masterson
Main article: James F. Masterson
the false self, which the very young child constructs to please the mother, and the true self.
Main article: Neville Symington
'two poles: one in which I am the source of my own action, where I have a creative capacity that comes from my own source of action, and the other in which an inner figure opposed to myself is the source of action.[31]
He termed the twin 'sources of action the "autonomous source" and the "discordant source"', and acknowledged that 'although the formulation is different, it is along the lines of what Winnicott talks about - the true self and the false self'.[32]
Sam Vaknin would be more pessimistic, arguing that 'the False Self is by far more important to the narcissist than his dilapidated, dysfunctional True Self':
Vaknin stresses instead that 'the False Self replaces the narcissist's True Self and is intended to shield him from hurt and narcissistic injury by self-imputing omnipotence....
The narcissist pretends that his False Self is real and demands that others affirm this confabulation'[38] - relational success in such instances being clinched 'when self finds in other that other who will "confirm" self in the false self that is trying to make real, and vice versa'.[39]
[edit] Susie Orbach: false bodies
Main article: Susie Orbach
the false self as an overdevelopment (under parental pressure) of certain aspects of the self at the expense of other aspects - of the full potential of the self - producing thereby an abiding distrust of what emerges spontaneously from the individual himself or herself.[42][edit] Jungian persona
Main article: Carl Jung
'when the persona is excessively rigid or defensive...[that] the persona then develops into a pathological false self'.[48]
[edit] Stern's tripartite self
Main article: Daniel Stern (psychologist)
Daniel Stern considered 'the sense of physical cohesion (..."going on being", in Winnicott's term)' as essential to what he called the Core Self - providing 'an affective core to the prerepresentational self'.[49]
He also explored how selective maternal attunement could create 'two versions of reality....
Language becomes available to ratify the split and confer the privileged status of verbal representation upon the false self', so that 'the true self becomes a conglomerate of disavowed experiences of self which cannot be linguistically coded'.[50]
However 'in place of true self and false self, Stern suggests the adoption of a tri-partite vocabulary: the social self, the private self and the disavowed self'.[51]
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