 Samuels describes a persona in the following way. The term derives from the Latin word for the mask worn by actors in classical times. Hence, persona refers to the mask or face a person puts on to confront the world. Persona can refer to gender identity or a stage of development such as adolescence, a social status, a job or profession. Over a lifetime, many personas will be worn and several may be combined at any one moment. Now what exactly does this mean to you and I? Well, we all have at least one persona. More likely, we have far more than that. Often our persona is based on something we do or are expected to do in society such as being an employee or a lawyer or a supporter of a football team. When we are in this role, we tend to act in ways that are consistent with how we expect others to view us. So, as the lawyer, we may always try to be erudite or wise. As a football team supporter, we wear particular team colors, assemble with other supporters and are often loud in public. All the time, we're acting out a persona. I find it useful to pay attention to not only what we are doing in terms of our behavior, but also what clothes we wear, how we speak and especially what we actually say and think. Very important here is to note that we have to have a persona. Without it, we are naked in the world and have nothing between us, in particular between the ego and the external world. We have nothing to hide behind, no clear sense of how to act, what to wear or what to say. So you can see that we have to have a persona. Those prosoles who have weak personas suffer tremendously in the world because they don't know who to be at any particular moment and feel that people can see right through them and that they have no defences. I often think of persona as a form of defense against the world. Remember when we were small, how we didn't really care what the grown-ups thought about us. How we just wanted to play and to have some fun. We had very basic personas and these personas were not consciously chosen, they just developed out of the psyche. We were known as a serious little child or a very boisterous little girl but at the end of the day we really didn't care so long as we could have fun and to play. What makes small children so endearing to us is not only their ability to move between reality and play or the conscious and the unconscious worlds but also how they don't have strong personas so we're able to see the real child at all times. This is so different when we are adults as we learn to persona up as it were and not let our guard down. As we grew older and went to school at around five or six we suddenly realized that certain kids like certain behaviors and we started to act out these behaviors. Here is where we consciously began to adjust our personas and started to realize that we can have more than one. We can have a persona for inside the classroom, one for recess and one for home. As we progressed through school we really started to work on our personas because we know that this is the way to ensure our friendships and connections with other kids at school. Then puberty sets in and the young adolescent finds themselves in quite a pickle because now we aren't really sure which personas really work. We then go to extremes often first with the external quality persona of our clothing and all of these are attempts to find an identity and the persona is crucial in this process. Remember I said that one of the functions of the ego was to provide stability of identity and personality over time. Well the persona is involved in this process. Remember those times when having the right clothes was really really important. How you had to get the right bicycle or the right toy. Nowadays this must be really difficult for adolescents as they not only have to adjust the internal way of being but have to be aware of rapidly changing clothing trends which brand is in and which one is out or which video game console is more trendy and which one isn't and even worse which cell phone or web space we should use. All of this contributes to the rapid development and alteration of the persona. When you next see adolescents out in the streets or in your home and you shake your head at their strange clothing or body piercing or language remember that all they are trying to do is to test out which persona works for them. Those of you that have been through this with your own kids will know that very shortly the extreme behaviors and clothing will end and your kids develop a fairly consistent persona that involves not only what clothing to wear but also what subjects to take at school, what music to listen to and which friends to keep. As we finish our schooling or university life and head out into careers we know that each particular career has a specific persona. We soon realize from watching role models in our chosen professions how we are supposed to behave, what to drink, what to eat and what to wear but most importantly what way to act in the company of others. This can be quite daunting at first. How is a lawyer or a doctor or a dentist supposed to act? Not only in their consulting room but out in the company of others. We tend to develop particular personas through identifying with role models already in these professions. I'm sure you know people who stay in their professional persona all the time. If you have a doctor friend and that friend is always acting the doctor dispensing medical vise at dinner parties or other social gatherings you can see that he or she is stuck in their persona. After a while it becomes really irritating and you want to shake them up and say, you know, just be real. So there's a strong risk that we over identify with our persona. This leads to one-sidedness, something we touched on in earlier episodes and a great deal of trouble in later life. But equally problematic is someone who changes their persona too often. If we see them at work they are so different from at a party or at the theater or at a game. We get confused with whom we are dealing and we want to go up to these folks and give them a shake too and say, just be consistent. Now Jung saw the persona as an archetype. So in all humans there is a need for some role enactment to engage with other people in a variety of settings. So a clan chief had to act in a certain way and the young males and females in the clan were expected to act in equally defined ways. We know that even in our massive societal structures we need people to behave in certain ways, meaning we need them to stay in a certain persona that is consistent with their function, office or occupation. We get shocked when we hear of people acting outside of their role. So if we hear of a policeman being arrested for drunk driving it bothers us far more than some nameless person arrested for the same crime. We expect our judges to be wise and never to exhibit instinctual or irrational behavior. So if a judge makes a statement from the bench that is inconsistent with that role we find it troubling and often want that judge to resign his or her position. The same can be said for a teacher, a doctor, a priest or any other such occupation for that matter. Isn't it interesting that we all seem to have a fairly consistent cultural expectation of occupational personas? These personas will obviously vary across cultures but within cultures we all have a solid sense of what is expected of how particular personas should be displayed in public. If we look at how comics often lampoon public figures such as politicians or judges it is so interesting to see how they often choose behaviors or actions that are vastly opposite from their public personas. It is when we over-identify with the persona that we land in trouble because what happens when the ego over-identifies with a rigid persona is that the unconscious tends to burst into consciousness in severe and unpredictable ways. For example, if we think back to the people I described in the clinical case in episode 3 which I called the model of the psyche we had an over-identification with the persona and severe depression resulted. This is an example of the compensatory nature of the psyche. If things are too heavily weighted in one area of the psyche, say the persona the unconscious tends to load up with psychic energy and at some point this massive loading results in unconscious material erupting into consciousness. Often this eruption is of a severe affect of disorder such as depression or anxiety or may even result in somatization. Now you can see why this aspect of the model I outlined earlier is so important to our better psychodynamic understanding of the psyche. The same lack of balance exists in the individual who has a very weak persona. You may encounter these individuals and they seem to need to exist in their own fantasy world their own inner world which on the face of it is a good thing as we all need to encounter and confront the unconscious but if we retreat into the unconscious too far we really struggle to keep one foot in the external ego-based world and the other in the internal unconscious world. So overall we need the persona to be a complement for the workings of the psyche. The ego is vital in this relationship because if it is rigidly identified with the persona it is an ego that looks outwards only outwards into the external world and is quite blind to the inner world of the unconscious. I often find that when I start to work with a patient in this situation and suggest that they pay attention to their dreams they'll say, oh I haven't had a dream for years. Now we all know that this cannot be the case as we all dream every night it's just that we don't recall our dreams. So these patients as they begin their work in analysis and start to recognize their unconscious they often find themselves having intense dreams each night that they are able to recall. It is almost as if the ego which we need to help us to recall dreams each night suddenly looks over its back and says, oh yeah I remember that stuff all that stuff about the unconscious and dreams and symbols wow I haven't seen that side of myself since I was very very small. You know I'm being a little silly here this is a way for us to see that when we pay attention to the inner world and begin to lessen our excessive attention to the outer world a balancing or compensatory action in the psyche is stimulated. So the persona is a mediator between the external world of others and the ego. Recall that I suggested earlier that you should think of the persona as a defense for the ego. But in our last podcast episode on the anima and the animus I said that these archetypes are mediators between the internal world and the ego. So we can imagine the persona and the anima or animus to be opposites. They fulfill very opposite roles for the persona dealing with the external world and the ego and for the anima or animus dealing with the ego and the internal world. Both are critical in the process of adaptation something I want to deal with in a future episode.