dada's definition: Persona - image of one's self projected outward. How I want others to think of me. Person - image of one's self projected inward. How I want myself to think of me.
Jung on the 'defeat of the persona' [my comments in brackets] - A collapse of the conscious attitude is no small matter. It always feels like the end of the world, as though everything had tumbled back into original chaos. [yay!] One feels delivered up, disorientated, like a rudderless ship that is abandoned to the moods of the elements. [this is a good thing] So at least it seems. In reality, however, one has fallen back upon the collective unconscious, which now takes over the leadership. [well, maybe it isn't a good thing. I don't like leaders.]
We could multiply examples of cases where, at the critical moment, a “saving” thought, a vision, an “inner voice,” came with an irresistible power of conviction and gave life a new direction. [Yeats' anti-self?] Probably we could mention just as many cases where the collapse meant a catastrophe that destroyed life, for at such moments morbid ideas are also liable to take root, or ideals wither away, which is no less disastrous. In the one case some psychic oddity develops, [some psychic oddity?] or a psychosis; in the other, a state of disorientation and demoralization.
But once the unconscious contents break through into consciousness, filling it with their uncanny power of conviction, [beware the uncanny power of conviction] the question arises of how the individual will react? Will he be overpowered by these contents? If so, it signifies a condition of paranoia or schizophrenia. Will the subject credulously accept them? If so, he may either become an eccentric with a taste for prophecy, or he may revert to an infantile attitude and be cut off from human society. [hey, who you calling infantile?]
Will the subject reject the contents? If so, there is a regressive restoration of the persona. [regressive restoration of the persona: putting humpty dumpty back together again] ...The regressive restoration of the persona is a possible course only for the man who owes the critical failure of his life to his own inflatedness. With diminished personality, he turns back to the measure he can fill. But in every other case resignation and self-belittlement are an evasion, which in the long run can be kept up only at the cost of neurotic sickliness. [so don't do it]
...Access to the collective psyche means a renewal of life for the individual, no matter whether this renewal is felt as pleasant or unpleasant. Everybody would like to hold fast to this renewal: one man because it enhances his life-feeling, another because it promises a rich harvest of knowledge, a third because he has discovered the key that will transform his whole life. Therefore all those who do not wish to deprive themselves of the great treasures that lie buried in the collective psyche will strive by every means possible to maintain their newly won connection with the primal source of life. [yawn] Identification would seem to be the shortest road to this, for the dissolution of the persona in the collective psyche positively invites one to wed oneself with the abyss and blot out all memory in its embrace. [come on, wed oneself to the abyss. You know you wanna] This piece of mysticism is innate in all better men as the “longing for the mother,” the nostalgia for the source from which we came. [What a piece of mysticism. The only thing I dislike more than leaders is mysticism. And nostalgia. But then, I'm not a better man.]
As I have shown in my book on libido, there lie at the root of the regressive longing, which Freud conceives as “infantile fixation” or the “incest wish” a specific value and a specific need which are made explicit in myths. It is precisely the strongest and best among men, the heroes, who give way to their regressive longing and purposely expose themselves to the danger of being devoured by the monster of the maternal abyss. [nom nom nom] But if a man is a hero, he is a hero because, in the final reckoning, he did not let the monster devour him, but subdued it, not once but many times. [That sounds dirty]
Victory over the collective psyche alone yields the true value, [now we see what it's all about. Consumerism] the capture of the hoard,[Get stuff = victory] the invincible weapon, the magic talisman, [Jung talking dirty again] or whatever it be that the myth deems most desirable.
Anyone who identifies with the collective psyche or, in mythological terms, lets himself be devoured by the monster and vanishes in it, attains the treasure that the dragon guards, but he does so in spite of himself and to his own greatest harm. [heroes are so stupid]
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and that's my inspired, authoritative, maundering (yes, maundering) take on the subject of Person and Persona. Here are some pictures. Are they at all related to the topic? you be the judge.
300px-Deku_link_reflection.jpg
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Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.