^‘Hopcke s books continue to be one of the

most intriguing ways to get acquainted with Jung.”

— Robert A. Johnson, author of Hcy Shcy We, and Inner Work

PERSONA

Where Sacred Meets Profane

Robert H. Hopcke
Persona
Also by Robert H. Hopcke
A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung
Jung, Jungians, and Homosexuality
Men’s Dreams, Men’s Healing
Same-Sex Love and the Path to Wholeness
PERSONA
Where Sacred
Meets Profane

Robert H. Hopcke

Shambhala
Boston & London
1995
Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall
300 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115

© 1995 by Robert H. Hopcke

Page 254 constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval

system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

987654321
First Edition

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 0

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc.,

and in Canada by Random House of Canada Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hopcke, Robert H., 1958-

Persona: where sacred meets profane/Robert H. Hopcke. — 1st ed.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87773-657-X (pbk.: alk. paper)

1 . Persona (Psychoanalysis) 2. — Case

Persona (Psychoanalysis
studies. 3. Minorities — United — Psychology— Case
States studies.

4. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961 — Contributions psychology

in

of persona. I. Title.

BF175.5.P47H67 1995 94-26577

155.2— dc20 CIP
To the memory of those who died
during my work on this hook:

Steve Rischy Rick Cotton,

CliffAdams, Michael Manicone,

Mike Elias, Larry DiRocco,

Steve Cattano, and Ralph Ascoli
and to those who were born:

Jesse Campton,
Chelsea Campton,

Joseph Alexander-Short,
Megan Alexander-Short,
Anna Lucille Castillo, and
Clara Serafina Castillo
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2015

https://archive.org/detaijs/isbn_9780877736578
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Part One: Jung, Jungians, and the Persona

Introduction 3
1. The Persona in Jung’s Theory and
in Jungian Thought 9
Part Two: The Persona and Therapy
Introduction 27
2. Persona Identification 30
3. Lack of Persona 58
Part Three: Cultural Politics Meets the
Psyche: The Persona and Social
Outsiders
Introduction 93
4. People of Color and the Dilemma of Invisibility 98
5. Gay Men and Lesbians: Out of the Closets,
Into the Streets 121
6. Sexism and Persona: Wounded Women,
Wounded Men 147
7. On Culture, Psyche and Outsiderhood:
Conclusion 178
Part Four: Persona and Spirit
Introduction 183
8. Persona and Ritual: The Mask as Archetypal
Symbol of Transformation 187
9. The Artistic Function of the Mask: Persona and
Purpose in Italian Opera 213
Notes 243
Bibliography 250
Crediu 254
Index 255

Vll
 Acknowledgments

I write my thank-yous on the very last day of 1993, which

seems appropriate, having for too long lived with this book
and being happy to have at last brought it, and one chapter
of my own life, to a close. Between the time of first concep-
tion, when I went to find material on the persona for my
own edification only to find very little in the literature, and
now, some six years later, a great deal of thought has gone
into the writing of this book. Given that my writing is

probably the place in my life where I feel the closest to

the mysteries of conception, gestation, and birth, it is not
inappropriate to acknowledge how hard this labor has been
for me, and it is with gratitude that I salute those who saw
me through it.

For the record, a stray remark of John Beebe gave rise

to my interest in the persona in the first place, when he

mentioned at a lunch now very long ago that he found it

very important to work with the persona in the analysis of

gay men. My own analytic work had proven the truth of
his observation, and so off I went, but I would like to take

the time to acknowledge John particularly, but more gener-

ally as well. He is a man who has been responsible, very
quietly and with considerable thoughtfulness and expertise,

for a great deal of excellent and courageous writing on the

part of a younger generation of Jungians, and I would per-
sonally like to thank him here for the unfailing encourage-
ment to my own work he has unstintingly given. To him it
may not seem like much, but to me it has been invaluable.

IX
 Occupying the top of thelist alongside John is the

vastly overworked but enormously helpful Emily Hilburn

Sell, without whose intelligence and patience this book
would have been a writer’s nightmare. I joked once during
one of our transcontinental phone calls, me in Berkeley, she
in Nova Scotia, that Shambhala shouldn’t call her “editor”
on this job but rather “writing therapist.” Indeed, in the
many creative dilemmas that I found myself, unaccount-
ably, faced with in writing this book, she was able to listen

and find a solution that worked. When my own perform-

ance anxieties rose up to paralyze me, she reassured me.
When I could see no way to turn this work into what I

wanted it to be, she came up with suggestions. Writers often

do not have many people to talk to about the process of
their work, particularly when it turns out to be as problem-
atic as this project, and so I deeply appreciate her help and
her available ear.

Also important to thank are the various folks at the

C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco who have helped me
do my research over the years. This includes the library staff

as well as more particularly Michael Flanagin at the Archive

for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, with whom I spent
a Saturday morning or two combing through the enormous
and fascinating collection of images that ARAS offers to the

mind and to the eye.

The community of people with whom I spend my
daily life are, as always, more important to my work than I
think they realize. By providing companionship, fun, and
relaxation they are in many ways responsible for my ability
to create anything at all: without their love, support, and
encouragement, I would be bereft. So thank you, Paul
Schwartz; Ray, Sharon, Jesse and Chelsea Campton; Phil
La Tona, Talia La Tona-Tequida, e famiglia; Mark, Jennifer,

Anna, and Clara Castillo; Ron Suresha; and all the folks at

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Operation Concern, especially Rick Mixon and Phil Con-
way, who manage to tear me away from my desk and my
periodic bad moods with the lure of a cappuccino at the
Orbit Cafe.
Finally, a special acknowledgment to those people
who gave their consent for their process with me as thera-

pist to be shared in public. Coming to me for help, they

very selflessly agreed to have their work used to benefit oth-

ers, and I would like to thank them, not on my own ac-
count, but for those who, in reading of the journeys
described in this book, will recognize their own and feel

uplifted and no longer quite as alone on the path.

Acknowledgments XI
Part One

Jung, Jungians, and

the Persona
An older C. G. Jung, wearing his own persona quite lightly,
is well turned-out with his white summer suit, jaunty straw
hat, and walking stick. (Photo by Joseph Campbell; source:
ARAS)
 Introduction

In my book A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C. G.

Jungy I began the discussion of the persona, the topic of the
present book, by writing, “All of human life is not lived in
the depths. As vital as the movements of the unconscious
are to human existence, conscious awareness and the quality
of day-to-day living will never be displaced as legitimate

and necessary components of human wholeness.” Now,

those familiar with Jung’s theory of psychological types
might be able to discern that these words were penned by
an extravert, someone whose psychological energy and in-

terest moves outward from himself to the world around

him. My extraversion has brought me
work as a to clinical
psychotherapist, a profession centered upon relationships
with others, and it fuels my writing, which on an essential
level moves my innermost thoughts, concerns, and feelings

out into the world at large into a very public arena. Thus,
the depths of depth psychology, the unconscious and all its

imponderables, for me at least, remain not the goal itself

of analytic work but rather the foundation upon which a

satisfying life can be built.

This extraversion, I think, is at odds with the predomi-

nant psychological type usually shared by individuals inter-
ested in a psychology of the unconscious and certainly is

the “minority vote” among followers of Jung’s thought. In

analytical psychology, and in depth psychology in general,
introversion is more the order of the day, that psychological
attitude in which psychic energy and interest moves into

3
the individual from the outside v^orid. Of course, on one
level, it seems as if introversion is perhaps the attitude most
appropriate to the study of psyche, Avhich, to use current
metaphors, is usually characterized as something occurring
inside — inner life, inw'ard reflection, interior images — as if

our body is merely the container of the soul, a physical

box in w^hich a precious substance is held and hopefully
cherished.
However, in examining this metaphor, one can see its

one-sidedness and especially the way in which such a psy-

chological attitude is in danger of reinforcing the least help-

ful attitudes of modern life, for example, the depreciation

of the physical, sensual, and erotic first begun by Christian-

ity and completed by the Enlightenment. More relevant to

our field of inquiry, such a view of psychological develop-

ment, in its focus on the individual, can easily become
sealed off from the fullness of human life and turn instead
into a kind of elitist, self-contained philosophy of mind.

James Hillman, following Jung, reminds us of the limita-

tion of this metaphor of “inwardness,” noting that it is we

who are in psyche rather than psyche in us, and his writings

continuously elaborate the ways in which we meet the soul,

not simply in our introverted reflections, but also in the
world around us, in the people we know, in the physical

experiences we enjoy. ^
His attention to the anima mundi,
the world-soul manifested in the physical, the natural, and
the erotic, provides a necessary counterpoint to the intro-
vertedness of so much depth psychology.
There is some justification for laying the introversion

of Jungian psychology at the door of Jung himself, from

whose introverted intuition much of his creativity sprung.
Certainly his attention to the unconscious was derived and
supported by his “typological endowment,” a phrase Jung-
ians use to describe one’s dominant psychological attitude

4 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

and function, and yet, the significant word here, so often
forgotten in simplistic discussions of typology, is the word
“dominant,” not exclusive, not singular, simply dominant.
For the fact of the matter is that Jung’s introversion was
only one part of a very public (and at times notoriously)
extraverted life with rich and complex interpersonal rela-

tionships, a life-long marriage, a large family, and increasing

public visibility, especially toward the end of his life. His
correspondence with people from all over the world runs
into many volumes. His various travels, to Africa, to the

United States, to India, form an altogether vital portion of

the life experience out of which his ideas arose. Further-
more, Jung’s introverted intuition was often trained on top-
ics of psychological interest which are essentially external
in nature: political occurrences, cultural trends, and artistic

works. And let us not forget that this was a man who laid

his innermost thoughts bare to a worldwide public in the

course of twenty volumes worth of writings.
As an extravert in such an introverted field, I have
coped by developing a workable mode of self-reflection, a

kind of introversion that fits me and has yielded many

riches. However, it has resembled the process of learning
another language in which, after many years of study and
practice, one eventually attains fluency but which always
remains on some fundamental level a foreign language. The
prejudice against such extraversion can often be great
within psychological circles. I have heard the words exhibit
tionist, overwhelming, scattered, superficial, problem solver,

and impatient used to describe me more than once, and not

always with justification or complete objectivity. And yet
the minority viewpoint of any field, however misunder-
stood and threatening, remains like the shadow in Jungian
psychology, the place out of which the growth of wholeness
must come, the place which includes all of who we are.

Introduction 5
Moreover, for me, it is my native language, what I speak
best and what expresses my deepest self.
These considerations, then, inform the present study,
which ison examining that concept in Jungian psy-
intent
chology which is among the most overlooked and yet which
remains among the more practical that Jung developed: the
persona. As I shall be demonstrating, the persona as Jung
defined and used the term can be every bit as evocative,
archetypal, and psychotherapeutic a concept as the many
others for which Jungian psychology has become known,
such as the anima/ animus, the shadow, or the complex.
However, as even the nontechnical, popular usage of the
term indicates, the persona is basically an extraverted no-
tion. Politicians, movie stars, and sports figures all have
“public personas” behind which hide their “private lives.”
The very idea of a private persona is oxymoronic. To exam-
ine the persona here, to value it, to bring forth its wealth
and its usefulness, is thus to go against the grain of introver-
sion so typical of the depth psychology developed by Jung
with its concern for the private, the interior, and the uncon-
scious. My hope, however, is that in understanding and re-

evaluating the persona, we will be dusting off an especially

important, brightly colored piece in the mosaic of Jung’s
thought, thereby creating a more balanced and vibrant pic-
ture as a whole.
These considerations also inform how we will go
about our look at the persona here, starting first with what
Jung wrote about this concept, since he coined our present-
day psychological usage of the term. With this scholarly and
historical grounding as a base, we will then turn toward
examining the issues around persona which typically arise

for people in psychotherapy, addressing such clinical con-

cerns as the difference between healthy and defensive per-

sonas; the development, creation, and use of a persona in

6 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

the course of therapy; the relationship between the persona
and psychological types; and the way in which the persona
functions in therapeutic modalities other than individual,
one-on-one psychotherapy, such as group treatment, family
work, or couple counseling.
From the academic, historical, and clinical, we will

move on to a subject of particular relevance to my own

personal and professional life: how the persona works (or
fails to work) for people who are somehow different from
the dominant white, middle-class, heterosexual, male-domi-
nated culture of the United States. As we will see, the per-

sona is the place in the personality where public and private

meet, where who we are collides with who we are told we
should be. For social outsiders, people who do not fit cul-
tural standards or whose individuality is not valued by po-
litical or social institutions, the persona performs an
especially important function and often takes an especially
hard beating, which psychotherapy can often be helpful in
repairing and transforming. Thus we will be looking at the

role the persona plays, for good or for ill, in the lives of gay
men, lesbians, and people of color, and will then go on to
examine the role of the persona in issues surrounding male
and female sex roles and their transformation. If the per-

sonal is political, as feminists often say, I think we will also

find that the persona-1, that which pertains to the persona,

must lead us out of the lack of political and cultural engage-

ment endemic to depth psychology and into a more active

commitment to inward and outward change.
To end this study, we will return to the basic metaphor
which undergirds the concept of the persona: the mask. In
its origins, in its use throughout the ages, and in its function
as an archetypal symbol of transformation, the mask has
played a peculiar and powerful role in the development of
consciousness, culture, and spirituality. We will survey the

Introduction 7
meanings and uses of the mask in ritual and draw parallels

from this material to the ways in which the persona func-

tions as a locus of spiritual and religious development.
Then, in a different but essentially related area of culture,

art, we will turn our attention to one form and tradition,

namely, Italian opera, and in particular, Giuseppe Verdi’s
Un Ballo in maschera, to make clear the artistic function of
the mask in the Western tradition and how persona pro-
vides a focal point for issues around truth and illusion, artis-

tic freedom and political exigency, comedy and tragedy.

To those who think the persona is a superficial topic
of inquiry, frivolous and slight, the depth and intricacy of
what follows should be sufficient proof to the contrary. To
those who I hope my examination
delight in the superficial,
provides a pathway to ever more fertile imagination. But
most especially, to those whose own personas are in need of
development or renewal, I hope my book is a locus of in-
sight and healing.

8 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

 The Persona in Jung’s Theory
and in Jungian Thought

The story of Jung’s life has been told many times and
from many perspectives, including his own, but a particu-
larly persuasive perspective on his life is advanced by Peter
Homans in his book Jung in Context. ^ Homans’s argument,
meticulously supported and distinctly nonpartisan, is that
the majority of Jung’s original contributions to psychology
grew and matured during the early period of his profes-

sional life, before and during his association with Freud

(roughly 1900 to 1913), became consolidated in the period
immediately following the break with Freud (roughly 1913
to 1918), and then subsequently underwent little significant

change for the rest of his career. Homans thus sees the enor-
mous corpus of Jung’s writing as extensive and far reaching
elaborations of what Homans calls the “core process,” “the
delineation of a fundamental structure of experience that,
Qung] believed, described the inner processes of the lives of
all men and women.
In looking at the history of Jung’s concept of the per-
sona, we find support for Homans’s thesis. Having origi-

nated in that foundational early period of Jung’s thought,

the persona, as Jung describes it, forms part of the whole
system of psychic structures that he proposed in Psychologi-
cal Types in 1921, his first publication following his break

with Freud and a product of that “period of inner disorien-

tation”^ from 1913 to 1918 in which his own original

9
thoughts on the psyche were formed. This new concept was
subsequently consolidated soon afterward, most notably in
“The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,”
first published in 1928 and contained in Two Essays on Ana-

lytical Psychology, and then underwent very little change

throughout the rest of Jung’s career. When Jung refers to

the persona in his middle and late years, it is always a brief

mention and usually not especially original, however much
such comments may call our attention to the diverse aspects
of this evocative concept.
In his first reference to the persona in Psychological

Jung contrasts the persona and the soul, which both

Types,

emerge as a function of relationship. The persona, which he

calls a “false self,” “an acquired personality compounded of
perverted beliefs,” is seen as distinct from soul, one’s true
inner self. In this discussion, he seems to borrow the term
from no one less than Arthur Schopenhauer: “The persona
is, in Schopenhauer’s words, how one appears to oneself and
the world, but not what one isT^
This distinction between soul and persona receives
greater treatment at the end of Psychological Types in that

touchstone of Jung’s early thought, chapter 10, “Defini-

tions.” Here Jung makes what will become a characteristic
distinction. On the one hand, there are aspects of the psy-

che that he calls “personal,” both in the sense of being

based on the persona and in the sense of belonging to a
particular person, while on the other hand, there are aspects
of the psyche that Jung would consider “individual,” in the
radical sense of being “indivisible” or “integrated,”
structures that transcend the mere incidental qualities or

experiences of one’s life to participate in something more

significant and enduring, which is more appropriately de-
noted by the word soul. With this distinction between the
personal and individual firmly in place, Jung goes on to

10 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

define the persona as a “functional complex that comes into
existence for reasons of adaptation or personal conve-
nience” and is “exclusively concerned with the relation to
objects,”^ that is, outer objects in the material world, in-
cluding presumably people as well as things.
Here Jung describes the persona as the outward face
of the psyche and sees it as corresponding to another struc-
ture of the psyche that he formulated, the inner attitude of
a person toward the life of psyche, which he initially called

the “soul-figure” and only later the “anima.” In seeing per-

sona and anima as twins in the psyche, Jung notes that, like
the anima, the persona is indeed a complex with its own
autonomy and, for this reason, is often difficult to change.
It is, quite accurately, a “personality” in its own right.^ Ac-
cording to Jung, the persona in this sense complements the
anima. For example, if one’s persona is intellectual, one’s

anima or inner soul-figure will be sentimental, says Jung.

At this point, however, Jung introduces yet another
layer to the concept, noting that a “feminine woman” will

have a “masculine soul” (later to be known as animus) just

as a “masculine man” will possess a “feminine soul” (or
anima). In this way, the persona becomes linked to that
most nettlesome thicket of Jung’s theory, his conceptions

of “masculinity” and “femininity,” particularly as these

conceptions are applied to those figures which are the per-

sona’s psychic complements, anima and animus. Without

going into a discussion of this much-debated topic within
Jungian psychology, it is sufficient to note that the persona

for Jung is the place in the psyche where the traditional sex
roles for men and women are located; men’s personas
should be masculine, women’s feminine, and any variations
on this scheme are seen as a difficulty with the anima/per-

sona relationship.^
Thus ends the debut of the persona as a concept in

The Persona in Jungian Thought 11

Jung’s thought. However, not long afterward Jung includes
his most extensive discussion of the persona in a small book
entitled The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious.
This exposition of Jung’s thoughts on the structure of the
psyche is actually a thoroughgoing revision of a lecture first

published in 1916 , revised nearly completely and repub-

lished in 1928 , and then reissued unchanged in two
subsequent editions.^ Although Jung admitted in his intro-
duction to the second and third editions that revision
would probably be desirable, he opted instead to let this

contribution stand as is so as to provide evidence for a par-

ticular stage in the development of his thought.
With regard to the persona, Jung returns to his earlier
distinction between what is “personal” and what is “indi-
vidual,” expounding a bit more fully on the difference.

A consciousness that is purely personal stresses its proprie-

tary and original right to its contents with a certain anxiety
and in this way seeks to create a whole . . . hence these
purely “personal” people are always very sensitive, for
something may easily happen that will bring into con-
sciousness an unwelcome portion of their real (“individ-

ual”) character.^

This passage indicates the rather fragile nature of the

persona, a sort of cover for one’s ego, which, unlike Freud’s
conception of the ego, Jung merely one’s conscious
is for

sense of self, a complex which stands in often precarious

relation to the whole of one’s unconscious, individual self

In calling the persona therefore an “arbitrary segment of the

collective psyche,” because of the way it is formed through
interactions with others in one’s personal family and in so-

ciety at large, Jung says that

the term persona is really a very appropriate expression for

this, for originally it meant the mask once worn by actors

12 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

 to indicate the role they played. ... It is, as its name im-
plies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns
individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is

individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through

which the collective psyche speaks.

When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask,

and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom
collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask
of the collective psyche. Fundamentally, the persona is

nothing real; it is a compromise between individual and

society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a
name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that.

In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essen-

tial individuality of the person concerned, it is only a sec-
ondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which
others often have a greater share than he. The persona is a

semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nick-

name.

Elsewhere, Jung speaks of the etymology of the term

itself, from per sonare, to sound through, derived from the
way in which ancient masks were fitted with tubes, not un-
like megaphones, which the actors behind the mask used to

project their voices toward the audience.

Founded as it is upon the image of the mask, the per-

sona, as one might expect, is thus regarded by Jung with
the dismissive ambivalence that is so noticeable in the tone

of this passage: as nothing real, a title, a function, a compro-

mxise formation, a semblance, something which feigns indi-
viduality, something two-dimensional. And yet Jung is

forced to acknowledge in the next paragraph that the per-

sona is not entirely collective in nature and is not formed
simply by others’ expectations or social conventions but can
indeed reflect that essential self which Jung termed “indi-
vidual.”

The Persona in Jungian Thought 13

 It would be wrong to leave the matter as it stands without
at the same time recognizing that there is, after all, some-
thing individual to the peculiar choice and delineation of
the persona, and that despite the exclusive identity of the
ego-consciousness with the persona the unconscious self,

one’s real individuality, is always present and makes itself

felt indirectly if not directly. Although the ego-conscious-

ness is at first identical with the persona —
that compromise
role in which we parade before the community yet the —
unconscious self can never be repressed to the point of ex-
tinction^^

and, Jung implies, thus determines to some extent the shape

and content of our personas. That Jung acknowledges this
rich interplay between the personal and collective, between

the ego and the unconscious, between the persona and the
soul, must be stressed at this point, not only because it

forms the basis of this important essay from Jung but be-
cause, as we shall see, it is all too easy to conclude that
Jung’s negative and dismissive attitude toward the persona
is the totality of his thought on the subject. In this passage

he clearly acknowledges the way in which this collective

mask molds itself upon the more essential personality of an

individual, that which Jung calls the soul.

Jung notes that the course of analysis, in its scrutiny

of one’s personal unconscious, usually results in the dissolu-

tion of the persona and in the relativization of the ego.

Ajialysis increases one’s awareness that one is not all one

seems to be nor is one’s conscious si^i-image, one’s ego,
coextensive with the contents of one’s entire unconscious
self. The dissolution of the persona in analysis usually ush-
ers in ah^mergence of one’s real or essential self, or, as Jung
put it, one’s true individuality, as well as an awareness of
that level of the psyche which Jung contrasted with the per-

14 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

sonal, namely, the collective unconscious, a plunge into a
previously unknown realm of experience, accompanied typ-
ically by cosmic dreams and a release of creativity.
“A collapse of the conscious attitude is no small mat-
ter,” Jung says at this juncture. “It always feels like the end
of the world. . . According to Jung, three outcomes
of this dissolution of the persona may be (1) paranoia or
schizophrenia, due to the collapse of the ego into psychosis;

(2) regressive or eccentric behavior, due to the lack of social

adaptation, or (3) what Jung terms the “regressive restora-
tion of the persona.” This third term denotes the process
by which some individuals, when they are faced with the
shattering of their illusions about themselves in analysis or
in life, revert to a previous lower level of social functioning

and essentially reconstitute for themselves a kind of defen-

sive persona which will protect them from any further de-
mands by the unconscious. Because some individuals
cannot tolerate the freedom and ethical conflicts which arise

in the course of knowing oneself fully — that is, as both

good and evil, beautiful and ugly, true and false — ^Jung
allows that this narrowing of one’s life may not be “an un-
qualified misfortune in all cases.” However, he does note
that “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. ... In every other case, resig-

nation and self-belittlement are an evasion leading to

neurosis.”^^
The dissolutior f the persona, the mask we wear over
our conscious sense of self, can also lead, in Jung’s view, to
an identification with the contents of the collective psyche,
a process in which we begin to feel as if we are thoSw* arche-

typal images we meet in our dreams and fantasies. The re-

sultant effect, which Jung called inflation, is an equally

The Persona in Jungian Thought 15

disastrous solution for the individual who loses himself or
herself in the realm of idealized, larger-than-life figures
rather than through psychosis or regression. With this in

mind, Jung writes:

The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the

self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand,
and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the
other. From what has been said ... it should be sufficiently
clear what the persona means psychologically. But when we
turn to the other side, namely to the influence of the collec-
tive unconscious, we find we are moving in a dark interior
world that is vastly more difficult to understand than the
psychology of the persona, which is accessible to every one.
Everyone knows what is meant by “putting on official airs”
or “playing a social role.” Through the persona a man tries

to appear as this or that, or he hides behind a mask, or he

may even build up a definite persona as a barricade. So the
problem of the persona should present no great intellectual

difficulties.^^

Just as with his discussion in Psychological Types, Jung

moves into examining the relationship between the persona
and the anima later on in this essay. As a “complicated sys-
tem of relations between the individual consciousness and
society,” the persona, Jung stresses, is necessary for an in-
dividual to function socially and to succeed in life. How-
ever, always mindful of the value of individuality, Jung
recognizes that

the construction of a suitable persona means a formidable

concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice

which drives the ego straight into identification with the per-
sona, so that people really do exist who believe they are
what they pretend to be.^®

This identification with one’s persona is, as Jung wryly

puts it, “a very fruitful source of neuroses, since it leads

16 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

to a life based on something false and partial, leading one’s

unconscious to compensate too bright a persona with some-

times truly horrendous private behavior. Jung enjoins us
always to remember Lao-tzu’s insight from the Tao-te
Ching: “High rests on low.”
Acknowledging the problematic aspects of persona
identification leads Jung to discuss, this time also more
fully, the relationship between the persona and the anima.

Jung uses the case of a man who identifies the whole of

himself with his persona of masculinity, a situation in
which he is unaware of that side of his personality which
could be called, by contrast “feminine,” his anima, in tech-
nical terminology. Thus, the man’s persona identification
leads to his projecting his anima or feminine side onto the
women around him, resulting in a kind of ironic subjuga-
tion to those women who receive or enact these anima pro-
jections, since this man needs women to reflect to him his

fuller self without forcing him to own those sides of his

personality that might disturb or disrupt his outward ap-
pearance of masculinity, for instance, weakness, emotional-
ity, and sensitivity. Because the anima and the persona
stand in a complementary relationship to each other, Jung
therefore notes how the cure for persona identification is

usually awareness of the anima; in the case of the man

above, this would mean coming to see that those aspects of
“femininity” once seen as belonging to women are actually

pieces of his own deepest individuality, parts of his own

soul. If carried out with honesty, forthrightness, and cour-
age, such a process of anima integration does not need to
be traumatic or difficult, but Jung recognizes, with the wis-
dom of a practicing psychotherapist, that people usually
only come to consciousness about these denied, hidden,
and repressed parts of their personality when forced to by
circumstance or by the mental anguish of neurosis, and so

The Persona in Jungian Thought 17

the process can become quite an ordeal: “When a man rec-

ognizes that his ideal persona is responsible for his anything

but ideal anima, his ideals are shattered, the world becomes
ambiguous, he becomes ambiguous even to himself.”^®
While much of Jung’s writing on the anima is clearly
from a man’s point of view and equates “femininity” with
the modern Western sex role given to women to enact so-
cially and culturally, one must nevertheless acknowledge the
importance Jung places on a conscious integration of this

femininity for men and the autonomous nature of the

anima in the personality of men. This autonomy, a charac-
teristic of those subpersonalities which Jung called com-
plexes and which have their roots in the archetypes of the
collective unconscious, extends to the persona as well, since

the persona essentially functions as the outward face of the

ego: “It is no accident that ourmodern notions of ‘personal’
and ‘personality’ derive from the word persona. I can assert
that my ego is personal or a personality and in exactly the
same sense I can say that my persona is a personality with
which I identify myself more or less.”^^

Alongside the ideas of a regressive restoration of the

persona and an identification with persona, Jung points in
various places to another persona dynamic, that of a missing
or neglected persona. His familiarity with what he called
Eastern culture, particularly that of India, China, and
Japan, led him to remark that the concept of persona does
not seem to exist in these cultures, since their concept of
“personality” is constructed on an entirely different world-
view than that of European culture.^^ Similarly, Jung notes
that “primitive” peoples, that is, less technologically ad-
vanced cultures, have no need of a persona, since they have
“only one foot in reality as we know it,” existing, in Jung’s
view, in a state of participation mystique, unconscious par-
ticipation in a collective way of life from which individual

18 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

ego consciousness has not yet emerged.^^ In modern socie-
ties, Jung mentions how certain individuals seem to lack a
persona or possess a persona that is decidedly undeveloped
and somewhat dysfunctional,

blundering from one social solecism to the next, perfectly

harmless and innocent, soulful bores or appealing children,
or, if they are women, spectral Cassandras dreaded for their
tactlessness, eternally misunderstood, never knowing what
they are about, always taking forgiveness for granted, blind
to the world, hopeless dreamers. . . . The man with the
persona is blind to the existence of inner realities, just as

the other is blind to the reality of the world, which for him
has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic play-
ground.

His allusion to children and playgrounds perhaps tips

us off to yet another category of people who lack a persona:

children, whose peculiar and sometimes embarrassing can-
dor might be seen as a result of an as yet undeveloped per-
sona-lity.

Here we find that Jung has pretty much exhausted his

discussion of the various aspects of the persona, a discussion

embedded in that section of his work devoted to a subject

of manifestly more interest and allure, namely, the anima

and animus. Although his point is, of course, to limn the
ways and means of inner reality, which are often summed
up for him in the figure of the anima, one feels that much
of Jung’s insistence upon interiority and the inner life of the
psyche, and consequently his somewhat negative attitude

toward the persona which peeks through now and then in

these discussions, has to do with his context and the audi-
ence for whom he is writing, namely, a fairly extraverted
twentieth-century European society based on convention,
roles, and a positivistic faith in scientific rationality. Thus

The Persona in Jungian Thought 19

the brevity of his work on the persona stands in contrast to
that rather expansive way in which the anima and animus
are treated in this work. Yet, for all of Jung’s diffidence
toward persona, it is continually linked with the anima and
animus. For instance, in discussing the various manifesta-
tions of the anima or animus in the psyche of modern peo-
ple, he writes that “their complicated transformations are as

rich and strange as the world itself, as manifold as the limit-

less variety of their conscious correlate, the persona.”^^ Such

a statement on the persona, though never fully developed
by Jung in the rest of his career, can be used, however, as a

starting point for the development of a less ambivalent and

perhaps more positive and enriching view of what the per-
sona can be.
A quick review of the rest of Jung’s references to the
persona shows that his thinking continued to work both
sides of the street when it came to this segment of the per-
sonality. The conflict between the truth of inner experience
and the falsity we have seen,
of outer appearance which, as

is a common theme running through so much of Jung’s

writings, surfaces again in The Archetypes and the Collective

Unconscious, published in 1934:

Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself

The mriror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever
looks into it; namely the face we never show to the world
because we cover it with the persona, the mask of an actor.
But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true
face.^^

In a lecture entitled “Concerning Rebirth,” put to-

gether at the spur of the moment at the 1939 Eranos con-
ference, he states quite flatly that “the persona is that which
in reality one is not,” and uses a mythological image to
describe the persona as “the garment of Deianeira, the Nes-

20 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

sus shirt to be torn away,” referring here to the robe poi-

soned by the centaur Nessus and unwittingly given by

Deianeira to her husband, Hercules, who, when he put it

on, was seized by excruciating pain. The image is striking

and speaks to how stifling, indeed, even crippling, the per-
sona can be. Jung, ever pragmatic, nevertheless sees how
difficult it is not to identify with one’s persona since, as he
says, “the persona is usually rewarded in cash.”^^
Invited to speak in 1935 at the well-known Tavistock
Clinic in London and present his own views on psychology,
Jung uses another image to describe the persona. When he
describes how, in his word-association tests, certain words
seem to disturb the subject of the test or lead to unusual

hesitations in responding, Jung attributes such phenomena

to the unconscious affect stimulated by the associations the
word has for the subject and says that “it is as though a
projectile struck through the thick layer of the persona into
the dark layer. The image here is that of persona as hide
or skin, which gets speared or pierced by certain powerful
influences, not simply a mask created and carried as if by an

actor, not simply a piece of clothing or a costume donned,

consciously or unconsciously, in order to play a particular
role or accomplish a particular job. A tough hide obviously
does just that, hides the inner self, but, to extend the meta-

phor, our skin also constitutes the largest and one of the
most necessary organs of the body.
Other ambivalent images, straddling inner truth and
outward appearance, come forth in Jung’s seminars on
dream analysis in which the persona is likened to a shell
“What we see of the individual is the persona. We are all

shells here, only surfaces, and we have very dim ideas of

what is inside” — as well as to a kind of crust over the per-

sonality.

The Persona in Jungian Thought 21

 If I should believe I was exactly what I am doing, it

would be a terrible mistake, I would not fit that fellow. . . .

I must know that for the time being I am playing Caesar;

then later I am quite small, a mere nothing, unimportant.
So this personal crust is a ready-made function from which
you can withdraw, or into which you can step at will. In
the morning I can say “Je suis roi” [I am king] and at night

“Oh, damn it all, it is all nonsense!”^^

Another of his lectures at Tavistock, titled “Psychology

and National Problems,” this time in 1936 alludes to Cae-
,

sar in the context of discussing the persona, specifically in

the gossip Jung had been hearing about Benito Mussolini’s

attempts to style himself a Roman emperor in order to con-

solidate his political power. Confessing that such gossip

usually piques his interest, Jung makes a more psychological

point: “The persona is never the true character; it is a com-
posite of the individual’s behavior and of the role attributed

to him by the public. Most of the biography of a public

figure consists of the persona’s history and often of very
little individual truth.
Another profession that Jung remarks upon within the
context of discussing the persona is his own, that of the
medical doctor, for whom the persona medici, consisting of
infallible authority, wisdom, and magic powers, can be
plied into use not only to substitute for true treatment but

to hide the doctor’s own human imperfections. On such a

use of the persona, particularly by psychiatrists, Jung writes,
“This lack of insight is an ill counsellor, for the [patient’s]

unconscious infection brings with it the therapeutic possi-

bility —which should not be underestimated—of the illness
being transferred to the doctor,”^^ and, thus, in Jung’s view,
possibly cured by the psychiatrist’s own psychological
health and moral courage, which shows the patient a way

22 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

toward a fuller and more truthful acceptance of self.^^ Else-
where he remarks, a little more jovially, how “doctors have
always loved using magically incomprehensible jargon for
even the most ordinary things. It is part of the medical per-
sona.”^^ In his articleon “Woman in Europe” from 1927,
Jung again remarks on the curative effect of removing the
persona, since in stripping off the persona we become “con-
scious of our common human bonds,” noticing that “in
our strength, we are independent and isolated and are mas-
ters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and
bound. . .

This repetitive theme, the persona as false, an impedi-

ment, and its removal a gain and a cure, nevertheless is only
one side of Jung’s view, for even to the later part of his
career Jung insisted on the persona as an integral part of the
personality, on a par in importance with the anima as psy-

chic mediator. Indeed, this view of the persona actually be-

comes somewhat formulaic by the time of Jung’s alchemical
writings: “The anima . . . functions as the medium between
the ego and the unconscious, as does the persona between
the ego and the environment” is a statement he repeats in
two separate places, and one which ought not to be ignored,
given the crucial importance the anima plays in Jung’s the-
ory of the psyche.^^
Like a skin or a hide, rather than a crust or a shell,

the persona is that which shields, protects, and also, Jung

acknowledges, reveals who we are. “The persona also gives

you information,” he tells his listeners in his seminar on

dream analysis, and he implies a certain degree of choice
concerning the persona, since it is “how you like to appear
to the world,” not simply “how the world makes you ap-
pear. Thus, one wonders if the negative tinge tosome of
his statements concerning the persona might have more to
do with what one might call persona pathology, distur-

The Persona in Jungian Thought 23

bances in the relationship between ego and persona such as
identification, regressive restoration, or a lack of persona,
rather than the very existence of the persona itself. How-
ever, as our brief overview of his thought has shown, the
concept of persona remained even till the end a multi-
shaded and imaginative addition to Jung’s understanding of
the workings of the human psyche.

24 JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND THE PERSONA

Part Two
The Persona and Therapy
Head of Medusa by Caravaggio. This famous picture, cur-
rently in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, presents a persona of
ambiguous aspect —both terrifying and terrified — a perfect
symbol for how it feels to be caught in persona pathology.
 Introduction

To MOVE from the preceding realm of theory and idea to

the world of therapy is entirely within the spirit of analytical

psychology, since for Jung, psychological theory was always

handmaiden to the analytic relationship. However, given
the range of images Jung used to shed some light on his

concept of the persona, as well as his diffidence regarding

the place of the persona in the psyche, both clinicians and
laypeople could probably profit from a bit more sophisti-

cated discussion of exactly what kinds of persona issues

typically come up in the course of what Jung called individ-
uation.
This process of coming to psychological wholeness
which Jung saw as the essential work of analysis and which,
in his view, involved the recognition, toleration, and even-
tual union of opposites in the psyche —has the result which
gave rise to Jung’s coinage of the term individuation: a per-
sonality individual both in the sense of its uniqueness as

well as in the sense of its oneness with itself (in-dividual,

that is, undivided). How the persona can be viewed from

within the container of the therapy relationship; in what
ways the therapist might intervene that could hinder or help
the development of a patient’s persona; and the role the

persona plays in the individuation process are questions that

form the basis of the discussion which follows.
My experience as a therapist has indicated at least
three distinct points of work with the persona which could
represent a model of sorts for a process of healing from

27
the perspective of this section of the psyche: (1) becoming
conscious of what one’s persona consists of and how it

works more often, does not work); (2) creating a more

(or,

authentic and truly individual persona; and (3) using this

more functional persona in the world both inside and out-
side the therapy relationship. As one might expect, a pa-
tient’s dreams often make clear the inner situation
concerning the persona with such uncanny, albeit symbolic,
precision that I have taken to thinking of dreams as a kind
of inner photograph of the patient’s psyche which the un-
conscious offers me in my role as therapist to help direct

the individuation process.

There is a strong Jungian tradition of seeing what
other schools would call psychopathology as symbolic man-
ifestations of a psyche intent upon growth. Thus, behavior,
fantasies, and experiences which are abnormal or dysfunc-
tional were viewed by Jung, and consequently by his follow-

ers, as phenomena which ultimately serve the end of psychic

development, however regressive or sick they may seem on
the surface by conventional standards. Beside this view,
therefore, stands the idea that a full consciousness and un-
derstanding of such so-called symptoms could and would
eventually lead the psyche forward to greater balance and
depth. Nevertheless, I believe I can say that a clinician al-

most always finds that the person presenting himself or her-

self for psychotherapy rarely has such a sanguine subjective

experience. People begin therapy, at least in my experience,
because they are in pain. Something is not going right, and
what we in the field call the “presenting problem,” that is,

what a client first presents as the problem to be resolved,

almost always sits upon difficulties and conflicts of which

the client is still wholly or partly unaware.
With regard to the persona, there are two kinds of
pathology, to use that term guardedly and entirely in a non-

28 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

I
judgmental spirit, which present themselves most fre-

quently to me in my work. The first is what we have seen

Jung call persona identification, the reasons for which and
the therapeutic resolution of which will be addressed in
chapter 2. The second, alluded to as a lack of persona by
Jung in his writings, will form the basis of chapter 3.

Though there are certainly other issues around persona,

most notably those which I will be addressing in Parts
Three and Four, these two varieties of persona pathology
are frequent and problematical enough to illustrate to a

larger degree the very important part the persona plays in

the process of individuation as well as the need for the prac-
ticing clinician to take quite seriously the state of the per-

sona and its development in therapy.

Introduction 29
 2 .

Persona Identification

As J uNG ’
s own words made clear, the one-sided extraver-
sion of Western culture has created a situation in which
most people find themselves identified unconsciously with
their persona. Putting it less technically, we typically think
of ourselves mostly in terms of what we do or who we are
in relationship to others. Many people, for example, will
use a self-description such as “I am a lawyer” or “I am Joe’s
wife” not to refer merely to their persona but, unfortu-
nately, to encompass much more — indeed, it is often meant
to be an expression of their very identity. Of course, how
could it be otherwise in such an extraverted culture, one
might ask, so focused on activity, production, and achieve-
ment, and yet, this identification with one’s persona, one’s
social role, is often the very cause of the problems which
lead people to seek psychotherapy.
Inexplicable failures in job performance or relation-
ships which range from merely annoying to positively cata-
strophic, a nagging sense of “something missing” from
one’s life, a diminished or even nonexistent capacity for in-
timacy and vulnerability with others, eruptions of obsessive-
compulsive fantasies or behavior, a lack of creativity or
enjoyment — psychiatrists have created a host of words
to describe these conditions, “anhedonia,” “dysthymia,”
“schizotypal personality,” and so on — all of these condi-
tions can be the result of persona identification, when one
has come to believe that one’s social self is really all there is

to one’s personality. Unfortunately, the bland theoretical

30
tone of the term “persona identification” imparts little

sense of how acute and disruptive the emotional suffering

engendered by such a superficial understanding of oneself
can be.

Phase 1: The Development of Awareness

The first task of the therapist is to bring to consciousness
this persona identification, to make the patient aware that
he or she is not just who or what they have been thinking
themselves to be all along. In this regard, a dream from
early in one patient’s therapy illustrates what this initial

consciousness-raising process can look and feel like within

the psyche:

No chit-chat, just a recent dream. I’m looking in a store

window at some black shoes, when a salesman, him-
self all in black, starts his sales pitch. These are fine

shoes, and since I’m from the North Bay, he can

even include some extra stitching around the leather
heel. Sounds like a good idea to me; it’s a deal. Then
I’m leaning back in a barber’s chair, head tilted back,

apron round my neck. My double’s in the chair next

to me, similarly placed. The salesman comes over, and

with some sharp instrument proceeds to cut my
throat from ear to ear. I am aghast and ask what’s going
on. Businesslike, he ignores me, lifting up the skin
from my face and folding it over my head. I see my face
from the outside: it is bloodred and raw. I panic;
surely this is very painful. No, he says, this is part of the
process and it will be over soon. With that, he uses
his two hands to make some adjustment on my face,

then lowers the skin once again. I feel the seam from
his incision; no pain. Then I notice some moisture at

the corner of my eye and lift my finger to examine

it.As I pull my finger away from my face I see a tear of
blood on my fingertip. I complain: You said this

Persona Identification 31
 wouldn’t be painful! Tut, tut, he replies, blotting away
the tear with a tissue.

Typical of a whole cross section of patients attracted

to Jungian work, Andrew was an artist in his early twenties
who had come to therapy because he had heard that it

might help in resolving his creative block, having been told

this by a slew of therapy-sawy friends of his who were quite

eager to expound on the wonderful effects their own thera-
pies had had on their “unfolding as artists” and their “inner

journeys.” Given this pitch for therapy, I was not too sur-
prised to findhim window-shopping in this initial dream
and being accosted by a salesman. The object of his atten-
tion in the dream, shoes, are also a not at all uncommon
dream symbol which often represents, as with Andrew, pre-
cisely what he seeking from therapy: a firmer and more
grounded standpoint from which the patient’s ego or self

can begin to observe or move.

His situation quickly changes though, once he has de-
cided to invest in this fine new pair of shoes. The pitchman
takes on another role entirely, an especially apt conflation
of barber and plastic surgeon who not only goes about alter-

ing the patient’s external appearance the way a barber

would in trimming his hair but who seems rather more in-

terested in first removing the outer layer of the patient’s

appearance in order to make deeper adjustments under-

neath. This image, of course, is the one which points to

the persona issues that were beneath Andrew’s presenting

problem, suggesting to me that perhaps the patient’s cre-

ative block had something to do with being all too identi-

fied with his social role or outward appearance, rather than,
for example, with a true withering of his creativity.

In exploring this hypothesis, I found that, indeed, An-

drew had become, after a great deal of initial encourage-

32 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

ment in school and some limited success commercially with
his painting, quite enamored of the freedom and icono-
clastic position that professional artists occupy socially and
had found in San Francisco a group of peers very much
taken with debating and discussing art over cappuccinos in
the various avant-garde cafes around the city. Adding all

this to the patient’s relative youthfulness and his upbringing

in a rather culturally impoverished small town, these vari-

ous factors in his outer life had conspired to seduce Andrew

away from his inner impulse to create and instead to seek
affirmation through an identification with his persona. As
one Jungian saw would have it, the initial dream predicts
the entire course of the analysis, and, in Andrew’s case, this
observation turned out to be true.
Though we will be discussing the issues which sur-
round gender and persona more fully in chapter 6, I think
it is important to underline here how common a situation
Andrew’s is for men in this culture. In large part, men are

socialized to conceive of themselves almost exclusively in

terms of their activities and, therefore, to create an identity
based on what they do rather than on who they are. This
so-called masculine identity is merely what Jung would call

a persona identification. The easiest way to prove such an

assertion concerning male socialization is simply to pay at-

tention at a cocktail party. The question that almost always

follows a man’s introduction is. And what is it that you do?
as if this information about his professional activities (woe
betide the unemployed) in some way imparts an essential

knowledge of who your new acquaintance actually is, when

in fact all you get is his persona. Similarly, if I ask in the
beginning phase of work for a man to tell me who he is as

a person, it is not at all uncommon for me to receive in

response a description of his professional status, “a teacher,”

“an artist,” or “an insurance agent,” in other words, his

Persona Identification 33
persona. It is unusual to hear a description of his personal
attributes, for example, “I am a caring person,” “I am
thoughtful,” or, even more unheard of, a statement of dom-
inant feeling, “I am angiy,” “I am depressed.” This version
of masculinity virtually assures that most men will find
themselves at the beginning of their individuation process
more or less persona-identified, like Andrew, who was re-

ceiving a great deal of validation for the role he was playing

and a fair amount of cash for the objects he was capable of
producing but quite at a loss for knowing who he was in
any deeper or broader way. His initial dream makes it quite

clear that the discovery process may be both a scary and

messy one indeed.
As I pondered this dream at greater length, it was, of
course, hard to resist the temptation to identify the sales-
man/barber/surgeon with Andrew’s image of me as thera-

pist, for the parallels are too salient to ignore and therapists
do in certain ways perform all the functions which are indi-
cated symbolically by these professions. Like salespeople,
they often provide something new and more workable
through encouraging a patient’s emotional investment in
the therapeutic enterprise. Like barbers, they alter a pa-
tient’s experience of self in order to look and feel different

to oneself and to others. Like surgeons, they reach beneath

the surface to reveal to the patient a more complex sense of
self and to correct difficulties that lie deep within. This sort
of an interpretation of a dream, which Jung called an “ob-
jective interpretation,” views the dream as referring to a pa-

tient’s relationship to someone or something in his outer

life, and in this case, it was interesting to try on this particu-

lar subset of objective interpretation, a so-called transfer-

ence interpretation, in which the major figure is seen as a

symbolic representation of the therapist.
Nevertheless, I have always found it best to stick

34 ,
THE PERSONA AND THERAPY
closely to the dream text, for dreams almost always say ex-
actly what they mean, and in this dream, the dream figure
is unknown to the dreamer and is definitely not the thera-
pist. For this reason, what seems more appropriate is what
Jung would call a “subjective interpretation,” in which the
dream is understood to depict a patient’s inner situation or
state. In this light, the barber/surgeon whom Andrew meets
would be a figure of Andrew’s own psyche, a part of his

own personality, which in the course of the therapy might

be projected upon the therapist but which is in fact actually
a part of Andrew himself
This figure’s black dress immediately suggests what
Jung called the shadow, that is, an inner figure which brings
together all those aspects of personality which one finds un-
acceptable, distasteful, or too fearful to acknowledge as
one’s own. Certainly his businesslike manner and surgical
aggression stand very much at odds with the patient’s “artis-

tic” outer persona, demonstrating the truth of Jung’s con-

nection between persona and shadow: the shadow expresses
what the persona represses.

However, in line with my many, many experiences

with men in therapy, this more than a
dream figure has
little of another inner figure of the psyche which Jung iden-

tified, namely, the anima. Based on his own experiences

first and foremost, but certainly reinforced by his clinical

research, Jung discovered that beneath the conscious per-

sonality of most men lay a powerful and very different
subpersonality, an experience and image of an opposite, al-

most always in feminine form which acted in ways that

were both consciously troublesome but psychically neces-
sary as well. In calling this a soul-figure, literally anima in

Latin, Jung pointed to the importance of this archetypal

figure to a man, for it is the anima which leads a man into
a deeper sense of himself, which provides for relationship.

Persona Identification 35
feeling, and intuition, all the experiences that so often are
excluded from a man’s conventional masculinity. In this

way, the anima has come to represent what one might collo-
quially term a man’s feminine side.

However, my repeated clinical experience, particularly

with gay and bisexual men but with heterosexually identi-
fied men as well, has been that this traditional Jungian view
of the anima as an archetype of femininity is more a state-
ment about the construction of gender roles in the Western
world than a statement about the essential nature of the
anima or soul-figure, which can appear in many forms, in-
cluding that of a man or other masculine figures. Andrew’s
dream is a good example of this type of “male anima,” for

this barber/surgeon is, as the anima is wont to be in a pa-

tient’s individuation, a figure of great strength and fascina-

tion who draws the patient’s ego down into the as yet
unconscious aspects of his soul.
In this case, the anima figure removes the conventional
masculine face behind which the patient is hiding in order
to get to the true inner self which needs attending to.

Though this process of disidentifying with the persona that

has been engendered by this male anima figure, this lifting
off of the outer face, is not frankly painful, the result is

blood, that is, feeling, warmth, life, the very qualities which
will indeed lead the patient back to his art in a more vital

away. Not pain but fear is the essential emotion here — fear

of the vulnerability that ensues when the persona is re-

moved, fear of the doctor’s power, fear of loss and grief, a

simple, basic fear of the unknown: What is life like when I

live through my soul and not through a role? In this case,

Andrew had come to work with a consciousness of being

restricted and blocked, although he could not at that point

articulate by what or why, so the feeling of the dream, a

36 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

mixture of wonder and relief, served to counterbalance the
initial fear.

“I guess the most striking part of the dream is how

neat it all is,” Andrew said to me. “No pain, no muss, no

fuss. You would think that it would be an unholy mess.”

“And the fact that it isn’t, what do you make of that?”
I asked, wondering to myself what direction he would
go in.

His silence indicated a deepening experience of feel-

ing, and it was refreshing for me to feel in the room what

the dream was indicating symbolically, a loosening of the
persona and an enlargement of the personality. “I don’t
know,” he finally said. “Maybe that I am becoming more
comfortable here. That it isn’t as awful as I thought it might
be, not that I thought, consciously at least, it would be
awful, since I am here, aren’t I. But I guess I had some fears

of you —and of myself, what I would uncover.”

“And so, you’re feeling less afraid.” I smiled.
“Yeah, I am feeling less afraid.” He smiled back.
“Quite a liberating feeling, actually.”

For another version of what persona identification looks

and feels like in the initial phase of work we turn to an
equally common situation in my experience, in which the
persona-identified individual lands in therapy not of his or
her own accord due to a consciousness of the restrictiveness
of the persona but rather because the very carefully con-
structed persona has been stripped away by inner or outer
events beyond the patient’s control. The anguish of such a
process always reminds me of just how ruthless the forces

of the unconscious can be when ignored or devalued.

Betty contacted me several times before she and I were
able to actually set up an initial meeting, and initial diffi-

culties such as the ones we encountered —missed phone

Persona Identification 37
calls, scheduling problems, ambivalence about the afford-
ability of my fees — nearly always indicate a fair bit of inner
conflictaround seeking out help, however consciously well
intentioned and determined the individual may be on the
outside to initiate therapy. When at last we were able to
schedule a meeting, some two months after her first phone
call, I encountered a rather nervous-looking woman, hag-
gard and looking a good ten years older than her forty-two
years. It took her several sessions to tell her story in full

detail, partly because her manner of presentation was halt-

ing, as if she had to check out my reactions and judgments
periodically before she could go on. But once the whole
story was out, what had happened to her dramatically illus-
trated not only how damaging a persona identification can
be but how excruciating the development of consciousness
about such an identification can often be as well.

Her well-constructed persona, “the suburban home-

maker,” had for many years served to hide a drinking prob-
lem that insidiously grew worse and worse. As is

unfortunately often the case, the need for those around her,
such as her husband and family, to continue to identify her
with this persona was such that even fairly obvious signs of
her alcoholism, such as a car accident and blackouts, had
been interpreted in other terms. She was simply “tired,”
“stressed out,” had “a lot on her mind.” For better or for

worse, her inability to function became such that this long-

standing and very neatly groomed persona was forcibly re-

moved when, in the course of a remodeling project, her

husband came upon a huge number of empty bottles hid-

den away, quite tidily, she said with a bit of irony, in the
back of their very messy garage.
During the ensuing confrontation with her then hus-
band, which she described to me now more than a year
after the event, she not only confessed in a fit of rage and

38 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

guilt to alcoholism but to a whole host of other secret sins
that had been carefully hidden away along with the empty
bottles. She had had a number of extramarital affairs, one
with a man who for a brief time enabled her to earn money
by arranging for her to have sex for pay with some of his
friends, money which was then used to support her drink-
ing habit. Also unbeknownst to her husband and family,
she had developed a habit of compulsive spending by get-
ting credit cards in various department stores under false
names. She even admitted to having abused one of their
children sexually one night when drunk, though she told
me that she was not sure if this incident had actually oc-
curred.
The result of this marathon confession was what a cli-

nician would term a state of near catatonic depression for

which she had to be hospitalized. After a good solid year of
treatment for both her substance abuse and depression, she
emerged from all the various inpatient and aftercare pro-
grams both solidly sober and infinitely wiser but with not
much sense of where to go from this point on in rebuilding
her life. Permanently separated from her husband, who had
been given primary custody of the children and had filed for

divorce, she was conflicted about fighting either the custody

arrangement or the divorce. Justifiably ambivalent about

her own fitness as a mother, she still loved her children and
her husband. Having never worked, she was at a complete
loss as to what her gifts, abilities, and interests might be as

to a job, much less a career. Relationships were, as she told

me in our first session, out of the question. “I can barely
manage to take care of myself, forget about anyone else.”

In this way, Betty came to me, more tentative than discour-

aged, almost not willing to hope for too much beyond con-
tinued sobriety.
The first dream she shared with me was the first dream

Persona Identification 39
that she remembered having after detoxification and actu-
ally, according to her, the first dream she ever managed to
remember:

At a religious celebration in an old apartment with my fam-

ily, an elephant in the corner needs to have its skin removed
to become part of the group. Howling in pain, as its skin is

stripped, it becomes first a fetus, then something that looks

like E.T., then it is me, horrible and ugly. It turns male
Medusas to stone.

Having been identified with her persona so thoroughly

to the almost complete destruction of her personality
through the compulsive and addictive behaviors that invari-
ably result from such persona identification, Betty had al-

ways thought of any kind of inner work as stupid and

pointless. Therapy was a rip-off, dreamwork a waste of
time, and self-reflection boring. Yet she had to admit that
this dream had stuck with her, and I had to do little but
mention that dreams sometimes are like the State of the

Union address, showing us what our emotional lives are

like, for her to understand how apt a representation this

dream was of her “hitting bottom.”
The “elephant in the corner” metaphor, used by many
substance abuse counselors to describe the place of an ad-
diction within a family system that continues to deny its

presence or effects, shows up ingeniously and concretely

in this dream as a symbol of the patient herself and the
persona-stripping that she had undergone. What remains is

first a fetus, then an alien, and then finally Betty herself,

albeit deformed and fear-inspiring, once again an especially

appropriate series to symbolize her inchoate self, her self-

alienation, and her own self-hatred.

The last line of the dream, an enigma to her, brought

forth few associations and mostly confusion from Betty.

40 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

“Wasn’t the Medusa female, not male? Wasn’t it the Me-
dusa that turned men to stone, not vice versa? Didn’t it

have to do with snakes, not elephants?” This detail in the

initial dream of a woman whose familiarity with mythology
and psychology was nil at the time is a manifestation of
how what Jung called the archetypes of the collective un-

conscious often peek through in the most unlikely places.

Through repeated experiences of exactly this type of
symbol in his own psyche and those of his patients, Jung
posited the existence of two layers of the unconscious. The
first, which he called the personal unconscious, consists of

all of those experiences, feelings, and encounters which we

have actually experienced at one time in our lives but which
are below the level of our current awareness. The second,
which Jung called the collective unconscious, consists of
various symbols, images, and experiences which are com-
mon to all human beings simply by virtue of being human.
Such collectively shared patterns of psychic experience,
which Jung called archetypes, often appear in dreams and
fantasies — as they do in Betty’s initial dream — as images
or symbols of which the dreamer has no actual previous
experience but whose meaning and presence is both power-
ful and compelling. For this reason, in doing dream analy-
sis, Jung recommended a technique which he termed
amplification, namely, the examination of the mythological
material itself to which the dream image seems to be related

in order to gain insight into what precisely the symbol may

be presenting, via the dream, to the consciousness of the
dreamer.
Portrayed in myth as a monstrous, snake-haired crea-
ture whose visage is so frightful as to turn those who see it

into stone, the Medusa’s story stands in relationship to that

of the great hero Perseus, so that in examining what Betty’s
dream of a male medusa may mean, we must follow his

Persona Identification 41
tale as well. As with many heroic figures in ancient Greek
mythology, Perseus’s origins combine the divine and the
human. Born of Danae, who had been impregnated by
Zeus via a shower of golden rain, Perseus was given the task
of slaying the Medusa by his wicked stepfather, Polydectes,
who thought of this ploy as the most efficient way to dis-
patch his stepson and competitor for Danae’s affection.
With the help of both the masculine trickster Hermes, who
gave him a sword to cut off the Medusa’s head, and the
feminine Athena, whose gift of a polished shield allowed
Perseus to glimpse the creature without being turned to
stone himself, Perseus succeeded in confronting and be-
heading the Medusa, bestowing the head on Athena as a

token of honor, who put the image of this head upon her
shield.

Though traditionally seen in Jungian psychology as

symbols of the infernal Feminine, the Medusa and her rela-

tives, “the Gorgons, metallic- winged, serpent-haired, and

serpent-engirdled, tusked like boars, bearded and barbed,
and with protruding tongues,”^ are monsters over which
the heroic Masculine, in the form of Perseus, and the ma-
ture Feminine, in the form of the goddess of wisdom,
Athena, eventually prevail. From this admittedly masculine
point of view, we see presented from Perseus’s side of the

myth yet another male coming-of-age saga, wherein Per-

seus’s confrontation with the Medusa signifies the boy’s

entry into manhood through the cutting of ties with both

negative-father masculinity, personified by his jealous step-
father in the myth, as well as the negative-mother feminin-
ity, the monstrous, immobilizing Medusa.
In my experience, however, and most particularly in

working with women’s dreams, I have found it crucial to

relinquish this traditional masculine viewpoint and take an-

other, more feminine-based standpoint. In doing so, it

42 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

seems to me that however much the Gorgons and the Me-
dusa have come to symbolize infernal, devouring Feminin-
ity within a male-dominated culture, these monsters are
actually more a primitive, unintegrated mixture of both
masculine and feminine, or, to put it another way, represent
the dark side of androgyny. Crowned by snakes animals —
that may be viewed as a symbol of phallic power or alterna-
tively of feminine healing —
the Medusa is an appropriate
symbol of that raw, indiscriminate psychic power that pre-
dates masculine and feminine, a kind of essential unity
which Erich Neumann calls “uroboric” and is represented
by a snake biting its own tail.

Seen in this light, the monstrosity of the Medusa

comes not from its infernal Femininity, in my opinion, but
rather from the perfect, primitive integration that it repre-
sents to a society and a consciousness split into duality and
imperfection. Such an interpretation of the Medusa (capital

M) is reinforced by a further amplification, drawn from

Jung’s own writings concerning fish symbolism, which sees

in the image of the medusa (small m), or the common jelly-

fish, a symbol of wholeness, with its roundness, its depth,
and its inner illumination all pointing to what Jung would
call the Self, the archetype of wholeness itself.^

Taking such amplifications into consideration, there-

fore, changes our view of the Medusa and helps us to see
that its primal nature, not its essential evil, is what makes it

fearsome to “civilized” society. Its appearance in Betty’s

dream signals in part this primal level of psychic function-
ing that Betty returned to when the circumstances of her
life tore off her outward face of respectability, her civilized

persona, which she had clung to so tightly. Psychically, it

was a return to a place where the differentiation of mascu-

line and feminine has not yet occurred, to a place of help-
lessness, unconsciousness, and vulnerability from which she

Persona Identification 43
was to begin to grow a new self and a new life. Again, Bet-
ty’s dream further supports this interpretation, for the male-
ness of the Medusa in her dream emphasizes the
androgynous wholeness which she had begun to contact in
her soul.
With these considerations in mind, I wondered aloud
with Betty, “What if this figure in your dream is a way of
telling you what it is like for you without a role, without a
mask, just your most basic, honest self?”
She was thoughtful. “That’s clearly why I feel such
compassion and so frightened at the same time. Like I am
seeing a naked fetus, ugly yet so moving.” She was silent.
“So you think that’s me in the dream?”
“If not all of you, certainly the part that has come
here, yes.”

She smiled. “I don’t know whether to hope for the

best or run away.”
I smiled back but did not say anything.

Phase Persona Disidentification

2:
AND Redevelopment
For both Andrew and Betty, the individuation process
began through persona removal, through beginning to
glimpse the fuller, more complex personality that lan-
guished beneath the social mask they had adopted
role, the

as the instrument to get through life. In taking this mask

off, both came into contact with a rawer, more primitive,

but also potentially more fecund and integrated self, and

their dreams conveniently supplied images for this.

The next stage in this process, in therapy as in life, is

the development of a new persona that is both effective and

more authentic. Since reality, both inner and outer, suc-

ceeded in knocking loose many of the previous self-identi-

44 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

fications of these two individuals, the stage was already set

for this phase of the work which, in my experience, pro-

ceeds like a dialogue revolving around two sets of questions.
The first set of questions is inner-directed (“Who am I?”
“What am I really feeling?” “What are my values in this
situation?”); whereas the second is concerned with outer life

(“How do Imake myself understood?” “How do I express

myself to others?” “What is the most powerful way to com-
municate this?”) As is clear, the very nature of the therapy
relationship lends itself to this dialectical process, with the
therapist acting as a mirror, reflecting back to the patient
what seems to be important and essential about him or her,
while simultaneously acting as an interactional partner, re-

acting to the patient and giving feedback concerning the

relationship in the room.
For Andrew, some months of this kind of focus on his
inner life and his true feelings about himself resulted in the
kind of slow change that I believe is the hallmark of healing.
Nothing dramatic really occurred, no earth-shaking epipha-
nies or shattering discoveries of hitherto repressed traumas,
just a simple, straightforward process of listening to how he
felt or did not feel in the room as he spoke of his life. He

felt drained after an afternoon with certain of his more pre-

tentious friends. He felt energized by a recent show in a

gallery. He felt intrigued by the rather standoffish girlfriend

of a friend that he met at a party with whom he was fairly

sure there was a mutual erotic tension. During sessions, he

sometimes felt lost and confused: “Where am I? Where is

this going?” At times he felt comforted and relaxed: “It’s

nice not to worry about anyone’s critical judgment.” His

capacity for reflection grew, without the encumbrance of a
false self, and so he came to know himself and his spontane-

ous reactions more fully and quickly.

The idea of dreamwork and active imagination was

Persona Identification 45
not new to him, but the urgency of his creative block per-
mitted him to grab on to these techniques as a way to shake
free of the binding persona that had stopped up the flow of
his work. Thus, he started to work again, but not on the
rather large scale that had been so much a part of his aca-
demic art training and for which he had been somewhat
infamous at school, delighting, it sounded to me, in the
burnished persona of “child prodigy.” Instead he began to
paint small, insignificant, everyday objects, or even began
pieces without finishing them, staying attuned not to the
outer significance of the work nor to the viewers’ potential
responses but instead to the meaning and process of his
work on, say, a coffee mug, a pair of scissors, or someone’s
shoe.
Naturally, that is when we fell through the trapdoor,
as I came to term it, landing smack in the middle of all

those uncomfortable feelings surrounding his doubts

around his adequacy, the significance of his creative work,
and his ability to “make it.” Two images from this middle
phase of work seemed to point out the persona issues in-
volved. The first was a painting he did in watercolor of a

Band-Aid decorated in very ornate, florid, and colorful de-

tail. Placing the watercolor on the ottoman between us, he

told me that he had entitled it Self-Portrait. “I feel like I

have been trying to pretend I am someone I am not, per-

sonally and artistically, as a way to cover up all these painful

doubts about myself, like it was a big Band-Aid that I, with

my talent, decorated in such an elaborate way that people

were content to simply enjoy the Band-Aid. And it hurts to

take it off”
I concurred. “Well, it is very beautiful.”
“Which is why I thought I’d do it in watercolors. I

don’t really ever work in watercolor, but I wanted to make

it transparent and fluid. I want people to see through it. I

46 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

want to see through it.” He looked at me in the eye.

“You’ve seen through it.”

“People don’t usually come to me if everything is

going well.”
“I imagine. But I guess I didn’t really see how much
doubt and pain I have been wrestling with. Or how critical
I have been of who I am.”
The second image for Andrew’s persona work in this

phrase came fairly close on the heels of this unusual self-

portrait, in the form of a brief, striking dream:

Rob and I are working together on refinishing the doorway

to his office, slowly and carefully sanding off the old paint
to prepare it for a new coat and color.

Though many clients, especially those familiar with

Jungian thought, seem to think that the larger and more
epic the dream, the deeper or more full their experience of
the unconscious, in fact, my experience has been almost
always the reverse: the pithy, short dream of a single image
frequently contains a much more powerful amalgam of
symbols, as this dream of Andrew’s demonstrates. In line,

of course, with an artist’s way of life, the most salient part

of the dream for Andrew was the material aspects of this

image, which emerged as he described the dream further

the sawdust, the flannel clothes we were wearing, the idea
of doing this work with someone else, our camaraderie, the
satisfaction of removing the old paint. So imme- it did not
diately occur to him, until I dream
suggested it, that the
was a glimpse into where we had come in our work on
removing the old sense of self and preparing the way for a
new one.
Fittingly, our work in the dream concerned a door-
way, a threshhold that opened both into my office and to
the world outside our sessions, and this symbol of transition

Persona Identification 47
is an altogether typical representation of a middle phase of
individuation. Drawing upon anthropological research on
the structure of initiation rites throughout the world, Jung-
ian analysts (Murray Stein was the first to do so) borrowed
the term “liminal,” coined from the Latin word for thresh-
hold, limeriy to describe this time of being “betwixt and
between,” this period after letting go of an old way of life
or an outmoded self-conception and before the full blos-

soming of a newer personality and direction. This liminal

phase, as one might expect, is usually full of surprises and
creativity but can also be a time of great confusion and
grief.

In contrast to his first dream after entering therapy,

Andrew’s unconscious presented us with a much more ac-

tive as well as a much more gentle, less horrifying sense of

what it is like to disidentify with the persona and get down
to the framing of his personality. No barber slices off his
face here. On the contrary, he and I are deliberately at
work, using small strokes, slow movements, moving piece
by piece. The result, an unfinished framework, felt to both
of us quite an apt representation of how it felt to be in

Andrew’s liminal phase: clean, clear, full of potential. More-

over, for this painter, this dream images changes his work
from something that he has been using to hide and cover
up, as in the Band-Aid image, into an activity that is meant
to enhance and finish, the persona as a coat of paint that

completes the look of the doorway and protects the wood

from the elements.
On the wall beside my office chair is a print of an
Edward Hopper painting. In the background of this paint-
ing, one glimpses an office-like setting behind a wall, while

quite vividly in the foreground there is a simple door open-

ing onto an unexpectedly vast expanse of blue ocean. It was
to this painting, which is constantly in my clients’ view.

48 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

that Andrew associated this dream and, naturally, our work.
“At first going through that doorway scared me, but I feel

like you and I are at work together in preparing the way.

After all, ninety-nine percent of good painting is in the prep

work.”
“So you aren’t as scared?”

“Not really. More expectant. Like what’s coming up.”

He twiddled his thumbs and made a face. “Impatient.”

For Betty, the course of work through this liminal phase

was less smooth than it had been for Andrew. Having spent
much of her life with very little affirmation, a deficit which
she had dealt with by falsehood and hiding, we had to work
a bit longer to create a space within the session to allow her
to feel herself directly without fleeing, judging, or covering

up. My image of her was of someone standing on a six-inch

ledge outside a window, someone with very little room to

maneuver, very little space for herself and for whom the
consequences of a misstep would be serious indeed. A quiet,
nonjudgmental stance, which is after all the essence of ther-
apy, was especially important for me to bring to bear as she
spoke of her efforts to reconstruct her life and her sense of
self following the trauma of the previous year.

Nevertheless, the challenge of the liminal phase, of

staying between the old and the new, is also often resolved

in a way in therapy that seems quite natural but is ulti-

mately not any better than what went before, namely by

identifying with another, more “therapy-consonant,” per-
sona of someone “in touch with her feelings” or “working
on her process.” Such an alternative persona identification,
almost always signaled by cliches, psychobabble, and slo-

gans, can sometimes feel to the unsuspecting clinician

particularly one in need of the narcissistic gratification of a
cure — like progress, whereas in reality the client is simply

Persona Identification 49
presenting herself and her feelings rather than experiencing
them fully and deeply in the room with me. For this reason,
I felt the need to be rather more active in ensuring that the
feelings Betty was telling me about were in fact what she
actually was feeling at the time, both through attending
fairly assiduously to the feel of the room and my own intu-
itive responses to her, as well as consistently asking her to
take a moment or two and simply check in with herself and
her emotional life.

The effect of this middle stage of work was well repre-

sented by the following two dreams:

Playing with my cousin, my mother criticizes him as egotis-

tical and he turns into a mole, burrowing into the ground.
I lay down to speak with him, and he tells me he’d like to
record his experiences as a mole but can’t, the hole is too
small and besides he is wearing a frozen jacket that he can’t
take off So I dig him up, thaw out the jacket with my
hands and he turns into a kitten. I think it’s awful what
they did to him.

I’ve lost fifteen pounds and am taking off many, many lay-

ers of black T-shirts. People may be able to see me from the

street.

In associating to the first dream, Betty told me that

the cousin she was playing with in the dream had been a

childhood playmate of hers who had died in an overdose

when she was still a teenager, the first person she had
known who had died. So the effect of the dream was en-
tirely revivifying, not only in its explicit imagery where the
warmth of her hands brings him back to life, but in its gift:

to her of an experience of the literal dead coming back to

emotional life for her in the unconscious. As she told me of
the dream and its effect, there was no doubt about her pres-

50 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

ence. The wonder of being with him again was palpable in
the room, a sort of numinous tingle, Lazarus rising from
the dead.
When asked what she made of his being a mole and
then a kitten, yet another in the series of animal transforma-
tions heralded by her initial dream, she mentioned that she
thought both animals were cute and cuddly but that the
kitten was more vulnerable. The mole was able at least to

dig beneath the ground to protect itself “I can tell you,

with my mother, there were plenty of times I wanted to go
underground, when she’d get on a roll with that tongue
of hers. And her sister, my cousin’s mother, was no better
either.”

“But for the grace of God went you, eh?”

“That’s for sure.”
“What if you don’t have to hide yourself, what if you
just let that frozen self warm up and relax, what if you don’t
have to go underground
—
“Well, I’d certainly feel more like a kitten, wouldn’t I?

Playful, cute ...”

“Or,” I suggested, “perhaps more like the second

dream.”
“You mean, taking off layers of clothes I don’t need.”
“Clothes and extra weight,” I said, as she sat quietly

thinking of the images. I could feel the gentle drip of anxi-

ety enter into the room and simply let it be for a moment
or two before continuing on. “I guess that’s the paradox
here. On the one hand, hiding, going underground, cover-
ing up, is the best way you can think of to protect yourself,
but really it is digging it up, thawing it out, taking it off,

which allows you to change and become freer, though it

makes you more vulnerable.”

Here she began to speak of her work in Alcoholics

Anonymous, particularly around the much discussed

Persona Identification 51
Fourth Step, in which the recovering addict writes out a
“searching and fearless moral inventory” in order to take
stock of his or her life and get a sense of a new direction. In
contrast to her expectation of this process, which others
speak of in tones of dread and fear, she found that her
Fourth Step work was actually relieving, similar to her expe-

rience when she first did a budget, finding that it really

helped to remove all the layers of denial and fear and get
down to what was true and solid, even if it was not exactly
what she might want or expect. Her sponsor had given her
a format for the process which involved not just listing her

“character defects” but rather relating her dysfunctional

ways of behaving to her feelings and to important life inci-

dents in which those ways of behaving were actually the

best possible ways available to her at the time to manage
those feelings. The result was that her Fourth Step was for

all intents and purposes what is called in classical analytic

procedure an “anamnesis,” a psychological autobiography

requested from the patient by the analyst at the start of
treatment as a preliminary way to have the potential analy-
sand begin to uncover some of the unconscious roots of the
symptoms to be treated. (An instructive but also entertain-

ing illustration of this technique can be found in Robertson

Davies’ novel The Manticore, which presents the main char-
acter’s story in the form of an anamnesis as told to a Jung-
ian analyst in Zurich.)
The outcome of this work, represented in the dreams
and her own anxieties, was of course a heightened sense of
vulnerability that came from being at last seen for who and
what she really was. In response to her strong sense of vul-
nerability, compensatory persona dreams began to occur for

Betty at this point. If dreams are viewed as naturally occur-

ring phenomena which serve a psychic purpose, then cer-

tainly one of the purposes that this presentation of

52 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

unconscious material to consciousness serves is to balance

one-sided or exaggerated conscious attitudes with the oppo-

site attitude or image from the unconscious, according to a
principle Jung termed compensation. These compensatory
dreams of Betty’s, however, contained such a sense of exag-
geration that they represented less a danger of her retreating
into a regressive restoration of her old persona and more a
kind of symbolic object lesson of how not to proceed. For
example:

In a huge, overdecorated mansion, crammed full of objects,

I am Tammy Faye Bakker, in all that garish makeup, and I

saunter through a huge walk-in closet filled with gowns,

more gowns than I could ever wear.

Dreams like this one, in which the self is represented

as the unsympathetic and self-parodying Tammy Faye,
make me wonder if the unconscious gets its sense of humor
from us or we from it. My patient could hardly take this
seriously, though she admitted she did at times simply want
to escape into the world of make-believe that the dream
presented, since her repeated contacts with her real and
fairly complicated self often left her feeling “out there,” by
which she generally meant either vulnerable or ashamed.
I pointed out to her the fundamentalist religious as-

pect of this dream, Tammy Faye as representing not only

the hypocrisy and overdone aspects of persona identifica-
tion but also the simplistic, there’s-only-one-way attitude
that so often characterizes the fundamentalist perspective.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to be that simple?” she remarked,

with the kind of irony that only results from a successful
disidentification from persona. “Simple, rich, and gorgeous.
And Gt)d knows Tammy Faye is gorgeous.”
“So there isn’t any danger of your leaping back into a

Persona Identification 53
Tammy Faye kind of life, you know, helpmeet to your man,
your only goal in life to look beautiful.”
She smiled wryly. “Not in this lifetime, even if I

wanted to.” She paused. “Which, for all the shit IVe been
through, I most certainly don’t.”

Phase 3: Putting the New Persona to Use

As one might expect, the final phase of work in therapy,

especially as its pertains to the persona issues faced by An-

drew and Betty, is often one which for the most part occurs
outside of the therapy office and is almost always, in the
case of authentic healing, a relatively quiet and natural
course of events that unfolds in the patient’s outer life as

the balance between persona and self is lived out. Some-

times this spadework, this preparation of psychological
ground, yields a synchronicity or two, but in contrast to
what we are conditioned to expect from Hollywood or nov-
els, the consolidation phase of this piece of individuation is

almost always a case of life’s not imitating art.

For someone like Andrew, very much in the first half

of his life, a long, drawn-out classical analysis of many years
and many tears is not where the bulk of his individuation
process could be or should be occurring. As Jung himself
puts it with reference to analysis with younger people, “Our
task in handling a young person is different from the task
of handling an older person. In the former case, it is enough
to clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and
ascent . . or in another place, “For young people a libera-

tion from the past may be enough: a beckoning future lies

ahead, rich in possibilities. It is sufficient to break a few

bonds; the life-urge will do the rest.”"^

Having gotten down to the business of knowing him-

self and working artistically from this humbler but consid-

54 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

erably more enlivened attitude, Andrew began to use our

sessions as a kind of weekly update on the activities and

relationships he was slowly becoming involved in. In partic-
ular, a romance that struck up between him and a woman
in his circle of friends absorbed a great deal of our time in
sessions, and I began to feel less like a depth psychologist
and more like the handmaiden/companion in a Shakespeare

play to whom the hero or heroine pours out their heart —

situation which is entirely appropriate as the focus shifts

from inside to outside in the analysis of a young person.

Consequently, our relationship neared what I have
come to call an organic termination, that is, an endpoint
determined by the patient’s inner process rather than by the
unfortunately all too frequent external circumstances that
force many people to end their work, such as relocations,
financial circumstances, and so on. In case either of us
missed the point, his dream life began serving up images of
packing suitcases, buying tickets for a trip, and waiting in
train stations, though it was a dream of my own which
finally led me to initiate a discussion of ending: In this very

simple dream I am hugging Andrew, silently but with an

unspoken “good-bye” very much in the atmosphere of the
dream.
“So people really do finish therapy, eh?” he said wryly,
after I wondered aloud in the next session following my
dream whether he might be at the point of wanting to be
heremore than needing to.
I had to laugh. “Oh, yes. People do end their work.”
“Well, it has been feeling a little like it’s time to move
on.” Here his persona and self came together as he looked
me in the eyes and very simply said, “Thank you.”
In Betty’s case, because it combined elements of mid-
life trahsition as well as the already mentioned persona and
recovery issues, the latter phase of our work was a much

Persona Identification 55
longer process. However, the persona work that dominated
much of our early work did in fact pay off, again in ways
that were evident mostly outside of the consulting room.
Pressured some by the financial settlement with her
husband in which marital support would last one year, she
managed to find a position as a teacher’s assistant in a local
private elementary school. This work, like all work with
young children, required a level of spontaneity, honesty,
and presence which very quickly refined the new persona
she had built for herself, requiring her to be hard and un-
yielding when discipline was needed, soft and caring when
empathy was needed. Balancing all this, as with Andrew’s
work, meant for Betty that the whole first year of her teach-
ing post put our sessions very much on what some call a
“counseling level” of therapeutic work, that is, with me act-
ing less as soul guide and more as mentor or teacher. With-
out certain prejudices toward introverted modes of working
or preconceptions concerning what analysis “should” be,
she and I worked together on the many very practical prob-

lems of her first job: what to do with annoying co-workers,

how to discipline the children effectively yet fairly, how to

organize her personal life to enable her to work with a mini-

mum of stress. She began to make friends who knew noth-
ing about her previous history and, indeed, who were quite
surprised when she revealed, judiciously and at appropriate
times in trust-building, her recovery process and what had
preceded it.

A small synchronicity that occurred at this point in-

volved a friend of hers who, hearing of her Jungian work,
intrigued Betty sufficiently with the offer of a tarot reading
so that Betty went through with it, only to find that the
center card of the reading, the ego card, turned up as the

Empress, which Betty felt was a very accurate symbol for

the way she felt about herself: empowered and yet well per-

56 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

sona-ed, both a real person as well as someone with an im-
portant place in the world.
With Betty as well as Andrew, this latter phase of per-
sona consolidation reinforces the truth which come across I

again and again: that psyche can as easily be met outside as

inside. For Betty, though, who unlike Andrew was at a

more advanced stage of life, our successful work on the per-

sona opened the way to another phase of analytic work and
indeed the more classic Jungian phase encountered at mid-
life, a confrontation with the unconscious. Thus, our work

did not end but simply changed form yet again, deepening
in ways that her secure outer place in the world quite help-
fully grounded and anchored.

Conclusion
As my work with Andrew and Betty has illustrated, when
dealing with a process of disidentifying from a persona, the
development of more accurate persona goes very much
a

hand in hand with the development of a more accurate

sense of self. In all of the above dreams, the persona issues,

though evident, are closely wedded to images of the devel-

oping self, for example in Betty’s dreams of animals in
transformation or Andrew’s work in preparing the door to
walk through. In the next chapter, we will be examining
this conjunction of persona work and individuation from
the perspective of those individuals who, unlike Andrew
and Betty, find themselves without a functional persona
and who, while spared the pain of persona removal, there-
fore encounter an equally poignant set of challenges and
difficulties.

Persona Identification 57
 3 .

Lack ofPersona

From the realm of persona identification and its re-

moval, gentle or ruthless, we move to the other extreme,

the patient who enters therapy with little or no persona
developed. Jung’s characterization of such people, “soulful
bores or appealing children, . . . spectral Cassandras,
dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood . . .

hopeless dreamers,” conveys quite well the social effect of

personalessness. As we will be seeing in this chapter, how-
ever, the psychic and emotional reality of living without a
persona, or with a severely inadequate one, can be consider-
ably more serious and more anguishing.
As with persona identification, the same two points of
work hold true for the person entering therapy due to the
lack of a persona. First, there needs to be the development
of awareness that something is missing, a consciousness-
raising process which can at times be slow in that it requires

an awareness of an absence rather than the identification of

an active, present dynamic. Flow can one miss something
which one has never had? As always with persona issues,

feedback from other people, their responses or lack thereof,

including the therapist’s own reflections to the patient of
what he or she experiences with the patient in the room, is

vital in developing the kind of awareness of this lack of

persona which lays the foundation for the next step,
namely, the development and use of a workable, authentic
persona. Though this phase of persona-development work

58
may be as frustrating for the persona-less patient as for the
persona-identified one, my experience has been that the for-
mer is often in a freer and more open position to experi-
ment and try on different personas, for unlike the persona-
identified patient, she or he is unencumbered with a previ-

ous social role which has spelt security.

To illustrate what this type of persona pathology looks
like and how psychotherapy can contribute to its healing,

we will be meeting two other patients. Carlo and Diana.

Phase 1: Awareness
With a personal manner that probably would be character-
ized by most people as “shy,” Carlo had come to therapy at

the behest of his girlfriend who, as he described her, seemed

about as contentedly aimless as he but whose experience
with her therapist was resulting in a vague sense of wanting
more of a commitment. In taking his family history,. I

found that this youngest child of an Italian-American fam-

ily was a good example of a trend recently made much of
by the media, an adult at age thirty-three living at home
with his parents, working at a minimum-wage job, and pay-

ing only nominal rent. Though a common pattern in coun-

tries with Latin cultures, here in the United States such a
situation is usually viewed as either evidence of America’s
continuing economic decline or of psychological problems,
either for the individual or for the family system as a whole.

In either case, the situation is not seen as good.

Carlo, though, him about how living at
when I asked
home was for him, did not at first seem to mind it that
much. That he was living the life more typical of a person
half his age was, in his mind, really not the presenting prob-
lem, which illustrates the prime difficulty in working with
someone with an undeveloped persona: it seemingly hadn’t

Lack of Persona 59
occurred to Carlo that his life might be different, since,

having never been encouraged to develop a persona, he was

not overtly troubled by not having one. On the other hand,
from his report, it 'appeared to me that his parents were
instead living out the conflict that should have been his.
His mother was very tied to the idea of Carlo’s continuing
to live at home, “I am her baby,” he told me quite disingen-
uously in our first session, while he depicted his father as

very vocal about how shameful and onerous it was to have

an adult son still living in his childhood bedroom. “Dad
tends to yell a lot, you have a hard time missing him,” he
said, leading me to think that Dad might have more of a
persona that one person could fully use. The middle way,

which Carlo appeared to have come upon quite uncon-

sciously, was not to develop a persona, to stay in a kind of

inchoate confusion about who he was and what he wanted,

so that both mother and father could be appeased and held
off In diagnostic terms. Carlo would probably be assessed
as having an “identity disorder,” again a label most often
applied to adolescents and young adults.

This assessment was buttressed by what I beheld in the

room, since his personal manner in session reflected this

lack of persona development. Sloppily though cleanly

dressed (clean, I imagined, only because Mom did the laun-
dry at home). Carlo’s wardrobe, I came to find, consisted

entirely of old jeans and white T-shirts. A head of long,

straight black hair hung down in front of his eyes, and his

beard and moustache seemed perpetually half-grown. He

never met my gaze directly but rather sat in the chair facing

me obliquely, feet stretched out so that to look at me he

would have to look out the side of his eyes from beneath

his hair. He neither smiled nor frowned, but wore a simple

expression that to me seemed somewhere between wonder
and bewilderment. He usually m.umbled when he spoke.

60 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

and even when I asked him once or twice to repeat what he
had said, not having heard it clearly, he still mumbled. But
I do not mean to give the impression that this presentation

reflected Carlo’s persona — as it would, say, with an adoles-

cent whose sloppiness and mumbling represent an attempt
at a rebellious or unconventional persona — for this man
seemed truly unconscious of his body or his appearance.

When I would draw his attention to his mumbling or the

way he was sitting or how hard it was for him to look at me
directly, far from becoming defensive, he seemed almost a
little surprised that I actually noticed him.
Starting with these small, initial attempts on my part
to foster self-awareness, first on just the gross physical level

and nearly exclusively concerning what was occurring in the

room, I eventually made such suggestions an even more ex-

plicit part of our therapeutic agenda, proposing that part of
our therapy process might mean his attending more closely
to himself, physically as well as emotionally. Carlo greeted

this idea with the same kind of innocent wonderment that

was his response to most of my emphatic mirroring, as if he

was hearing something quite novel, something that he had

never contemplated before. “I didn’t think of that,” he said
more than once in the course of our beginning relationship,
smiling a somewhat fetching little half-smile. For my part,
this childlike way he had about him, completely genuine
and unrehearsed, endeared him to me and more than miti-
gated the empty, unfocused feel of our initial sessions.

His description of the way his parents treated him in

childhood, as well as their contemporary behavior toward
him, reminded me, strangely, of the way people treat a pet,

an innocuous living presence that is always around and is

regarded with a great deal of affection but not really taken

seriously. His mother simply seemed to assume that he
would accompany her on various errands, not informing

Lack of Persona 61
him at all in advance of her plans but merely gesturing, or
so Carlo told me, toward him, which gave him to under-
stand he was to follow her. Indeed, when I asked aloud, “So
she hadn’t told you she was going to the store, but expected
you to know that and to come with her without saying a
word to you about . . . he gave me a silent look, which I

took to mean, “You mean there is something unusual about

this?” His father, according to Carlo’s report, did not inter-
act with him much. The rare occasions when Carlo’s father
did refer to him were almost always in a conversation with
Carlo’s mother and then, of course, using third person pro-
nouns. His two older brothers, whose names I did not learn
for many months, had evidently left home many years ago
and had little to do with the family. Given the strange mix-
ture of maternal enmeshment and paternal neglect, it be-
came rapidly clear to me why Carlo’s level of persona
development seemed stuck somewhere in early childhood.
His first reported dream came many, many months
into the initial phase of our work, which, at once a week,
consisted mostly of what I call reportage, that is, the chroni-
cling of daily events which seems to be what many patients
think therapists want to hear, to which I nearly always re-
spond by attempts to lift up the various feelings behind the
words. This affectless reportage, typical of but by no means
exclusive to men, finally gave way to a brief and not excep-
tionally encouraging dream:

There is a house without walls, and I am afraid to look

under the floor because I can hear animals.

Expectably sparse, the dream raised a few questions in

my mind after Carlo told me about it. The first questions,
as is often the case, had mostly to do with my need to see
the dream image as clearly and as close to what the patient
himself had experienced. Though some people experience

62 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

my requests for rather minute descriptions a bit burden-
some, I think that this fleshing out of the image and dream
experience serves the development of the patient’s own con-
sciousness of these hitherto unconscious symbols.
“Help me see this, Carlo. This house without walls, is

it like a platform?”
“No, there was a little bit of framing around. Like it

was under construction.”

“Framing? You mean, beams, crossbeams . . .
?”

“Some vertical boards, mostly along the outside, and

one doorway, it looked like.”

“So no roof, siding, whatnot . . .

?”

“No, nothing.”
“And you said you were afraid of the animals under-
neath. Were you hearing them? What did they sound like?”
“Little scratching noises.”

“Like squirrels or rats . . .

?”

“Yeah, like that.” His look at me led me to feel as if it

was I who was acting very strange by wanting this level of

detail, rather than he who had had this dream, told me
about it, and then appeared to have lost interest.
I kept close to my own curiosity, an indispensable
asset in the therapist’s psychic armamentarium. “So no real

big animals, no roaring, barking . . .

?”

“No, little animals.”

I let a moment or two go by, to switch from the mun-
dane to the more emotional level of the dream. “What were
you afraid would happen if you looked?”
“Well, first of all. I’d have to tear up the floor, but I

guess that wouldn’t be so bad, since the place is not done

anyway. But I’m thinking like I might get bitten or some-
thing.”
“You could just look,” I suggested,
“Yeah, I guess.”

Lack of Persona 63
 “What kind of animals do you think are down there?”
“I dunno, squirrels, maybe, chipmunks, you know,
something like that.”

“So, no rats or anything.”

“Nah, there’s nothing there to eat, so no mice or rats

or anything. No, I’d guess squirrels.” He paused, staring

into space, “So what does it mean?”
I have made a habit of not answering that question
when it is put to me, not just to avoid the implication that
I somehow know more about the patient’s psyche than the
patient himself, though in certain cases I may, but mostly
because psychological wholeness comes from the patient’s
own relationship to his unconscious contents, not mine.
Thus, I respond by trying to have the patient formulate his

own interpretation of the dream first. “What if this dream

is telling you something about yourself? What do you think
it is saying?”
He sat for a long time with the same blank expression,
so I put it another way. “What if the building in the dream
represents you?”
Again a long silence, but I could feel something mov-
ing in the mood of the room. “Then I guess I am in the

early stage of construction, huh? And there’s a lot more

beneath the surface than I think.”
I smiled. “I’d say so.”
“Hmm.” Then he gave me his trademark sidelong
glance. “You think that’s what it means?”
“Uh-huh.”
He didn’t say much more about the dream at that

point but he was clearly intrigued.

As this initial dream imagery as well as Carlo’s self-

presentation and story all indicate, to lack a persona is not

simply to lack a kind of social acceptability or a certain
savoir faire. Not to have developed a persona means not to

64 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

have developed a self. Without walls or structure, there is

no possibility of furnishing, of rooms, of interests, or of

individuality. At the very least in this first dream, we had a
floor, a standpoint of some sort but its main function in the

dream was not support but rather repression, for it served

to hold down and repress the lively, greedy squirrels which
my patient could hear scratching beneath the surface of his
everyday life. A little cheered by the rudimentary framing
he reported in place after my questioning of what really was
present in this house under construction, I felt the dream
not only encapsulated the inner psychic situation of this

man but the place we had come to in our work together, a

very early place, indeed.
Here again the major affect is fear, fear of the un-
known but undoubtedly a fear also of the walls which the
development of a persona and a self necessarily entail. In

his serene childlike bliss of complete dependence on his par-

ents, Carlo was indeed living in a house without walls,
without restriction in a wonderful kind of freedom. The
result of our therapy work, a large piece of which would be
the development of a workable, authentic persona, would
undoubtedly entail walls, division, conflict, restriction, and
separation, not just between him and his parents or him
and his girlfriend — relationships which currently existed in
a kind of conflict-free limbo for him —but between the var-
ious parts of himself that lived beneath the floor of his un-
consciousness and, almost certainly, between us, given that
the persona is formed mostly through interaction with the
Other in whatever form — other people, cultural expecta-
tions, or the demands of life. For this reason, I suspected
that a lot more than squirrels lived beneath the floorboards,
animals we would, I hoped, come to know in time.

All the same. Carlo’s ability to see this largely unbuilt

house as a symbol of his own inner psychic situation sig-

Lack of Persona 65
naled the first step toward the very important awareness of
his personalessness which was the prerequisite for any fur-

by the notion that his

ther psychic development. Intrigued
dream images might be symbols of himself, he soon began
to bring in his dreams regularly, not all that able to work
with or interpret them, but simply fascinated by the images.
If a persona was to be built, it would be founded upon
exactly the sort of individual and unique aspects of his self
which were being shown to him in his dreams.

If Carlo represented an example of the “appealing children”

type of personalessness, Diana was much more in the cate-
gory of Jung’s spectral, tactless Cassandras. A woman in her
early thirties, she decided, after reading one of my books,
that I could help her with the various problems she was
having with her husband, whom she presented, at least in
our initial phone conversation, as her major problem. The
most informative piece of our interaction, though, was not
the content of the phone conversation but rather the style
of her interaction, a nearly nonstop flow of loosely associ-
ated talk that seemed to pour forth from her. She resisted
all my attempts to get her to save some of this self-presenta-
tion for our first face-to-face session. At the end of ten min-

utes I knew in synopsis form the history not only of her

current marriage but also of her previous therapist, her for-
mer relationships, the sexual abuse she had suffered as a

child, her drug and alcohol abuse history in childhood, the

death of a pet the previous year, various work-related events
that had occurred recently in the office, her boss’s extramar-

ital dalliances, her best friend’s weight problem, as well as a

fairly florid positive transference onto me, who was un-

doubtedly the only person that could help her given the
brilliance of my various writings. As I often tell my interns,
the very first interaction with a client on the phone is a

66 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

source of great insight and information, and the unusual
quality of this particular conversation with Diana prepared
me for what was to come.
Our first session, indeed, the whole first phase of our
work together, was, as I anticipated, not all that different,
as Diana went on and on talking at me, answering questions
that I had never asked, making various none-too-compli-
mentary comments about my office furnishings, tripping

lightly onward to tell me a story about this, an observation

about that. At first I thought that this uncontained chatter
was simply the way that she, like many people, handled the
anxiety about beginning work with a new therapist, though
this patient was certainly no novice at therapy. When I
made statements to this effect, however, attempting to have
her speak less about events and information and more about
her feelings, she seemed not to understand what I was say-
ing and simply continued the thread of her latest narrative.
Curiously, there really was no sense of pressure in her
speech, a feature which might indicate mania or psychosis,
nor could I sense that faintly hostile or controlling quality
that can be present when someone will not let me get a
word in edgewise and fills the room with words in order to
blot me out of their consciousness. Rather, I came to see

that this behavior was not a defense, in the strict sense of

the term, but her normal manner of self-presentation, an
extraverted version of personalessness.
Her physical appearance bordered on the bizarre, even
for Berkeley, with wild dark-blond hair hanging down in
disarray and clothes mismatched in style, color, and gender
in a hodgepodge nowadays elaborated by well-known de-
signers into the “grunge” look but at a time way before
such a look was fashionable. On Diana, it looked simply
weird to be wearing a man’s flannel shirt with a pink gauze
skirt, with huge hoop earrings and black pumps without

Lack of Persona 67
stockings, a combination dictated not by consciousness of
personal style but simply by random chance. She seemed
not to care about her oddness, though, and I could well
believe that any strange looks she might get on the street

would simply escape her.

Given her fairly chaotic family history, a full picture
of which I had to assemble like a mosaic from the various
disorganized bits and pieces she provided me over the
course of months, it made sense that she had never devel-
oped a workable persona, nor indeed a persona of any sort.

Virtues so much prized by therapists, such as containment,

propriety, tolerance, and discrimination, did not exist in

her household. Her alcoholic parents, whose various trou-

bles necessitated a relocation every year or two, alternately

neglected and abused their two children, with the result

that Diana laid herself bare to whomever or whatever came
her way in a desperate attempt to be seen and heard. What
she called her “promiscuous” period had come to an end
with her marriage to a computer engineer, whose long
hours atwork and self-absorption greatly troubled her, and
so she had come into therapy, yet again, for a solution.
Unlike those for whom this way of acting might actu-
ally constitute a persona of sorts, she responded blankly
whenever I reflected on the way she spoke and acted in our

session. Despite her many bouts of therapy, it was almost

as if she had never really thought about herself Whereas
other people might a little uncomfortably acknowledge
their “vivaciousness” or “energy” when I observe how
much they seem to have to tell me about themselves, Diana,
from all appearances, had never considered who she was,
nor how others perceived her, and her descriptions of her
relationships indicated that this near-complete uncon-
sciousness on her part had been accepted by those close to

her. For example, Tony, her husband, she said, considered

68 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

her “flighty,” though she herself didn’t get what he was
talking about, but her best friend, she reported, appreciated
her “spontaneity.”
One of Diana’s early dreams is almost too obvious to
require interpretation:

I am driving a big bus on my way to my brother-in-law’s

house when I suddenly have to stop. So I get out and begin
walking down a big street, and I am naked. But it really

isn’t a problem, until I meet a friend of mine who is going

to be going to the party too, and she suggests that I might
want to put on some clothes. I laugh at the suggestion. I

feel so free.

“It would be so excellent to do that, really, you know,

just walk down the street without clothes. I loved it in the

dream, really, really. In fact, since the dream I have kinda

thought about it at various times.” Here she erupted into a
fit of giggling. “Like now.”
“You mean, to be here with me without any clothes
on?” I clarified.

“Yes, don’t you think it would be wild?'' And again

she erupted in giggling.
Having come to recognize that many of Diana’s ques-
tions were really oblique statements of feeling rather than
actual inquiries, I knew I could avoid answering and she
would take no offense. Instead, I returned to the dream.
“Why do you think your friend suggests putting clothes on,
then? Is that friend particularly uptight or . . .
?”

“No way. No way. Tina is like totally cool. I really

love her. She’s just being like, you know, protective.” Diana
rolled her eyes at this.

“You made a face. Do you think she shouldn’t be so

protective?”
“Well, you gotta get, like, Tina’s groove, which is

Lack of Persona 69
pretty straight arrow but really right on, too. She runs this
whole office in Oakland and is, like, really put together.
Everyone likes her.”

“So you like her, too?”

“Totally.” Then a sudden turn into insight as she re-

membered something I had said from a previous session.

“I’m just thinking, what if I could be like Tina?”

I thought that that might be a good object for a bit

of reflection, so I simply reinforced it. “Sure. What if you

were?
A long silence ensued as the mood of the room
changed yet again. I could feel Diana’s quiet sadness.
“Maybe I would have more friends, maybe people wouldn’t
think I was so strange. Maybe Tony would spend more time
at home.”
“Well, Diana, you know, that’s kind of the thing
about clothes,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s fun without

them, but if you want to go to a party and fit in, it’s proba-
bly a good idea to wear them. I think you might feel a little

too naked without them, don’t you?”

She nodded her head, absorbed with the thought.
While Diana’s public nakedness is of course an alto-

gether apt representation of the very personalessness that

characterized her, her associations to her capable friend
Tina gave me reason to hope that a little bit more of a

contained sense of self might be in the offing. Despite her

lability, the very sober quality that the session took on when
she began to work with the more subjective level of the

dream also indicated a dawning awareness of her lack of

persona. From this platform of consciousness, my hope was
to help Diana build a more stable and useful way of being
in the world.

70 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

Persona Development and Use
As both Carlo and Diana make clear, the therapeutic work
around personalessness has one advantage that work with
persona identification does not have, namely, that in start-

ing with a tabula rasa, one has a kind of excitement, free-

dom, and creativity in the process of persona development
which is often very motivating for the patient and the thera-

pist. Persona development can be a process of discovery and

choice which the patient often experiences as quite empow-
ering and more than a little fun, once the lack of a persona
and the necessity of having one is brought to the patient’s
consciousness and integrated as syntonic.
For Carlo, the initial house dream was followed by a
very long series of construction dreams that followed over
the course of nearly two and a half years of work. Together,
by focusing on his inner life through dreamwork and active
imagination, he and I watched as a self and consequently a
persona was built symbolically from the ground up.

I am hiking in the Oakland hills with a friend, and on a

little green knoll we come upon the foundation of a house
that looks like it was just poured. He and I look in the hole,
the basement of the house, and I think how clean it is,

smooth, how it will never be that clean again.

Carlo’s main association to this particular dream was

a kind of wistfulness at the never-again quality of the foun-

dation’s pristine condition. “Soon it will be covered over

and lived in.” He looked at me with soulful brown eyes.

“It’s kind of sad.”

I sat with the feeling in the room, with many thoughts
in my head, mostly at how fitting Carlo’s sadness was. To
grow is, as he was finding out, to lose the free, childlike

Lack of Persona 71
innocence in which he had been living. “All growth is loss
on a deeper level, isn’t it?” I said, attempting not to sound
overly oracular or wise but rather to meet him in his insight.
“But tell me what, it is like to see a foundation, a potential
home.”
He smiled very slightly. “Exciting. In fact, it’s all too
perfect, since my girlfriend and I have been talking about
finding a place together.”
“Ajid moving out of your parents’ house.”
As Carlo’s adult personality began to form in our rela-
tionship, I remained consistently taken by the level of sub-
tlety he was capable of, as with this rather momen-
tous statement, delivered only with a little grin and a direct
^ ‘‘AT" ”
Stare. Yes.

“Which is probably, given this dream, both sad and

exciting, I would imagine.”
Once again, only a small acknowledgment. “Yes.”

I am carrying two-by-fours, big stacks of them on my

shoulders to a construction job that a crew of gay men is

working on. I am surprised how, even though they are

heavy, they don’t hurt my shoulders.

Here was the sort of dream that challenges therapist

and client, in that its closeness to reality makes it hard to
see in a symbolic or inner light, for it followed Carlo’s first

week on his first job, not as construction worker per se but

rather as a kind of clerk/gofer for a large property manage-
ment firm, which in a somewhat synchronistic fashion came
his way through a neighbor in the apartment building
where he and his girlfriend had taken a place together.

After his somewhat dry delivery of the dream and a

short exchange on the literal, objective situation which it

clearly reflected, I mused aloud on the detail in the dream

72 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

that, for a heterosexual man, might be the most powerful.
“What do you make of the construction crew being gay?”
He grew thoughtful. “You know, I didn’t really pay
much attention to that part of the dream. These guys
weren’t really fern or anything. It was a sense of solidarity,

mostly, between them.”

“Does that reflect the way you may be feeling?”
“To tell the truth, yes. Now that I have my own job
and my own place, I feel more like I can hold my own with
other guys. This week, it was just like everyone treated me
very naturally, like it was completely normal to work, to
earn your own living, to have your own house. I guess that’s
a little like being gay — you know, aman among men.”
Six months into the job, after a promotion to office
manager, following the unexpected leave of the former
manager. Carlo’s dream life continues the thread:

Iam the foreman on a construction job. It is sunset and I

am feeling some pressure around having to decide whether

or not to put a door or a window in this particular place.
The house is framed and some of the wallboard is even up.
I need to figure it out before nightfall.

As the changes of his outer life consolidated his sense

of himself in the world, this sense of pressure in the dream
made me a bit concerned over the timing of all of this.
Though Carlo had certainly begun at a place rather delayed
in his development, the dream had me wondering if it all

was not too much too soon. “How is it to have to decide

this on a deadline?”
“Well, not fun, but a little exciting all the same. I have
found that I kind of like the crunches at work. You know,
it gives you a sense of being alive, and I have found out a
lot of stuff about myself”
“Like?”

Lack of Persona 73
 “Well, like I don’t really freak out too easily. Someone
at work called me ‘unflappable.’ So I have the feeling in this
dream, you know, ‘I’ll get it done. Don’t worry. Be
happy.’ ” He paused. “I’ve also realized that I am not really
my father in this way. Mom always used to tell me how
like

much I was like my father, but it isn’t really true. I am very

different. Dad gets excited over anything. Me, I just sort of
cruise through. It gets done.”

“What do you make of the door or the window?”

He laughed. “Baby, I am going places!”

The next dream in the series gave us a clue where

Carlo was headed:

I am meditating in the center of a large, square, empty

room that has no roof, so I can see the blue sky above me.
I feel like I have just moved in or am in the last stage of
moving out.

Carlo’s sense of the dream, as the images themselves

make clear, was one of an overwhelming experience of bal-
ance. “It is as if everything is settled and at peace. There are
walls, and there is sky. There is me, and there is nature.
There is light, and there is shadow. There is sadness, and
there is anticipation.”
The very regularity and consistency of this inner imag-
ery, as if Carlo’s unconscious was indeed working on its

own timetable of construction, was a source of wonder for

both of us. Though Jungian thought places much emphasis
on the examining and interpreting dream series, as opposed
to individual dreams. Carlo’s series of house dreams, each
time with clear indication of work accomplished, was
unique in my experience. These dreams began to give Carlo

a sense of his own personality and a sense of power. That

such dreams could be attributed to no one else, not his

74 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

parents, not his friends, helped Carlo feel that indeed he
had a personality and consequently could in fact be his own
person. Our therapeutic shorthand, derived from this pow-
erful dream series, was that Carlo could “build his own
house and live in it.” The external changes in his life — the
job, the apartment, and with these, a slow but quite notice-
able change in appearance from grungy adolescent to a
good deal more neat, well-dressed adult — ^were the outward
manifestations of the ever-growing internal structure, a per-
sona built up from the inside out.
All, however, was not simply rosy as the psyche offered
up its process. As some of the sadness of the dreams above
make clear, each step forward brought up with it a darker
and more difficult side as well. Much of Carlo was afraid of
the responsibility of this construction. As we took the
dream series seriously and spent much time in session and
in active imagination around the experience of actually
building and living in a house of his own design, the weight
of the responsibility, the choices, and the commitment was
at times felt as heavy, almost crushing, despite his basic con-
fidence in his ability to handle it. Expectably, one very sa-
lient way his ambivalence about this process was expressed
came primarily through a transference onto me.
One of Jung’s major disagreements with his mentor
Freud was about the place of transference in the therapeutic
process. Freud believed that the transference — to put it sim-
ply, the patient’s experience of the therapist as if he or she
were a figure from the patient’s past —held the key to heal-
ing in the analytic relationship, because it allowed patient
and therapist to experience past trauma in the present
within a situation that allowed for a working through of
these difficulties to the point of a healthier resolution, in
contrast to the neurotic solution that most patients brought
in as their best attempt to cope with the original trauma.

Lack of Persona 75
To this end, much of Freudian psychoanalytic technique is

designed to foster and maintain the patient’s transference

onto the therapist, hence the therapist’s relative anonymity,
the use of the couch, and the single-minded focus on the
occurrences, feelings, and interchanges within the room be-
tween therapist and patient.

Jung felt otherwise about the transference. Although

he acknowledged that it is an unavoidable phenomenon in
most therapeutic relationships, he felt that it represents the
patient’s inability to perceive reality, since the therapist is

not actually the person from the past that the patient is

experiencing him or her to be. Thus, Jung considered it

important to address transference in the therapeutic rela-

tionship when it occurred but felt very strongly that it was

detrimental to encourage or focus upon it to the exclusion
of the patient’s ability to perceive reality and meet the ther-

apist as a person. To Jung introduced modifica-

this end,

tions to psychoanalytic practice, abandoning the use of the

couch in favor of a face-to-face positioning of the therapist
and patient in a more natural, human setting; focusing on
whatever the patient’s concerns were in either outer or inner
life, rather than insistently directing the course of the thera-
peutic conversation toward the therapeutic interaction and
its vicissitudes; and dealing with transference only when it

occurred between therapist and patient.

As Carlo consolidated his outer life, the shadow side

of this growth took the shape of a particular kind of trans-

ference onto me. Specifically, he began to experience me as

confining and controlling and began to feel as if he needed

to behave in ways within our relationship that would coun-
teract what he felt was my parental manner toward him. As
his sense of self developed, a persona did indeed emerge and
began to be put to use in opposition to what was perceived
as my “demanding” that he come to sessions, my “insist-

76 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

ing” that he pay me, and my refusal to “permit” him to
take vacations or breaks from therapy. Consequently, he
began to come late to sessions or propose long breaks from
therapy, and my attempts to explore or discuss his feeling
around these things were simply seen as reinforcement of
the accuracy of his perception that I wished to control him.
Part of me realized that perhaps he needed to see me this

way, to get a sense of his strength, to feel separate after a

long period of connection which had enabled him to

change in quite unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, it was a
difficult transference to carry, given how successful our
work had been.
The picture was filled out, though, by the fact that I

was not at all the sole recipient of this testing. He began to

confront his parents when they criticized or infantilized
him, and in fact, after one blowup, he severed contact with
them completely for nearly six months. His boss, whom he
had always liked and enjoyed, suddenly began to be per-
ceived as “picky,” “uptight,” and “unfair.” We made a bit
of progress on resolving the transference with me by my
consistency in drawing the parallels between this situation
and ours so that it began to dawn on Carlo that the menace
was not simply outside in the form of all these controlling
parental figures but rather that a part of him had an invest-

ment in setting us all up as straw men to test his strength

and his newfound self. It began slowly to sink in that with

me at least he was always free to go, that his lateness did

not result in my retaliating or throwing him out of therapy,

and that I was not his father who controlled with criticism
or his mother who controlled through smothering and
love.

One night, before our session, he arrived early at my

office after a hard day at work and settled into his car to

take a short nap, during which a very impressive image

Lack of Persona 77
came to him in that liminal state between sleep and wake-
fulness:

I felt my body rise upward, stretching out from inside, like

I was expanding, until my outer skin split and became like
a loose, lifeless exoskeleton, as if I were an insect coming
out of the larva stage, stretching, stretching, upward and
upward.

Synchronistically, I had picked a calla lily from my

garden and had placed it in a vase next to my chair, so that
upon Carlo’s report of the dream, he pointed to the flower
and said, “The feeling and image was like that flower
upward, emerging, beautiful.”
This riveting image, so phallic in its symbolism and so
moving in its power, sat between us in silence for many,
many minutes as the endpoint of one phase of our relation-
ship together. We didn’t say much in that session; what
really could be said in words that could possibly improve
upon what the unconscious had given Carlo in the dream?
But I silently went over who this man had been when I first
laid eyes on him and who he had become. From a boy, even

less than a boy really, he had become both a man and a

person. And we sat together for a long time and looked at

one another.

For Diana, whose personalessness had created a lack of con-

tainment that seemed to border on self-destructiveness, her
somewhat bumpy initial commitment to our work together,
not helped at all by her checkered therapeutic history,

brought forth from me a consistent effort to redirect her

attention within the session to her own problems and not
those of everyone else she knew. The effectiveness of this
redirected attention, simple as it may seem technically, re-
sulted in the kind of fear for Diana that the persona-identi-

78 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

fied patient often feels in such a case, an altogether
necessary experience of her very real vulnerability.
Thus, as always with people whose fears are para-

mount, we proceeded simply, that is, with mere awareness.

We catalogued the ways in which she automatically at-
tempted to protect herself in her relationship with me and
with others. Her primary defense was through flight, that

is, fleeing relationship by only pretending to be present, and

on this point I was tipped off in an unexpected direction
during one session when she mentioned a whole host of
childhood flying dreams. She reported these dreams to me
with great affection, but she sadly told me that she no
longer had such dreams, leading me to think that she was
now acting out her flight in her real life by being in a distant
relationship with a not-too-present husband, by a host of
superficial friendships, and eventually even in her relation-

ship with me. It was usual for Diana to be at least five

minutes and sometimes up to twenty minutes late for our
appointments. When I wondered aloud about this, linking
it to the fears we had been discussing around her being
focused upon and seen by others, she at first denied and
rationalized the lateness but came to see that fear was again
behind it, referring to her important initial dream. “I feel
like to come here and talk to you is showing up naked. I

feel embarrassed and ashamed.” As difficult as the feelings

may have been for her to tolerate, I counted this as progress,

for her first take on that dream was quite a bit different and
a good deal more unconscious, a change of heart on her
part which illustrated how dream interpretation is certainly
not a “once for all time” affair but that dreams are symbols
whose meanings evolve over time.
Another favored defense we discovered was distrac-
tion, mostly in the form of doing too much at any one time.
Interestingly enough, as with Betty in chapter 2, much of

Lack of Persona 79
our work around Diana’s distracting defenses centered
upon that most persona-based of all experience, her appear-
ance. When Diana was wounded by a co-worker’s comment
concerning her “eclectic personal style,” which she took to
mean “sloppy,” I had her describe how she felt as she got
dressed and came upon a kind of pressure she felt to bring
all the various parts of herself together in an outfit all at

once. At this point she reported a dream she’d had some

months before that popped into her mind:

My best friend and I are shopping. I see a dress, then a

baseball jacket, then a sweater. My friend is surprised when

I tell her that I don’t have to choose, I can afford them all.

“But you know, I don’t really have that feeling, that I

can afford them. It’s more like I have to buy them all and
wear them all at once.”
“Or else?” I wondered.
“Or I’ll just be naked!” She sat there, looking at me, a
pained, almost stricken expression on her face.

Here I thought that a bit of active imagination might

help. “What if you spend some time this week just imagin-
ing putting on each one of those things one at a time.”
“Like first the dress, then the jacket, and then the
sweater, separately?”
“Exactly.”
She mused on this a bit. “Or you know, I might just

want to try it in real life.”

“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I might just want to get a dress out of

the closet, put it on, then just put on the jacket, and then
just a sweater.”

Even better, I thought to myself “How do you imag-

ine that would feel?”

80 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

 “I don’t know. Probably strange. It makes me anxious.
“Anxious about what?”
She laughed. “God, I might just be boring.”
“Or people might be able to finally see Diana and not
”
just your ‘eclectic personal style.’

She nodded, understanding.

It turned out that despite the appropriateness of this

little exercise, Diana didn’t do a thing either with the active

imagination or the actual clothes. Instead, the movement

forward took an entirely psychic form, for that week she

dreamt:

Pm fifty pounds heavier, and my brother and I find a rock

with a strip of fat or resin, underneath which are many,
many jewels, in particular a pearl, which we bring to a mu-
seum and put in a showcase.

This dream experience of herself as heavier, interest-

ingly enough, brought forth none of the conscious fear of

weight or food that she sometimes spoke of with regard to
her periodic fasting —one form of her undoing—but rather

a more grounded, richer, plusher experience of herelf, en-

tirely consonant with the imagery of jewels and the variety

of clothes she could now inwardly afford.
“I had the sense,” she said in her characteristically

breathless, rushed manner, “that it was really nice to be big.

I felt more powerful, you know, imposing.” She giggled.

“Ajid I really liked the clothes!”

The experience of choice represented in the dreams —

choice of jewels, a choice of clothes — is an important piece
of individuation. Frances Wickes’ classic seminar on the
subject begins with a profound insight into how basic

choice is to our humanity:

Lack of Persona 81
 The art of living is, in its essential meaning, a development
and transformation of the power of inner choice. It is of all
creative arts the most difficult and the most distinguished.
Its products are fashioned in the workshop of the soul

whose windows open upon inner and outer worlds. . . .

Man wins the right to this choice of what he inwardly cre-

ates by bringing to consciousness something hitherto a pos-
session of the unconscious, withheld by an ancient god.
Choice is not only a gift, but a theft, an act of primal
disobedience. . .
.^

On a banal level, the dream represented how simple

awareness of herself allowed Diana the possibility of choos-
ing and having in a way she had not really ever sensed.
Without conscious choice all else followed —her bizarre,

random manner of dress, her periodic refusal of food, and

her inability to discriminate and thus to direct the flow of
her thoughts, resulting in flights and distractions. Through
these two dreams, the unconscious stressed the giftlike as-

pect of the self she was becoming aware of. Unlike Carlo’s
process, which was one of assiduous semiconscious con-
struction, Diana’s growth was coming as an objet trouve,

something bestowed, something she needed to actively

accept.
It was this development of awareness in Diana, aware-

ness of her defenses as well as awareness of her inner self,

that laid the basis for the slow development of a sturdier

persona in Diana, which in turn resulted in the expectable
negative transference tangles between us as she put her per-
sona to use with me and against me. Her transference, how-
ever, took on a form not uncommon among survivors of

abuse, one in which I began to be experienced as the abu-

sive parent, in her case, alternately neglectful and intrusive,

an abusive parent to whom she felt, in her newer sense of

self, she could and should stand up to.

82 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

 An example of her transferential experience of me as

intrusive occurred one day, when commenting about her

lateness, something which I did with great regularity and
very conscious neutrality, she turned to me with a com-
pletely uncommon edge to her voice and said firmly, “It is

my hour, isn’t it?”

Unused to displays of strength and directness from

this woman, I nevertheless heard the tone in her voice and
felt called to an equally direct response. “It is.”

“Then,” she said quite calmly, “I can choose to be late

if I want to, can’t I?”

""Are you choosing to be late?”

“Yes. Today, I had an important phone call and so I

simply decided to finish and get here when I get here.”

cc-p>»
rme.
She sat back and observed me with hawkish eyes. Si-

lence reigned.
“I take it,” I said, “you have feelings about my notic-
ing the lateness.”
“I feel that it is my business, not yours.”
I smiled inwardly as I noticed my own countertrans-
ference response, as very critical thoughts began to float
through my head, picking apart her statements, wanting to
point out inconsistencies. She had engaged me, and I liked
it. Put another way, her persona had paved the way for an
actual relationship and connection between us, replete with
tension and negotiation. Having been put in my place, I
merely sat with her as the hour unfolded. We didn’t say
much, but both of us felt very much in the room.
On the side, the transferential experience of me as ne-

glectful came through in a long, equally troubling series of

dreams about me. My own rule of thumb is to see the first

dreams about the therapist as a sign of the formation of a

true working alliance, an indication that the patient is actu-

Lack of Persona 83
ally in the process with the therapist. For Diana, though,
her “showing up” to therapy was symbolized by a transfer-
ential experience of my not “showing up” for her with
dreams such as the following.

I came to your office but you had gone on vacation, and a

woman therapist had taken your place. I was very angry,
and I wanted a refund.

When I arrived at your office, which was in your house,

you kept leaving our session to make preparations for a
party in the backyard, a party where guests were arriving
and I knew I wasn’t invited. I was confused, and my feel-
ings were hurt a little.

You brought your brother into a session with us. He was

older and wiser, but then the two of you began discussing
me as if I wasn’t there. I stormed out.

However problematic Diana’s personalessness may

have been, its only advantage was the complete immediacy
to unconscious experience which was its psychological leg-
acy. Thus, she experienced all of these dreams, a dozen or
so of which appeared over the course of six months, very
much as if they were outer reality, and she showed up visi-

bly, palpably angry with me. So I went along with this emo-
tional experience of me, taking to heart the insight that I so

often have to give to my interns and consultation clients,

namely, that the emergence of the negative transference is a

positive sign that the client trusts you enough to get angry

and fight. In this way, rather than interpret away these ex-
periences as “symbols” or “images,” an especially dangerous
form of countertransferential defense on the part of
Jungian-oriented therapists, we acted completely and ut-
terly in session as if I had actually done these things during

84 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

a session, since, after all, as far as Diana’s psyche was con-
cerned, I had. So she got angry, told me off, demanded that
I be more attentive, spend my time concentrating on her,
not letting my own life, my own family, or my concerns
take my awareness off her.
“I don’t want to spend my time with your brother or
your party guests. I want you here.”
To which my response was, could only be, “Here I

am.
Naturally, my vacations and absences were the locus
of great upheaval, dredging up a very primal fear for Diana
that I would die while I was away and would not come
back, but my continued presence throughout the various
storms of feeling eventually led, as with Carlo, to Diana’s
beginning to see the difference between the transferential
image of —
me abusive, neglectful, and abandoning —and
the real me, who stayed present and attentive, who did not
end the relationship or abandon her but continually came
back week after week, and who returned following vaca-
tions. This discrimination between the re-experienced
trauma and the present-day relationship brought a greater
calmness, founded upon the awareness that, now that she
was an adult, things were different from her childhood.
Moreover, this difference began to be internalized as a con-
sequence of her own actions, particularly her actions ema-
nating from her persona, that is, her ability to be in the
world with others in relationship. More simply put, she
began to feel that in showing up for the relationship, rather
than fleeing or hiding, her demands that I show up, too,
were justified and resulted in my giving her something she
had always wanted and felt she deserved — attention, care,
and love.

number of years of our work together, Diana

After a
had become a much more centered and calm person. Age
^

Lack of Persona 85
helped in this regard to some degree, but our work was an
equally large part of it. Some of her outer-world changes
had included the same sort of well-justified demandingness
toward her husband, with the result that she and her hus-
band needed couples counseling to work out the details of
how they would relate to one another if he were not com-
pulsively working and she were not playing the role of dith-
ering wife.Though she dismissed her change in wardrobe
as mere window dressing, she nevertheless found that her

more consistent appearance fit much better into the corpo-

rate culture of her workplace, so that she was considered for
and received a promotion. Many of her friendships fell by
the wayside, sometimes evoking from her the kind of anger
she had shown toward me for not showing up; other friends
just drifted away as Diana found her own company to be

sufficient.

It would be aesthetically pleasing if I were able to end

my presentation with a rich and beautiful dream from the
ending phase of our work, but there was no such dream,
and indeed, the development of Diana’s persona made
dreamwork less and less interesting and important over
time. One theory that may explain such a situation comes
from the energetic model of the psyche so dear to psychody-

namic clinicians, in which the conscious and unconscious

are seen as two realms that share a single energy source,

called libido by both Freud and Jung, so that bringing en-

ergy to consciousness deemphasizes or deflates the energy in
the unconscious, and vice versa. Thus, a highly unconscious
person has less libido available for conscious action. It may
have been that Diana’s persona enabled her to hold and
consciously use her libido, her psychic energy, so that less

was available in the unconscious. In other words, in her

living a more integrated life on the outside, she needed

86 THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

dreams less and less to compensate her consciousness. In
this way, I counted our work together a success.

Conclusion
Having emphasized, for obvious reasons, clinical work with
persona in these last two chapters, I feel somewhat obliged
to state that the development of a persona is just, in my
opinion, the middle phase of the work, for personas were
made to be used. As we have seen. Carlo and Diana, as

well as Andrew and Betty from chapter 2, continued their

individuation in various ways after the persona work had
been tacked down and completed, which leads me to point

out, without being overly rigid in this regard, of course,

that until the clinician or the patient sees change in the
outer world, the persona work, as well as the self-awareness
that undergirds the persona, is probably not done. How-
ever, I have found that it is not generally necessary to bela-
bor the point, since the acquisition of a more functional
persona based on better knowledge of the self almost always
naturally eventuates in the use of this more authentic self-

presentation. Andrew began exhibiting. Betty had devel-

oped through Alcoholics Anonymous a much more sup-
portive and available set of friends and was through
persistence and consistency even able to regain partial cus-
tody of her children. Carlo got a job and an apartment.
Diana worked through her conflicts with her husband.
While some psychoanalytically oriented purists might
sneeze at the superficiality of persona work, the result of
this therapeutic focus on the link between self-presentation
and the self that is its foundation is a life of greatly en-
hanced satisfaction. For this reason, I hold that analysis
should serve life and not vice versa and that careful atten-

tion to the persona and the ramifications of such attention

Lack of Persona 87
provide a potent corrective to the danger of what I have
termed the “overanalyzed personality,” that introverted
preciosity that occurs over the course of a long, psychody-
namically oriented analysis in which inner life is valued over
outer world rather than held in joyful balance together.
As for any concerns regarding the analytic character of
persona work, the cases of Carlo and Diana should put such
concerns to rest. As their therapist, I was privy to much of
their persona-practicing phase as both of them used their

more assertive, even aggressive personas on me, developing

the facility to correct, contradict, and even at times argue
with some of my observations, comments, or suggestions.
Though both certainly experienced me as basically trust-

worthy and consistent, and they each went through a period

of classic negative transference, not only, I felt, as a way of
working through the various ways they had been abused as

children so as to learn a different experience of relationship,

but also as a way of testing the sincerity of my acceptance
of the new, more direct persona our work had inaugurated.
Carlo fought back if he heard criticism in what I said, trying

out the newfound strength and confidence in his percep-

tions, whereas Diana and I went through a long, trying pe-
riod in which her battle around depending upon me often
felt as if I were again the incestuous, intrusive father. In
both cases, their personas, stiffer, more pointed, stronger, as

well as my own, toughened up through many hours of

being present to souls in pain, enabling us to take on these
difficult transferential experiences and resolve them. It was
as if we were breaking in the new clothes that they had
acquired for themselves, making the new shoes and jackets
more flexible, more giving, roomier, and my role was to

weather the stretching and flexing.

As I conclude this look at the clinical side of persona,

a caveat is in order. The more “depth-oriented” clinicians

88 '
THE PERSONA AND THERAPY
and readers may at this point be feeling a bit of anxiety, for
as is clear in some of the cases I have presented, a great deal
more intrapsychic conflict and wounding is present than
can be accounted for or cured with mere interventions on
the level of persona awareness, development, or use. Here I

concur. Though not overly invested in diagnostic categories

except as a helpful shorthand description of otherwise fairly
complex phenomena, I am aware that fairly serious person-
ality and other disorders will almost always feature persona
disturbances as only the most evident of the various con-
flicts and deficits with which such patients are afflicted.

However, I do not agree that the only way toward resolu-

tion of these conflicts and deficits is from the inside out,

through permitting and tolerating regression, for example,
or through a single-minded focus on the transferential rela-

tionship that such patients invariably bring to their work in

therapy. It seems to me that this introverted approach can

be and, indeed, often should be balanced by a more extra-

verted approach as well, a kind of work from the outside in,
of the sort described above.
In my opinion, the goal of therapy work for a patient

is not consciousness for its own sake, nor mere simple sup-
port through empathic presence, though these are indis-
pensable tools on the way to a life which can be more fully

an expression of one’s true self Of the many images of per-

sona that have been presented, the best to make this point
are those of house and clothing. Simply being empathically
present to someone who is homeless and without clothing is

really only half the journey. If, in their work with patients,

therapists do not help find them actual clothing and shelter

in the form of a workable persona, they are doing a grave

disservice to their clientele. On the other hand, simply pro-
viding a house and a few more stylish outfits to the patient

Lack of Persona 89
is not the magic cure either, and my focus on persona here
should not be construed as such.

In the above examples and dreams, I hoped to show

that an embrace of the outer world neither precludes nor
supersedes an embrace of the inner and that the persona is

precisely the place in the psyche where any union of the

two will occur. In our next chapter, we will be focusing on
certain groups of patients for whom the wounding of their
inner lives is derived specifically from the various ways in
which the outer world, in the form of cultural stereotypes

and prejudice, has invalidated, twisted, or attacked their

souls. In such cases the persona is not simply the first or

most obvious sector of the work of psychotherapy, soul
healing, but rather the most basic.

90 ' THE PERSONA AND THERAPY

Part Three

Cultural Politics Meets the Psyche:

The Persona and Social Outsiders
Statue of Saint Debarras from the Church of Saint-Etienne,
Beauvais, France. What appears, at first glance, to be
Christ, eventually reveals itself to be a crowned, bearded,
and rather pregnant saint — Saint Debarras, whose sexually
ambiguous persona as depicted in this highly unusual statue
reflects both the suffering and the wholeness of those whose
personas do not fit conventional social roles.
 Introduction

In examining the various clinical issues surrounding

persona in Part Two, we have stayed for the most part
within the purview of clinical psychology, treading a path
that leads from the collective unconscious to the personal
unconscious and back. In noticing how the persona was
formed (or not) in the individuals presented and how their

development and use of a more functional persona coin-

cided with the development of their self-awareness, we have
ventured beyond the individual and the therapeutic rela-

tionship only about as far as the patient’s family in order to

understand what directions and what forms these individu-
als’ healing took. In doing so, our examination of the per-
sona has remained very much in the classical tradition of

European-American depth psychology, with Jung and ana-

lytical psychology as a major contributor to this tradition

wherein the individual and his or her development within

the family of origin are used as the bases for understanding.
Of course, the various schools of depth psychology have
different theories and approaches, Freudian psychoanalysis
with its emphasis on early childhood and psychosexual de-
velopment, analytical psychology with its archetypal per-
spective on the unconscious, and so on, but all of these
schools of psychology for the most part remain distinctly
oriented toward the individual and his or her family of
origin.

There is a great deal of common sense in and theoreti-

cal justification for this approach. Given the long period of

93
dependence characteristic of human newborns, the individ-
ual family system bears the most responsibility for shaping
and directing the developing human being, and within
Western culture, the value of individual autonomy and in-

dependence is a nearly undisputed cornerstone of our con-

ception of civilization. Moreover, psychology, a field of
inquiry that, comparatively speaking, is but a relatively re-

cent addition to the panoply of Western thought, in its aspi-

ration to become a true natural science has profited from

the restriction of its perspective to the individual and the
developmental influence of the family. Such restriction not
only makes empirical research possible but, like all restric-

tions, it provides for a feeling of security and stability.

For all of this objectivity, the rather heated tone and

schismatic results of so many psychological debates over
theories and treatments is evidence that very subjective and
deeply emotional factors are bound up with psychology’s
formulations of the ways and means of the human psyche.
Though Jung himself occasionally insisted on the empiri-
cism of his own conclusions and theories, he nevertheless
consistently made room for the irrational and subjective
both in his generalizations on psychology and in his clinical

practice, where more than once he stressed the importance

of abandoning all theory when faced with an individual pa-
tient.

Theories in psychology are the very devil. It is true that we

need certain points of view for their orienting and heuristic
value; but they should always be regarded as mere auxiliary

concepts that can be laid aside at any time. We still know

so little about the psyche that it is positively grotesque to

think that we are far enough advanced to frame general

theories. We have not even established the empirical extent

of the psyche’s phenomenology.^

94 -
CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE
 In a field dominated by a quest for objectivity and a
need for linear theoretical perspectives (much of the time
merely out of an invidious desire to have psychology ac-
cepted as a natural science), Jung’s fondness for exploring
the subjective and nonlinear, the fringe areas of what he
might call the “extent of the psyche’s phenomenology,” re-
sulted in research on topics as shockingly unconventional as
alchemy and unidentified flying objects. The consequence
of this interest has meant that for a long time his analytical
psychology was but a marginal force within European and
American psychology, though its recent popularity, in the
United States in particular, might signify, among other
things, a creeping dissatisfaction with the restricted,

natural-scientific aspirations of psychology as a field.

As a gay man and a psychotherapist trained in one of

the most floridly multicultural settings in the United States,

the San Francisco Bay area of northern California, I came to

find after years of clinical work that indeed the theoretical
perspectives and clinical practices of classical depth psychol-
ogy only captured a part of what I was being faced with,
personally and professionally, on a daily basis. What was
missing from my academic and clinical training is precisely
what this chapter will be focusing on: namely, the way that
culture and society have a psychological and developmental
impact upon the individual in ways that, in my opinion,
may have even more of an effect than the individual family
constellation so dear to developmental psychology in tradi-
tional psychoanalysis. Indeed, this sociocultural impact oc-
curs not just in early childhood but persists through
adulthood and old age, that is, as long as an individual par-
ticipates in culture and society. WTiile my awareness of this
impact grew initially from becoming aware of my own ho-
mosexuality in college and the differentness that it repre-
sents culturally, socially, and politically, my continuing

Introduction 95
work with patients who, owing to race, gender, sexual ori-
entation, or other factors, stand outside the dominant
white, male-dominated, middle-class, European-American,
Christian cultural values of the United States continually
brings home to me the need for people in general and prac-
ticing clinicians in particular to recognize the psychological

impact of cultural and social factors.

Despite analytical psychology’s fondness for drawing

upon the various world religions for mythic and psychologi-
cal amplification of individual processes, very little attention
has been given, until recently, to integrating a sociopolitical
perspective into standard Jungian psychology for the indi-
viduals that clinicians are currently seeing. However, even
one of the more senior Jungian analysts, Joseph Henderson,
in writing about that layer of the unconscious which he calls

the cultural unconscious, “an area of historical memory that

lies between the collective unconscious and the manifest
culture pattern,” puts his finger directly on the great impor-

tance of taking culture fully and deeply into account analyt-

ically:

Insofar as the personal shadow is the opposite, not of the

whole ego but only of the persona, it always has a social (and
therefore cultural) aspect since the persona embodies our
need for appropriate social interaction. Therefore, a study
of unconscious cultural conditioning may become an abso-
lute necessity in order to understand certain projections
that people make upon each other.^

The persona is the place psychologically speaking

where the individual and society meet and interact, and so
naturally the persona, which is already perhaps the most
manifest portion of psyche, is nearly always the first place

where the effect of culture is seen. Indeed, one could go so

far as to say that the persona is sociopolitical by nature and

96 - CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

that persona pathology, both in the consulting room and
outside, reflects not simply individual pathology but socio-
political pathology as well. To use Henderson’s observation
from above, the persona is certainly a reflection of the indi-

vidual as well as his or her strengths, weaknesses, vices, and

virtues, but it is in addition very much a reflection of the
culture and society to which the individual belongs, along
with the shadow side of that society or culture.
That shadow side of our culture, and particularly the
exclusion of certain whole groups of individuals from the
structure of power and privilege within American society, is

what I will be using the concept of the persona to focus

upon. As a member of one of those excluded groups I have
had to experience and repair within my own psyche the
damage that this exclusion has wrought both on my persona
and my soul, but also as a practicing clinician, I am brought
this damage for understanding and healing. By looking at

persona, we will meet the shadow, the collective shadow of

what used to be called, without irony, the American dream.

Introduction 97
 People of Color and the
Dilemma ofInvisibility

Once upon a time, a very powerful metaphor dominated

the American cultural psyche, the metaphor of the melting
pot. This image, cherished by Americans of all cultural
backgrounds, for a long time expressed our attitude as a

nation toward difference, particularly cultural, racial, or

ethnic difference, with special relevance to the incoming
waves of immigrants during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The melting pot image, like all mythic
images, yields much information about the assumptions
and prescriptions behind what it meant to be American: for
example, that there was a stable structure or container into
which various diverse elements could be melted and that
the result of this process would be less a mixture or a stew

but something truly melted, that is, more fluid and ostensi-

bly more homogenous. The image was meant to be an es-

sentially harmonious one, and the tone that surrounded its

use was generally one of reassurance and peace. The as-

sumption behind this metaphor is that the parties involved

in creating this America would in fact agree to melt, as it

were, that they would see it in their own best interest to

divest themselves of their previous cultural identities, tradi-

tions, languages, customs, and so on so as to merge into the

blend of diversity that had long characterized these United
States, a political entity itself forged into a union from
wide-ranging and very different geographical regions by the

98
Founding Fathers and generations of statesmen following
them.
For the most part and for a long time, the parties were
indeed cooperative in melting, valuing their American iden-
tity more than their previous national origins, taking it

upon themselves to speak standard English rather than per-

sist in retaining their native languages, embracing new cus-

toms and ways, and turning away from the old and original.

The benefits of this melting pot for those newly arrived or

for success-oriented individuals already resident were both
the level of equality that seemed to be promised — that egal-
itarian and democratic ideal for which America was long
the shining symbol worldwide —and the opportunity for a
better and more prosperous life that such equality guaran-
teed. Anyone could be president, anyone a millionaire.
Hard work might not guarantee success but there was at
least a constitutionally guaranteed set of rights which would

not preclude or impede the rewards of hard work, better

ideas, a vision, or a dream. America was the place where the
streets were paved with gold.
As is probably evident to anyone reading these words,
the last decades of the twentieth century have consistently
chipped away at this image as an accurate, desirable, or

functional way of managing difference, and the dark side of

and inexorably been made mani-

the melting pot has slowly
The most powerful blow to this mythic image fell
fest.

when it became clear that, far from egalitarian or demo-

cratic, the United States was a nation deeply divided along
racial and economic lines. Whereas immigrants from Eu-
rope had been assimilated into a social and economic struc-
ture that, while not free from prejudice, at least managed
to accommodate them, the same was clearly not true for
immigrants from non-European countries, notably Central
and South America or Asia. Nor could it be said that long-

People of Color 99
standing residents of the United States of a race other than
Caucasian, notably “Negroes” and “Indians,” designations
subsequently updated to “blacks” and “Native Americans,”
and updated even more recently to “African-Americans”
and “indigenous peoples,” enjoyed the same educational,
social, economic, or political opportunities that ’white
Americans took to be their birthright.

If the melting pot did not provide for the kind of egal-
itarian opportunities that constituted so much of America’s
mythic appeal, then what would be the motivation for the

assimilation process required by this homogenizing con-

tainer, an assimilation process which entailed so much loss,

so much self-betrayal, so much emotional and cultural dis-

location? If social and economic advancement were illu-

sions, why speak English? Why abandon one’s cultural

origins? Why turn one’s back on the old country? As the
abiding racism of the United States became more manifest
as people of colors other than white and of national origins
other than European began to ask for inclusion into the
structures of power and privilege within the United States
only to be met with hostility, resistance, and even outright
attack, it became simultaneously more evident that one’s
ethnic or racial identity, however much a liability it might
be, was nevertheless perhaps the only true sense of oneself,
the only grounding piece of the puzzle that could be looked
to for stability and selfhood.
With the crumbling of such a cohesive and reassuring
image as the melting pot, Americans are faced with certain
truths about themselves as a nation. The first is that the

days of managing difference through assimilation and ho-

mogenization are long over and that a new and more au-
thentic way of dealing with the essential diversity of this
country must be elaborated. The buzzword for this newer
way forward is “pluralism,” though, quite in keeping with

100 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

the word itself, what pluralism means varies from context
to context, from discipline to discipline, and from individ-
ual to individual.

The second truth is that even many decades into a

more overt acknowledgment of the racial and ethnic antipa-
thy that undergirds so much of American society, very little
progress has been made in changing to any significant de-
gree the structures of power and privilege in the United
States to include the true racial and ethnic diversity of this

country. Token efforts initially have given way to attempts

at more substantial changes, but the fact remains that peo-

ple of color are still in the minority within the institutions

that control the power and wealth of our society such as

Congress, the courts, the upper echelons of business and

industry, and the churches. And the debates —and riots

rage on around how and when this emerging majority will

in fact be represented accurately and proportionately in our

social institutions.

As for the situation within analytical psychology, not

unexpectedly to be sure, there reigns a general lack of con-
sciousness and certainly an appalling lack of discussion on
the matter of racism. In a groundbreaking but practically
unique example of thought on this matter, Polly Young-
Eisendrath addresses the issue of racism within American
Jungian circles quite directly with an article entitled “The
Absence of Black Americans as Jungian Analysts.” Sincerely
troubled by the exclusion of African-American individuals
from her professional circles, an experience evidently quite
at odds with her life outside of the Jungian domain, she
explores racism in general and Jungian racism in particular

to arrive at certain formulations around the psychological

underpinnings of this dynamic, formulations which I be-
lieve help to understand the persona issues which face

People of Color 101

individuals from nonwhite, non-European cultural back-
grounds.
Her first move is to put racism in the context of split-
ting:

Racism is a psychological complex organized around the

archetype of Opposites, the splitting of experience into
Good and Bad, White and Black, Self and Other. As an
example of splitting, racism belongs to the psychology of
early life during which differences are sorted out according
to anatomical features. In the period of development from
about twelve to thirty-six months, when the child is begin-
ning to experience a continuous distinction between self

and other, emotional relatedness is infused with powerful

splits between the Great and Terrible. Under such condi-
tions, identity is frequently maintained by defensive moves
to contain the Good in subjectivity while projecting the
Bad into objectivity. Furthermore, in this same early period
of life we witness power struggles in regard to right of
autonomy and control. . . . The parents function (ideally)
to provide nurturant care and to set limits on physical
freedom, whereas the child (now differentiated as a

body-psyche being) often struggles against such care

and limits.*

Even without a great familiarity with the object- rela-

tions school of psychoanalysis from which Young-Eisen-

drath is drawing the above insight, one can see the rather

primitive nature of splitting, in that splitting occurs at a

point of development which predates the child’s ability to
hold both good and bad together, both in the experience of
others as well as in his or her own self-concept. For this

reason, individuals for whom splitting and projective de-

fenses predominate are seen diagnostically as more dis-

turbed and behave for the most part in considerably less

functional ways than those for whom the so-called higher-

102 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

level defenses, such as intellectualization, rationalization,

and sublimation, predominate. The former are usually la-

beled as suffering from “personality disorders,” the narcis-

sistic, borderline, and schizoid varieties of which have
received the most attention in recent years theoretically and
technically within the field of object-relations, whereas
those individuals who have been able to manage a consoli-
dation of self-concept and an experience of the Other and
self as both good and bad are seen as healthier and more
functional.

Thus, in placing racism on a par with severe psycho-

logical disturbances of the most primitive sort, Young-
Eisendrath makes clear the destructive quality of racist atti-

tudes, thinking, and behavior. However, as a Jungian ana-

lyst, she widens the discussion of splitting to include not
simply the personal but the transpersonal level of the un-
conscious as well:

The splitting of images of people into Great and Terrible is

always an indication of archetypal processes at work and

never an occasion of personal contact that includes the am-
bivalence of good and bad features which are mingled, in-

separable. . . . When we see evidence of defensive splitting,

we know that two conditions are present: anxiety (or fear)

and archetypal reality or process.^

The result is that feelings of hatred and envy

corresponding respectively to the perceived threat of de-
struction at the hands of the evil Other and the wish to

destroy or depotentiate the evil Other to cope with this per-

ceived theat — lead to an archetypally tinged experience of
reality which, as she puts it, becomes “infused with mean-
ings commonly called ‘divine’ or ‘demonic.’ When people
relate to each other through these primitive emotional states

People of Color 103

in adulthood, the potential for destruction is high.”^ In put-
ting racism in the psychological framework of primitive de-
fensive maneuvers, Young-Eisendrath accounts both for its

persistence as well as its psychological harmfulness, harm-

fulness which in my experience takes onnumber of forms
a
and is wrought through a variety of dynamics upon those
affected by racism. The destructiveness of this dynamic for
the racist person him- or herself, whose flawed reality orien-

tation, given such primitive defensive structures, leads to

disastrous consequences on the psychological level if not on
the social, economic, and political levels, can only be sur-
passed by the consequences of racism upon the souls who
are its objects — people of color.
The first consequence of racism is invisibility. People
of color within the United States are invisible in many
ways. The most obvious way that they are invisible is in the

most literal sense of the term. Given white predominance

in business and government and consequently in the com-
munication media that are their symbiotic commercial part-
ners, one does not physically see people of color in great

numbers represented publicly. Despite nearly gargantuan

efforts to change this situation, the images of people of

color that are seen on television, in magazines, and in public

areas are comparatively few in the sea of white people that

dominate our national visual consciousness. Moreover,
when people of color are represented, it is more often than
not as stereotypes, crude, simple, and often unflattering car-

icatures, rather than as individuals of multilayered complex-

ity and depth. For every fully drawn character that is

African-American, Latino, Asian, or Native American in a

movie or a television program —Larry Fishburne’s strong
father in Boyz N the Hood or the octet of Chinese women
in The Joy Luck Club — there are at least twice as many
stereotypical presentations to be found — the villainous Jap-

104 CULTURAL POLITICS xMEETS THE PSYCHE

anese corporate raiders of In the Line ofFire and Black Rainy
or the myriad television sitcoms in which blacks play buf-
foonish, one-dimensional roles. As the exceptions to the in-
visibility of people of color in the media become more and
more numerous, even complex portrayals by their very ex-

ceptionality prove the rule that in terms of visibility, white

people first, everyone else second.
On the topic of stereotypes, Young-Eisendrath sees is-

sues of control and dominance which lie at the defensive

heart of racism:

Stereotypes are emotionally-charged beliefs based on psy-

chological complexes that interfere with seeing “things”
and people empathically and accurately. In any group or
organization, some kind of tradition or set of beliefs func-
tions to discriminate the “in-group” members from the
outsiders. Within groups, stereotypes function to control
differences.^

By projecting the bad out onto the Other, flattening

this image into a stereotype and then using this image as a

means of control, racist attitudes and behaviors work, in a

manner of speaking, to impose a threatening persona upon

the Other, a persona that is actually a part of the racist
individual’s own psyche, a projected complex of his or
her own.
This situation results in a second sort of invisibility

that afflicts people of color in the United States, an invisi-

bility that results from both the predominance of whites in

the media but that harks back to the assimilationist melt-

ing-pot ideal of our past. Even when people of color appear
publicly, in positions of prominence or power, there is a
great deal of pressure for them to lose their ethnicity and
adopt a “white” look, a “white” manner, a “white” way of
being. It is the light-skinned black person, the Latina or

People of Color 105

Asian without an accent, the “Washington redskin” in a
business suit, that is rewarded socially and economically
and is welcomed by the power establishment, definitely not
the African-American in cornrows and beads speaking
loudly in nonstandard black English, or the Spanish-speak-
ing Puerto Rican without a shirt, or the Native American
in traditional dress, though all these may be citizens of the
United States with families that could well predate the ar-
rival of a majority of white Americans’ forebears to this

land. Bankers, politicians, and executives who are of non-

European, nonwhite heritage can be virtually assured of not
advancing until their own personal style conforms to the
WASP tradition — dark-blue tailored suit, striped tie

or primly knotted silk bow, short hair, and tasteful gold

jewelry.
The most egregious examples of this pressure to con-
form, however, in my opinion, can be seen daily in the
television news media, where the personal style and stan-

dard English of people like Connie Chung and Geraldo

Rivera, solidly Establishment and definitely Anglo-Saxon in

derivation, most certainly do not represent the stylistic and

cultural diversity of the Asian, African-American, and Lat-
ino communities, indeed, do not even accurately reflect the
style and manner of the middle-class sections of those popu-
lations within the United States. Though most certainly ap-

pearance is but one aspect of one’s ethnic heritage, the

shameless “de-ethnicization” perpetuated by such standards
of appearance and speech serve to hide people of color even
when they actually physically appear on screen.
This double-barreled invisibility, literal and stylistic,

which is an outgrowth of American racism, results in an

individual of color being deeply divided, placed in a situa-
tion that is essentially and unresolvably conflictual. To be
nonwhite means to be excluded, but to be included means

106 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

to attempt to mold oneself into someone else, to lose one’s

race and ethnic heritage. To succeed means to hate and be-

tray oneself, while to embrace and love oneself means to
suffer prejudice, poverty, and continued invisibility. Even
the term “internalized racism,” used to denote this inner
conflict for people of color within a racist society, is itself

oxymoronic, for it implies that it is people of color who are

themselves racist, not simply those in the power majority
who continue to oppress and deny them access to the privi-
leges accorded to white people and whiteness in this society.

To extend Young-Eisendrath’s use of object- relations

concepts, another way of describing the unresolvable con-
flict faced by people of color is to say that racism creates a
situation in which the best solution for the object of such
attitudes is to projectively identify with the oppressor. Pro-
jective identification, another extremely primitive defensive
maneuver learned at a time before object constancy or con-
solidation, results when the projective splitting already de-
scribed, which is designed to maintain the image of oneself
as good and project all the bad outside onto the evil Other,
is then followed by the infant’s need to maintain a connec-
tion with that Other, usually the parent upon whom the
infant is, naturally, radically dependent. Hence, the infant
identifies with that hated, evil Other — the image of which
is in fact but a split-off projection —and internalizes that

evil image as a part of his or her own self-concept. As is

probably evident, such projective identification results in

confusion around identity, poor boundaries between self
and Other, and a cycling between self-hatred, often quite

markedly self-destructive, and an outwardly directed aggres-

sion toward others.
Lest the above be misunderstood as psychopathologiz-
ing people of color, I would like to make it clear that I

believe racism is at the root of the problem, not the individ-

People of Color 107

uals themselves for whom projective identification is often
the only way to reconcile the irreconcilable splitting that is
forced upon them by the dominant culture. So that this last
statement will not be misconstrued as patronizing, let me
say that I think framing internalized racism as a form of
projective identification is helpful in understanding and
working through it, just as the child of a personality-disor-
dered parent, in therapy as an adult, needs to work through,
piece by piece, those internalized fragments of the crazy,
destructive Other to come to an awareness of him- or her-
self as containing both Good and Bad, angelic and de-
monic.
As always is the case in the presence of primitive de-
fenses, simplification reigns. For example, even the very ter-

minology we have developed as a people to discuss racial

differences is ridden with falsehood and stereotypy. We

tend to focus on “color” in only the most superficial sense
of the term, summing up a whole individual on the basis of
a single feature of their persona, using symbolically loaded
terms like white, black, yellow, brown, or red, terms which,
moreover, are woefully inaccurate: “White” people are not
more truly white than “black” people are truly black or

than “redskins” are red. Thus, the linguistic movement is

away from such simplification and toward recognition of

cultural, geographic, or national origins, as with terms like

African-American, Native American, and Latino/Latina,

which by their use acknowledge that the differences which
exist go far deeper and are more complex than racist atti-

tudes would have it.

The astute reader will see from this disquisition on

racism’s psychological effects that of all the parts of the psy-
che described by Jung’s psychology, the persona is the locus

for much of the conflict and pain experienced by people of

color within a white-dominated, racist society. The issues

108 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

of invisibility, of conformity, of internalized hatred, and of
identity get confronted and coalesce first and foremost on
the level of persona, so that without an awareness of the
significance of persona in the individuation of a person of
color, without appreciating the persona as the primary psy-
chic locus that absorbs and handles the daily dose of racist
treatment every person of color experiences in the United
States, clinicians and laypeople will continue to either mis-
construe the behavior and reactions of people of color or,
equally common though much worse, pathologize a person
of color’s attempts at resolving the unresolvable dilemma of
living authentically within a culture that denies people of
color full authenticity.
One place that the Gordian knot around the persona
and the shadow that afflicts people of color in our racist

society can be seen, in my experience, is in the conflicts

concerning achievement and success that many people of

color have presented me with as their motivation for initiat-

ing psychotherapy. Years of professional training within

fields as diverse as business, design, education, and science
may have resulted in social status and a level of achievement
far higher than their own parents, many of whom were ei-

ther immigrants forced to raise families in conditions of

poverty and overcrowding in urban ghettos or on farms or
merely a generation or two out of slavery or work camps.
Still, there remains a sneaking, pernicious sense of being an
impostor, of not having deserved this status, of having
fooled someone or gotten ahead unfairly. Feelings such as

these, in which the sense of self has not kept pace with the
persona, are certainly exacerbated for such clients should
the accusation be launched, subtly or aggressively, that the
reason for their success was an affirmative-action quota or
through intradepartmental nepotism on the part of other
people of color in supervisory positions.

People of Color 109

 In addition, familial conflict over first-generation suc-
cess stories seems equally pervasive, with parents sometimes
expecting their children to use their greater social or eco-
nomic status to improve their parents’ way of life, only to
have their high expectations continually disappointed, or
with various relatives envying and resenting the success and
launching their own accusations of having sold out or be-
come an “Uncle Tom.” As is clear, individuals in this situa-

tion have been put in an impossible dilemma thanks to

racism: They are expected to redeem themselves, their fam-
ily, and even to some extent their entire race through “mak-
ing it,” and yet they are also forbidden to own this success

or status, both by whites who feel their privilege or power

threatened and at times by members of their own commu-
nity out of envy, fear, or adherence to nonassimilationist
political agendas.

The resolution for this dilemma often occurs in my

experience through the cultivation of and eventual identi-
fication with a persona that I have dubbed the “blank” per-
sona. It has happened fairly often that a person of color will
seem at first to me as if they simply lack a persona, present-
ing themselves very tentatively, seemingly insecure, lacking
confidence or verbal grace, rather noticeably eager for my
opinions or advice on what to do or how to act. Though it

can be that the dearth of positive, authentic images of peo-

ple of color and various forms of familial dysfunction have
indeed conspired to keep the individual from developing a
true persona, I have found just as frequently that at times a

persona exists but is unconsciously kept blank, devoid of

individual characteristics. Here the individual just simply
seems invested in being nice to everyone, seeking harmony
with others, abhors standing out, and avoids conflict by
suppressing all the individual features that a good, useful
persona generally possesses. Thus, the effects of what I have

no- CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

come to call an identification with a blank persona can
combine all the worst parts of persona identification —such
as a pervasive constriction of the personality, a false sense of
self and others, an inner emptiness, and all the various se-
quelae of repression —with the worst parts of lacking a per-
sona entirely, such as upsurges of unmodulated instinctual
energy, an inability to interact with others productively or
sincerely, loneliness, fearfulness of others, and a sense of
failure. Yet, often the blank persona with which these peo-

ple of color have identified has clearly achieved its aim in

mediating the various pressures directed at them in their

interactions with external and internalized racism. By re-

moving all individual characteristics from their social pre-

sentation, they have succeeded in defusing their threat to
the dominant culture. By having convinced themselves that
their personalities are in fact coextensive with the very su-
perficial, nonoffensive personas that they have adopted,
they have been able to fend off the nearly inevitable feelings,
such as survivor guilt, rage, and terror, that resulted when
they attempted to be, deeply, sincerely, and fully, the whole
person they are.

Complicating the picture here, of course, is that peo-

ple of color emerge from families and cultures with value
systems sometimes rather sharply at odds with those of peo-
ple from European heritages, and so this seemingly blank
persona is often not simply a defensive maneuver or the best
social adaptation one could make to racist attitudes but the
very persona which is, within their cultures of origin, seen
as most valuable or appropriate. Such a situation appears to

be particularly true for clients of Asian backgrounds, nota-

bly Chinese or Japanese, though certainly not exclusively.

Jung himself even remarked upon this characteristic, not-

ing, “In the Eastern view the concept of the anima, as we

have stated it here, is lacking, and so, logically, is the con-

People of Color 111

cept of a persona. This is certainly no accident, as I have
already indicated, a compensatory relationship exists be-
tween persona and anima.”^
I believe, however, that what Jung mistook for a lack
of a persona is actually more the kind of blank persona so
highly valued as “good form” within Asian societies, a per-
sona that is based upon values largely lost on the European
or American: subtlety, indirection, grace, harmony, and in-
wardness. Likewise, personas of different shapes, textures,
and appearances will be valued more highly than others,
depending upon the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of cli-
ents. In fact, the features of the persona most highly valued
within certain cultures are often precisely what the domi-
nant white culture seizes upon to create the various ethnic

stereotypes essential to perpetuating a racist social or politi-

cal agenda — the loud-mouthed black woman, the hot-
tempered Latino greaser, the complaint Singapore girl, the
mystical Indian, the inscrutable Oriental. All of these
stereotypes are certainly based on the values of the cultures
involved even while they are racist attitudes that caricature
and use such personas to their nefarious ends, making
members of these groups look ridiculous, dangerous, or
trivial.

Given that a person of color’s authentic persona may

in fact be quite at odds with the persona that a therapist
may think he or she should possess, it is important, in intro-
ducing the concept of identification with a blank persona,
to note that the problematic quality of this situation is not
the persona’s blankness, which in fact, as I have noted, may
be completely culturally syntonic, as with certain Asian in-
dividuals, but rather the identification with the persona

blank or otherwise — ^which can be the person of color’s

only defense against an objectively hostile social envi-
ronment.

112 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

 It should be fairly obvious by now that the therapist,
when working with this kind of situation, has in his or her
own turn inherited the racist dilemma brought in by such
clients, for what approach should be taken when a person

of color has dimmed all of his or her own authentic charac-

teristics in favor of a blank persona designed to facilitate
survival in a world where his or her invisibility is enforced
day after day? Should the therapist simply work with the
persona identification the way he or she would with any
client, lifting up the inner self and cultural heritage
client’s

for integration into a more authentic persona? The result of

this, I can tell you, is most definitely not an unequivocal

improvement of the client’s day-to-day life or level of com-

fort but rather almost always an elevation of the level of
racist conflict in her or his consciousness and life. As the
person of color adopts a less blank, more particularized,

more emotionally real persona, those desiring their invisi-

— white people but shockingly sometimes other

bility often
people of from
color own their commu- or different ethnic
—respond with more
nities and attempts
overt attacks at

suppression. Three brief examples make clear the painful

quality of the persona-related issues that become engaged.
As Edward, a Chinese client of mine, became more
and more assertive at work and began acting more confi-
dently and more entitled, both white and Chinese co-work-
ers began making remarks designed to shame and
intimidate him. He was given far more work to accomplish
than other co-workers, with the double-edged observation
that he was more capable than others in his department,
a situation that fairly guaranteed one of two undesirable
outcomes: intolerable stress as he tried to do it all or lack of
advancement as he failed. In calling attention to the unfair-
ness, he was openly called a “troublemaker,” and a number
of snide comments were made about his being a threat to

People of Color 113

the department, “an affirmative-action suit \vaiting to hap-
pen,” as he put it once in session. The only other Chinese
man in his immediate department openly regarded him as

a usurper and enemy, having previously been the depart-

mental ethnic mascot. Yes, we had been successful in devel-
oping a more aggressive, more “functional” persona from
the perspective of a white American for whom privilege, a

sense of entitlement, and skill at confrontation and compe-

tition are functional characteristics, but for a person of
color, such a persona, however more authentic and bal-
anced it feels, however much more leeway it provides for
the expression of personality, nevertheless encounters an ex-
ternal, objective social system in which the failure of a per-
son of color is ardently desired and their continued social
and emotional dysfunction enforced through both direct

and indirect abuse. The “successful” persona given to a per-

son of color within racist society is in fact the very persona

that this client walked in with, the blank persona he had

identified with, which, psychologically and emotionally,
had led to severe and chronic depression, insomnia, self-

destructiveness, and a level of repression that literally took

years to undo. For a person of color, this blankness is the
only acceptable persona: all else, however real and authen-
tic, is forbidden and threatening.
The persona issues took another turn with Frances, an
African-American woman who had managed despite great
economic hardship to win her way into a rather prestigious
operatic training program. However, once there, she found
herself in an overwhelmingly white environment, singing
almost exclusively the works of white nineteenth-century
European men, within performance traditions established

by white European singers, and coached and taught by

white men. Thus, caught in an unresolvable conflict be-
tween conformity and self, unlike Edward, Frances chose to

114 ' CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

create a false persona. She straightened her hair and used
makeup to lighten her skin color. Working with a coach to
move her range from her natural rich mezzo-soprano to a
higher and more “white”-sounding soprano, she was semi-
conscious of the irony of what she was doing, in that
“white” is the term used to describe a tonal quality that is

colorless and unattractive in a voice. Despite the abundance

of role models in her particular field, especially in opera, of
black women who have managed a career without creating
a persona of overt falsity, from Marian Anderson right on
through Jessye Norman, who perform as black women
within the white-European vocal traditions, Frances did not
have the psychological resources, social support, or courage
to move in that direction and brave the inevitable conflicts

that would ensue from a more authentic persona. The re-

sult, as one might expect, was that she finished the training
program, sang for a brief period, but then abandoned her
career upon her marriage to an older white man she had
met when on tour one summer. Frances reported a moving
and ironic dream toward the end of her training program:

I am to go to a recital by Kathleen Battle but feel I must

refuse the tickets. They were a gift by one of the singers in

the program and are too expensive. I am afraid of incurring

an obligation.

Indeed, Frances refused to engage in the battle that it

would take to be her authentic self in the world, a battle

that, reminiscent of Diana’s dreams from chapter 3, is actu-

ally a gift. In refusing this gift, symbolized by turning away

from a performance by one of the most successful black
female opera singers on stage today, and taking refuge in-
stead in a false persona, she was robbed of a career, and we
were robbed of who knows what kind of transformative tal-

ent. Racism, though, rather than Frances’s refusal, lay at the

People of Color 115

heart of the problem, for to create an authentic persona is a
battle for the person of color, a battle that often must be
fought with few resources and little help.

Jorge, an architect and second-generation Mexican-

American, did not develop the persona conflict, like Ed-
ward, via therapy, nor avoid it, like Frances. Rather, he ap-
peared in my office in the midst of it, torn between
establishing his own practice and continuing on with the
firm where he had done his training and received his li-

cense. Sufficiently well known to be able to establish his

own architectural firm, he was certain that he would be a
financial success, but his work would consist, as he told me,
of work he did not consider socially important or useful,
such as private homes or corporate facilities which is where
he said the big money was in architecture. By contrast, his

current position was with a firm contracted almost com-

pletely by a Bay Area city to design low-income housing
within neighborhoods undergoing urban renewal, work
that was conceptually and politically gratifying but which
was comparatively poorly remunerated.
The persona level of conflict induced by racism, exter-
nal and internalized, was summed up by a single statement
he made in exploring what to do with me: “Does success
mean helping my people? Or does success mean making a
lot of money? My mother would probably tell me that it’s

the first, but my father would probably tell me the second.”

How to be successful in the world, an issue of great import
to this man whose own parents immigrated to the United
States with practically nothing to speak of except ambition,
meant a struggle of far greater proportions than for even the
most socially conscious white architect, for Jorge clearly felt

that the persona of success, “making it big,” was necessary

to prove his worth in a way that white Americans can often
take for granted. We sat with the struggle for a long time.

116 ' CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

examining it from every angle, until he finally decided to

break away from his firm and strike out on his own. But
for a very long time, despite the successful persona which
such a move instantly created, simply by dint of his being
able to create his own business and make it work, Jorge was
always assailed by the feeling of being an impostor, as if he
were pretending to be successful. This psychological situa-
tion, in which the person feels as if they have adopted a
false persona when in fact their actual persona is quite au-
thentic and functional, is yet another outcome of the im-
possible conflict between inner experience and outer culture
which is racism’s effect on people of color.
Now, of course, there are certain alternatives to an es-
calation of the individual’s conflict through authentic per-

sona development available to therapists in working with

clients. For example, one could attempt to help the person
of color adapt to the situation or to restrict their ambitions
to achievable arenas. One could use the therapy as a cathar-

tic container for their rage at the injustice and oppression

and enable the person to go on with their outer life after

periodic venting. Though I have actually heard such alter-

natives argued by professionals, they are not in my opinion

either viable or particularly therapeutic, although they are

occasionally solutions to the racist dilemma that very well

meaning and empathic therapists come up with in order to

solve the knot they have inherited by working with clients

of color. They are cousins to that acceptable form of racism

among liberal therapists, the “culturally appropriate refer-
ral,” when clients of different ethnic backgrounds are

handed off to therapists of those ethnic backgrounds, usu-

ally done with countertransferential relief as transparent as

it is palpable, because of the presumption that such clients

will feel more “comfortable,” often unfortunately accom-

People of Color 117

plished by convincing the client quite subtly that he or she
would be more comfortable.
In avoiding all of the above, the best solution I have
come up with is finally to supplement the development of
amore authentic persona with an awareness that the result
of this process may simply highlight the racist pressures

which my clients face every day but at least highlight them

in a way that makes it clear that the racism is outside of their
personalities rather than the poisonous introject which led
them to the identification with a blank persona in the first

place. Put more simply, a more authentic, culturally specific

persona may lead to greater external conflict, but at least it

gets rid of the internalized racism, a liberating, empower-

ing, and transformative result. Rather than fighting them-
selves, disowning their own rich cultures of origin and
family traditions, suppressing their complexity and conflict
in favor of an identification with stereotypes or blankness,

the development of an authentic persona for a person of

color means the kind of freedom that in my experience
almost always brings with itsome kind of sociopolitical en-
gagement with the true enemy, the racism and discrimina-
tion endemic to the United States. Edward, for example,

finally did file a grievance which resulted in a long period

of stress for him at work but which also resulted in changes

in his company’s policies. Clearly, though, this is most

definitely not the happy ending so many of us thought
would coincide with the idealized therapeutic cures we
dreamt of achieving with our patients as we trained to be-
come healers: in a racist society, such a happy ending is a

chimera.
As for the countertransferential aspects of working
with people of color, therapists might use their own “cul-

turally appropriate referral” resources as consultants for

their own enlightenment rather than getting rid of their

118 , CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

clients. The challenge of Young-Eisendrath’s formulations
of the roots of racism as similar to universal developmental
issues and primitive defenses makes clear that all therapists

must take active steps to raise their consciousness about

their own racist thoughts, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs
and not expect the clients of color they see to educate them.
It is the therapist’s own responsibility to work out his or

her psychopathology, not the client’s.

As anyone familiar with depth psychology can see,

much of the above analysis runs counter to the deeply in-

grained medical model and internalized focus that are char-
acteristics of psychotherapy based on the unconscious. Yet,
without an acknowledgment of the unfortunately all too
real shadow of American culture, made up of equal parts
intolerance, elitism, and enslavement, as opposed to our na-
tional ego ideal of tolerance, equality, and cooperation, and
without an integration of that acknowledgment of our
shadow into therapeutic practice, depth psychology will
continue to be a mere intellectual plaything for the affluent
or the province of only the most privileged within our soci-
ety— doctors, psychologists, and professionals.
Moreover, insofar as the persona and people of color
are concerned, there is no amount of depth psychology that
can be applied which will result in personas any more ac-
ceptable to the white majority. People of color are born
with and die with personas, by dint of their difference from
the white majority, that in a racist society forever separate
them from power and privilege. Thus, in such a situation
the solution can never be, essentially, to change the individ-
ual person, however much therapeutic support and under-
standing can be helpful in dealing with the pain and
suffering inflicted by racism, but rather to change the racist

system in which we all live.

Therapists working with people of color are, like it or

People of Color 119

not, involved in a process that is sociopolitical and not sim-
ply “psychotherapeutic” for which many of us were given
very little training or help beyond the most rudimentary
courses in “cultural sensitivity” that now exist at the gradu-
ate level in the most progressive counseling programs,
courses which are often little more than cultural survey
courses of no great depth. The discussion above is meant to
push a bit at the reigning psychologism of depth psychology
and to show at least one way that, practically and theoreti-

cally, Jungian concepts and an acknowledgment of racism

are not antithetical but could become tools for a powerful

and transformative combination of theory and praxis.

120 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

 5.

Gay Men and Lesbians:

Out of the Closets, into the Streets

IF PEOPLE of color can, through racist attitudes and insti-

tutional structures, be kept invisible in spite of the fact that

their difference from the Anglo-European majority is visible

in their very physiognomy, then gay and lesbian individu-

als, whose difference from the majority resides in factors

that are primarily affectional or sexual and are expressed in

activities and behaviors that in most circumstances are kept

private, can be kept even more invisible and invalidated. In

that the persona is the area of the psyche in which a resolu-
tion is forged between the pressures of the external sociopo-
litical situation and the needs, hopes, and dreams of the
inward individual, one might well expect, as we have dis-

cussed with reference to people of color, that gay men and

lesbians cope with and overcome this oppressive outer situa-

tion in large part through work on the persona. However,

to fully appreciate just what is involved in such healing, one
must first appreciate the depth and breadth of what gay
people face culturally as they attempt to become conscious
of and own their homosexuality.

Homophobia: The Octopus Dwelling

IN THE Depths of Western Culture

With and symbol-

the advent of gay liberation, traditionally
ically marked by the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York
City, where a group of transvestites and other gay people

121
fought back against police harassment, there has slowly fil-

tered into our culture a new way of seeing and understand-

ing homosexuality. In this new view, homosexuality, along

with other variations in sexual behavior, is seen as a normal

phenomenon within a whole continuum of sexuality, while
the negative judgments and attitudes toward such variations
are themselves seen as problematic and destructive. How-
ever, the progress that has been made in changing such neg-
ative attitudes toward homosexuality into perspectives that
are more neutral or even gay-affirmative has been slow and
fraught with setbacks. The reasons for the slowness of this
cultural change around the realities of homosexuality was
made clear to me by a dream image which came to me in
the midst of my thinking and writing about the concept of
homophobia.
In preparing my article for Same-Sex Love, which was
to be a collection of papers on gay and lesbian individua-
tion, I had decided that a fitting contribution from me
would be an article on homophobia.^ This concept, coined
by psychologist George Weinberg in his groundbreaking

book Society and the Healthy Homosexual, has become very

much a part of psychological parlance since its introduc-
tion. By adopting Gordon Allport’s definition of prejudice
as “an avertive or hostile attitude toward a person who be-
longs to a group, simply because he belongs to that group
and is therefore assumed to have the objectionable qualities
ascribed to the group, Weinberg dubbed the prejudicial

fear and hatred of homosexuality “homophobia,” quite de-

liberately using a term of psychopathology, phobia, to make
and psychologically harmful nature of
clear the irrational

such prejudice against gay and lesbian people. Weinberg

goes on to explore in his book the various causes he can
identify, mostly psychological, which create and maintain
this phobic attitude toward homosexuality, but in my own

122 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

thinking and contemplation, it became clear to me that
those causes that Weinberg lists could easily be supple-
mented by many, many more that go far beyond the psy-
chological and include religious, social, and cultural factors

which keep alive such irrational hatred toward those of us

who love other men or other women.
Needless to say, my contemplation of this truth about
our culture hardly cheered me, just as almost always in
working with homophobia, either with individuals or in

groups, the mood suddenly turns dark and heavy. One

night in the midst of this work, I had a very simple dream
image, one which I at first interpreted as merely a fond
memory of southern Italy:

A young fisherman had caught a large octopus and was

methodically pounding it on the rocks to tenderize it. I was
looking forward to eating it once it was prepared.

As sometimes happens with dreams that have an easy

external association, I almost missed the symbolic aspect to
this one, since upon waking my first thought was that the
scene, which evoked pleasant feelings in me, was nearly
identical to an experience I had had at a beachside restau-
rant in Siracusa, Sicily, during the year I had lived in Italy.

Hardly a staple of the American diet, octopus, I found, was

particularly common in Sicily: caught fresh from the sea,

tenderized precisely the way the dream had depicted it, and
served in a variety of ways, all of them quite delicious once
I overcame my American bias and the raft of negative asso-
ciations octopuses evoked. Dreams of Italy are nearly always

compensatory for me; that is, they come to me in times of

difficulty, internal or external, in order, I feel, to balance
me and remind me of the times of peace, hope, and con-
tentment which I have also lived through. So, in working a

Gay Men and Lesbians 123

bit with this dream, I needed to acknowledge that perhaps
this grappling with homophobia might be a bit more dis-

turbing unconsciously than I had previously appreciated.

Which is, of course, when it hit me that in fact I was
the young fisherman in the dream, having dragged up from
the depths this many-tentacled, pervasive, and formless
creature, an element of the collective shadow if ever there
was one, and in writing my article, I was proceeding to kill
and prepare this beast for public and private consumption,
that is, symbolically, depotentiate and integrate its power
into my own body and soul. How like an octopus homo-
phobia is, for it reaches into so many areas of Western cul-
ture with its many arms, nearly formless and yet formidable,
like a simple animal in reality and yet fearsome, a monster
to be slain and consumed.
In addressing the many-tentacled beast of homopho-
bia in modern society, Weinberg’s book had the importance
it did at the time (and still does) because he quite cannily
adopted the terminology and approach of the very school
of psychology, namely, Freudian psychoanalysis, whose
view of homosexuality as pathology had become a major
theoretical pillar of, as well as an enormous influence on,
psychological thinking as a whole in the United States.
Many writers have done careful scholarship to set the record

straight on psychoanalytic homophobia, demonstrating that

in fact the view of homosexuality as pathology derives not

from Freud, who, like Jung and others, put forth a great

number of possible theories on the origins of homosexual-

ity, but rather from followers of Freud, notably Sandor

Rado, Irving Bieber, and others who abandoned Freud’s
view of the innate ambisexuality of human beings to codify
into psychological theory the idea that heterosexuality is

“natural,” and all else “perversion.”^ That this attitude de-

124 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

rives more from religious tradition than scientific data con-
stitutes one of the great ironies of psychoanalytic theory.
For their part, Jung and his followers escaped some of

the flagrant homophobia of psychoanalysis, since their

major point of contention with psychoanalysis had always
been with the emphasis placed upon sexuality to the exclu-
sion of all other aspects of human life, and hence, Jung and
Jungians found their attention directed to a potentially
more holistic and symbolic view of sexuality than the rather
literal, developmental schema offered by orthodox psycho-
analysis. The difficulty, of course, within Jungian psychol-
ogy, or to say it another way, the specific Jungian form of
homophobia, lies in the way that Jungian attention has not
until very recently been directed all that often to homosexu-
ality, so that the literature within analytical psychology on
same-sex love has been virtually nil and what has been writ-
ten on the topic, usually by heterosexual analysts, has not
been either all that enlightening or profound.'^
Despite such neglect, one can use Jung’s ideas quite
homophobia and homosexuality.
successfully to understand
My own view of homophobia is that, as with all phobias,
we are dealing with the realm of the shadow. One can cer-
tainly see this both in the often vitriolic condemnation of
homosexuality within psychoanalysis as well as in the dis-

comfort and neglect of homosexuality from within Jungian

circles. For a society so dedicated to the idea that heterosex-
ual sexual and social behavior is nature itself, a powerful
shadow is created around those aspects of heterosexual sex-
ual and social behavior which cannot be admitted into con-
sciousness. It is this shadow which we see projected onto
homosexuality and homosexual individuals in the form of
stereotypes. Rather than acknowledge heterosexual infidel-

ity and the current crisis in the institution of the heterosex-

ual nuclear family, as evidenced by the rising divorce rate.

Gay Men and Lesbians 125

homophobia projects this shadow onto homosexuality in
the view that homosexuals are promiscuous and unable to
form long-term relationships. Rather than acknowledge
that the antisexual legacy of the Puritan founders of the
United States has led to a culture that hates sexuality and
the body while simultaneously being obsessed with sex and
physical pleasure, as evidenced by the consumer culture all

around us every day, homosexuals carry the shadow of this

heterosexual neurosis about sex in the stereotype that all gay
men and lesbians are sex-obsessed.
In addition to this shadow projection dynamic, an-
other perspective on homophobia can be proposed from
archetypal psychology in the view that, by having built het-
erosexuality into the very definition of male and female gen-
der roles, a situation is thus created in which men and
women who are not heterosexual present this society and
culture with the image of the Androgyne, that creature who
marries both male and female within itself For Jungians,
the image of the Androgyne has always had a great impor-

tance, starting with Jung himself, whose psychology has as

its foundation the view that human nature is polar, always

containing two sets of opposites whose tension creates the

life of the psyche and whose resolution is sought through
the process of individuation. Thus, the Androgyne for Jung
and Jungians is a symbol of the union of these opposites
and for this reason is very often seen as divine. Less empha-
sized within analytical psychology, though most certainly
present in Jung’s writings and those of his followers, is the

polar nature of the Androgyne symbol itself, which pos-

sesseson the opposite end of its divine nature a demonic or
—
monstrous aspect the Androgyne as the undifferentiated,
chaotic, unnatural fusion of that which could and should be
held separate. In my opinion, by deviating from the socially

imposed norm of heterosexuality, homosexual individuals

126 ,
CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE
present this culture with an image of the Androgyne that is

different from the divine image, enshrined in the union of

the heterosexual couple, and therefore represent symboli-
cally the monstrous aspects of the Androgyne to the culture
at large. In other words, the shadow of the Androgyne, with
all its terrifying implications of nondifferentiation and
chaos, is projected onto gay men and lesbians rather than

being seen as the shadow of the heterosexual couple itself, in

which transvestism, child sexual abuse, and a host of other

boundary transgressions occur daily in secret.

As this brief survey of homophobia makes clear, I

hope, the effects of homophobia reach far and wide through

Western culture, touching aspects of everyone’s existence in
ways that cannot be escaped. Homophobia is built into our
very way of thinking, into our very way of perceiving the
world. To see through theological arguments simply leads
to having to cope with the pseudoscientific bases of homo-

phobia, just as greater amounts of objective scientific data

simply lead to the more irrational, archetypal, and therefore
ineradicable bases for the hatred of Others. The question
then arises, given the cold and clammy touch of homopho-
bia on all our lives: What is the effect of such fear and
hatred upon those individuals who are, directly or indi-

rectly, its object? How is it that gay men and lesbians re-
spond to the weight of this monster on their backs?

Persona as Closet: Nowhere to Run,

Nowhere to Hide
The effect of such homophobia on the lives of gay men and
lesbians can be discerned in certain developmental patterns

common to many homosexual individuals. Though suffi-

cient research in this area has not actually been carried out

as yet, presumably most gay and lesbian individuals are

Gay Men and Lesbians 127

born as the product of a heterosexual union and usually
grow up within conventional heterosexual family structures,
though the growing presence of gay and lesbian families,
constituted through insemination, surrogate parenthood,
and other means, as well as the transformation of the Amer-
ican family as an institution due to divorce, social disloca-
tion, and other factors, should be acknowledged in this

regard. For these reasons, unlike people of color, say, the

incipient gay or lesbian child is all too often raised within a
family unit that is at odds with his or her personality and
in which little mirroring is provided that could confirm,
much less affirm or celebrate, their affectional and sexual
orientation.
Moreover, the development of a consciousness of one’s
sexuality is a process that occurs over the entire course of
one’s lifetime, a process made doubly difficult for the gay
or lesbian child within American society at least, with its

dogged tradition of Puritanism and its conflicts about sexu-

ality, particularly sexuality in children, which are added to

the general homophobia of the culture at large. Thus, the

incipient gay or lesbian child, growing up in a sex-negative

culture whose only images of sexual behavior, when they

appear, are nearly exclusively heterosexual in nature, has
very little opportunity or freedom to realize before young
adulthood an awareness of who and what these feelings are

that draw them to other boys or other girls. Unlike a person

of color who knows at an early age that he or she is African-
American or Chinese, the result of our culturally neurotic
attitudes about sexuality and same-sex love is that a gay or

lesbian individual may not necessarily be aware of his or

her homosexual orientation until comparatively late in their

psychosexual development.
Even if all these disadvantages are overcome and the
homosexual individual manages to become conscious, sim-

128 . CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

ply conscious, of his or her ’homosexuality, homophobia is

still a powerful force to reckon with on a daily basis for

gay men and lesbians. One example of such homophobic

pressures faced by gay people in this society is the idea that
the self-declared homosexual can and perhaps should be-
come heterosexual, a position supported by religious groups

and by some fields of psychology. From the religious, that

is to say Christian, perspective, this heterosexual-conversion
concept, scattered in the best American tradition across de-
nominations as theologically diverse as Roman Catholicism,
Presbyterianism, and Lutheranism, is based in one form or
another on the idea that adherence to church teachings with
regard to sexuality and marriage, with help from God,
Christ, or some other form of supernatural power, will re-

sult if not in outright conversion to heterosexual behavior

then most certainly to an ability to refrain from homosexual
behaviors and relationships. In nearly all Christian denomi-
nations within the United States, with a few notable excep-
tions, openly gay or lesbian individuals cannot be ordained
nor are gay or lesbian relationships recognized as sacramen-
tal or even desirable. The Roman Catholic Church, in the
person of Pope John Paul II, has repeatedly come out with
ever more conservative statements regarding the intrinsi-
cally disordered nature of homosexuality and the affirma-
tion of heterosexuality.
The psychotherapeutic version of heterosexual conver-
sion, on the other hand, draws its proponents from post-
Freudian circles in which Freud’s own notions of ambisexu-

ality and the full Oedipus complex were rejected by prac-

titioners who are writing manuals on how to treat

homosexuality even today, almost twenty years after the

American Psychiatric Association rejected the pathology of

homosexuality. Interestingly enough, this psychological ho-
mophobia involves roughly the same mode of thought as

Gay Men and Lesbians 129

the religious version, namely, that heterosexuality is, de-
pending on whom one reads, either the biological or cul-
tural norm and so psychotherapeutic cure involves a
behavioral reorientation of sexual desire away from mem-
bers of one’s own sex. This conversion can be accomplished
through aversive methods, many of which seem to be sim-
ply thinly veiled forms of punishment or torture, as well as
by other, less violent forms of conditioning, all of which
have in common reinforcing and rewarding heterosexual re-
sponses and behavior. The irony that conservative theologi-
cal positions regarding sexuality find a partner in, of all

schools of psychological thought, Freudian psychoanalysis

and behaviorism —perhaps the two most antireligious
schools of psychology in the West — suggests that the essen-
tial point of agreement between these two areas is derived
from homophobia rather than the internal logic or rightness
of their respective systems of thought on homosexuality.
For those apt to identify too closely with the American
persona of tolerance, freedom, and individual rights and be-
lieve that I am overstating the level of homophobia gay men
and lesbians continue to face, I can only say that every week
my practice and my agency work bring forth cases of gay
men and lesbians who have been subjected to physical,
emotional, and even sexual abuse with the intention of
changing their sexual orientation from homosexual to het-
erosexual, with methods that have included electroshock,
starvation, beatings, forced prayers, and compulsory hetero-
sexual activity. This abuse of their homosexuality, under the
rubric of theological or psychiatric intervention, has in fact
led them to come to an openly gay or lesbian therapist or

to seek out services in a self-identified gay and lesbian men-

tal health counseling agency.
Given such a situation, in which a gay or lesbian indi-

vidual has the whole force of Western culture and history

130 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

to contend with simply to become conscious of his or her

homosexuality, only to then be confronted with active and

vigorous attacks upon their sexual identity once they ac-
knowledge it, can it be any wonder that the persona, that
area of the psyche where self meets society, is a battleground
for gay men and lesbians who wish to live a life of integrity
and authenticity? As one might imagine, certain dynamics
around persona tend to predominate as gay and lesbian in-
dividuals attempt to cope with and work through external
and internal homophobia.
The first pattern is what I have come to call an identi-
fication with a patently false persona, usually heterosexual
in nature. This situation is the one which gay and lesbian
people, and now the population at large, commonly term
“passing” or “being in the closet,” except that the closet
in which these individuals are hiding may shut their own
awareness of their homosexuality out of consciousness along
with others’ perceptions of it. In other words, the homosex-
ual individual identified with a patently false persona is usu-
ally not consciously deceptive but in fact may actually
believe he or she is heterosexual, despite numerous indica-
tions to the contrary either in the form of an experienced
lack of heterosexual desire or repeated, often troubling, ho-
mosexual fantasies and relationships that feel ego-dystonic
and conflictual.

In light of some of the factors described above, this

kind of identification with a false heterosexual persona is

most common in my experience among adolescents who in

the course of their young adulthood eventually realize and

claim their homosexuality but for whom disidentification
with this false heterosexual persona would most certainly
mean social ostracism, intolerable psychic conflict, and even
familial rejection. However, adults of all ages may be just as

identified with a patently false persona which serves to hide

Gay Men and Lesbians 131

their homosexuality from others as well as from themselves.
One example of a false persona of this sort which is not
heterosexual in nature can be found within some gay or
lesbian Roman Catholic religious, who seize upon a persona

that is asexual in nature, provided to them through their

participation in the religious order, in order to resolve the
conflicts around their homosexuality.

Regardless of an individual’s age, however, or the sort

of persona used to cover their same-sex sexual attraction, to
disidentify with a false persona and begin to claim one’s
homosexuality as an important portion of one’s personality
is actually just a fancy psychological way of describing what
most people these days simply call “coming out.” In com-
ing out of the closet, the gay or lesbian individual goes
through a process which in our previous chapter we have
seen other individuals go through in working their way out
of persona identification: becoming conscious that their
previous persona is not an authentic representation of who
they actually are; modifying or abandoning the major fea-

tures of this previous persona; and developing a new and

more accurate persona as an openly gay or lesbian indi-
vidual.
Three dreams from the very short therapeutic process
I had with a Roman Catholic priest who came to see me
during his sabbatical year in Berkeley, a year which coin-
cided, not too coincidentally, with his coming out both to

himself and to others of significance in his life, give a flavor

of what the coming out process is for a gay man who had
long identified with a patently false persona in defense
against his homosexuality but who in midlife finally began
to own and celebrate his sexuality internally and externally.

Ken presented himself to me for psychotherapy fairly

late in the academic year, an introverted but affable man

who had turned over in his mind the idea of entering coun-

132 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

seling for many a month before finally taking action, thus
honoring his inner process but also ensuring that our work
would be limited in duration, as he would be leaving to
return to his job at the end of June. As he described his life,

I saw a heartrending picture of what life in the closet, an

existence lived from behind a false persona, had entailed for
him. Growing up in a farm town, within a family notable
in its emotional coldness and distance, he had, as so many
religious, entered seminary in adolescence, finding within
the novitiate and his religious formation a family and a
community he had never known. In advanced middle age
when he came to see me, Ken had begun his religious life

well before the various reforms instituted under Pope John

XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, which signified a

young adulthood spent within “old-style” Catholicism, in-

cluding pervasive personal restrictions, a severe attitude
toward sexuality of any sort, including “particular friend-
ships” between members of the order, and a glorification of
the work ethic. This lifestyle, which Ken had lived for
nearly thirty years, was an unending round of sixty- to

eighty-hour work weeks in educational institutions, a social

life which extended no farther than his residential commu-
nity, and the firm belief that, in line with his vocation, he
was called to celibacy, which he had up to a certain point
had no problem with, given his experience of himself as

asexual. It was not until about five years before I saw him,
he told me, that he began to actually have feelings,

thoughts, and fantasies that were sexual in content, and in-

deed, he discovered, were primarily homosexual in content.
At first this inward experience of his homosexuality did not
disturb him, for his commitment to celibacy remained firm,
and yet, he found that these feelings, thoughts, and fanta-
sies did not lessen over time but began to proliferate. He
dealt with them, he told me, by working harder still, in fact.

Gay Men and Lesbians 133

so hard that his superior feared for his mental and physical
health and had forced him against his will to take the sab-
batical year in Berkeley.

This sabbatical, his first vacation in his entire lifetime,

opened him up to another way of thinking and feeling in
the world. He found Berkeley’s more progressive and laid-

back atmosphere a very refreshing, though often equally

threatening, change from what he had known before, and
the very visible gay and lesbian community of the Bay Area
led him to think that there may be a way of dealing with
his homosexuality which could reconcile his call to celibacy
and his desire to connect more deeply and really with those
he knew. In short, he wanted to come out, and so Ken came
to me, an openly gay therapist, on a recommendation by a
religious colleague of mine who thought I could be helpful
to Ken as he explored life outside of his traditional persona.
His first dream, from the first month of his work, re-

ported here verbatim as he wrote it out for me, shows, even

textually in its lack of personal pronouns, the situation we
began with and the peculiarly poignant loss of self that liv-

ing in such a state of persona identification wreaks upon

the personality of a gay man:

Was somewhere and two Franciscans were frozen in sleet or

ice, left on the sidewalk of a retreat center. They were as-

sumed dead. When a person came to cut them away

through the ice, the two were found to be alive.

In discussing this dream, Ken’s first association was to

Saint Francis, who forhim had profound significance, com-
ing from an order which prided itself more on its intellec-
tual sophistication and its educational pursuits than its

relationship to nature and poverty, Franciscan virtues par

excellence. I noted aloud how this simpler, more natural

way of being seemed to have been frozen in ice, big blocks

134 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

of ice, that is, frozen for many, many years. His amazement
that the two Franciscans were still alive after being in the
deep freeze was palpable, which of course reinforced my
view that in the unconscious sleeps all the wealth of the
lives we did not or have not yet lived.
That there were two Franciscans in this dream
brought to my mind the traditional Jungian interpretation
of duplication in dreams, namely, that a duplicated image
often represents the coming to consciousness of a new psy-
chic content. Here, having entered therapy to acknowledge
and find a way to live out his sexuality, Ken found a more
natural and authentic spiritual self emerging. This piece of
his individuation process was aided in his outer life by his

participation in a course on psychosynthesis, from which

came various images and symbols that he had drawn during
various exercises in class.

Two such drawings he had made and brought in to

show me poignantly illustrated the nature of life in the

closet, that is, life behind the false persona. The first was
that of an astronaut floating in space with a suitcase, face
obscured within his helmet, his lifeline severed from the
ship. This painful picture of isolation and abandonment, in
which Ken appeared wrapped in a silver spacesuit like the

boy in the bubble, self-contained and cut off, brought up a

great sadness in both of us as we sat with this powerful
image on the ottoman between us and regarded it for a

while.
The second drawing was the angular figure of a gleam-
ing silver robot in which, he told me, he lives. My associa-
tion to this drawing came from the third book of the
Canadian writer Robertson Davies’ Deptford trilogy. World
of Wonders, in which a mistreated young boy runs off to
join a carnival, only to be given the job of operating, from
the inside, a hollow automaton and in this robotic prison

Gay Men and Lesbians 135

to perform tricks for the amazement of the circus audience.
By showing me this portrait of his false persona, the persona
of a compulsive workaholic who had put in years of unre-
mitting labor at school and had lived the emotional life of
a machine, Ken had begun to take the first step in disidenti-

fying with this persona. He had become conscious that who

he seemed to be from the outside — frozen, spaced out, me-
chanical —was not who he actually was on the inside
warm, natural, a human being.
His path of persona disidentification, however, be-
came more specific and gathered unto itself still more emo-
tional heat, as the issue which engendered it in the first

place, his homosexuality, urged itself further into his con-

sciousness. In this regard, Ken began to have a series of
dreams about a friend of his whom
known since the
he had
novitiate, a friend who long remained unnamed in his

dream reports to me but who initially appeared as his typi-

cal companion in various dream situations. However, after

our first month, the relationship between Ken and his

friend, who had at last acquired a name, Ted, thawed out

in his unconscious, and accordingly, he dreamt:

Was with several couples who were close friends of my par-

ents, while I was growing. One of the sons of these friends
kept massaging my neck and back I felt some connective-
ness with him and tenderness.

Instead of adopting an objective interpretation of this

dream, identifying the dream figure with Ted, the actual
person whom Ken now could admit having always had a
crush on, we stuck closer to a subjective interpretation.
From this perspective, we looked at the dream as the inner

result of abandoning the old, false persona. A greater soft-

ness and flexibility began to emerge, relaxing the stiff-

necked resistance to Ken’s real, physical self. Simultane-

136 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

ously, Ken became reacquaihted with friends and family
through a process of revising from within his attitudes
toward his relationships. The gentle eroticism that springs
up between him and his friend in the dream is, of course,
the source and motive power behind this second stage
in disidentifying with the false persona, coming out as a

gay man.
The third dream, which occurred in the last month of
our work together, aptly symbolizes the result of coming
out in its location of the dream ego within a public, com-
munity setting:

I was in a gay bar, felt afraid, anxious, thinking that I

should leave, began to notice people I knew. I finally felt all

right to stay. There were two persons I knew but I have not
seen them for many years — one, a former student, another,
a fellow teacher.

The dream report at last starts with a personal pro-

noun, “I,” and moves from the typical vulnerability and
fear that accompanies the use of a more authentic persona
to what many gay men and lesbians experience as a recovery

of the lost self and the uncharted community of fellow gay

and lesbian people that they are now a part of In becoming
visible to themselves and to others, in investing themselves
in visibility individually and as a community, gay and les-

bian people move from simply coming out as a disidentifi-

cation with and refashioning of their personas into a way of

being that uses the new, more authentic persona as the basis
for a more effective self.
While starting as an inward and private process, com-
ing out almost always eventuates, as this dream indicates, in

outward changes as well. For Ken, the realization that an

acknowledgment of his homosexuality to those he knew
was not a repudiation of celibacy but simply an act of

Gay Men and Lesbians 137

greater honesty and a wish for healthy intimacy moved him
to begin telling people he knew in Berkeley that he was gay.
Likewise, and quite momentously, he wrote a long letter to
his friend Ted, not only acknowledging his homosexuality
but also delineating precisely the nature of the feelings he
had long borne toward Ted and his commitment to living
out their relationship in a way that was faithful to both
their vocations. Ted’s response, which was more than a little

vague and somewhat defensive, indicated to both of us that

his friend needed to do more of the intrapsychic work that
Ken himself had taken so long to do as well.

Having unconsciously arranged for a time limit to our

work together, Ken prepared to leave for yet another teach-
ing job, determined consciously to not let it swallow his life

whole and to attempt to balance his professional commit-

ment with real and honest personal relationships. Near the
end of our work he reported the kind of powerful, archetyp-
ally rich dream which Jung called a “big” dream:

Was at a religious service in a field, where the pope was to

attend, left the field, but as I was leaving, three men came
on motorcycles, one along the grass, the other two went
into a European looking building. I noticed that they had
what looked like bombs. I saw them throw the bombs onto
a tent. I stayed outside and told persons not to enter, be-
cause I thought the service was in the field anyway. I called

for an ambulance. But the pope came into the building, I

never saw him, but saw buses with no one in them. I tried

to stop three person [sic] from entering because of the

bombs, but they resisted, so I let them go in. After the
buses, the ambulances came into the building. Looked into
the building, there was a large beer bottle, broken on a large
table.

This amazing dream, in which the graphic representa-

tion of how his previous religious commitments were being

138 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

deconstructed in order to make room for a new container,
the beer bottle at the end, nevertheless does not in its re-

ported form communicate the numinosity of the final

image. As Ken described this beer bottle, it was huge, nearly

twenty feet long and ten feet high, set on its side upon a
table and split on a bias down the middle and separated,
though miraculously none of the beer spilled out. As he
associated to the image of beer, his lower-middle-class Mid-
western childhood came up, as well as the astute observa-
tion on —which both
his part that beer is alcoholic and
grain-based —married both elements of the Christian Eu-
charist —wine and bread— into a single substance. Having
revised from the inside out his relationship to the asexual

persona he had worn so long to the detriment of his whole-

ness, in short, having come out, Ken found himself gifted
with a new and wondrous container, an integration of inner
and outer that is always the result of a right relationship to
one’s persona. He left to go back to work, and I have not
heard from him since.

Persona and the Gay Community: Out of

THE Closets and into the Streets
In illustrating how an individual, Ken, might confront and
work through the homophobic pressures which every gay
man and lesbian faces in the United States, we follow a
tradition of individual attention that is at the heart and soul
of psychology, particularly Jungian psychology. However, if

the persona is where society meets soul, then clearly the

persona dynamics created by homophobia’s pressure to hide
one’s homosexuality are confronted not simply individu-
ally, but by the community as a whole.
Persona play is an essential and pervasive part of the
gay and lesbian community, a community that was formed

Gay Men and Lesbians 139

and works tirelessly on a social level to combat the invisibil-

ity and constriction that the homophobia of Western cul-

ture continually urges upon us all. For this reason, much of
the persona play that can be seen in the community is an
object of fascination, horror, and confusion for those out-
side the community who have not yet worked through the
prejudices and stereotypes which have their origin in homo-
phobia.
One form of persona play in the gay community takes
the historic form of cross-dressing and drag. Unlike trans-
vestism as a private sexual behavior, which research has
shown is an activity participated in predominantly by het-
erosexual individuals, drag has always been a very public
display within the gay community. Indeed, as the use of
Stonewall as a community symbol unconsciously indicates,

the drag queen can well be understood as the historic kernel

of what subsequently became the gay male community in
its current manifestation. Even today, in every major city, a

fair number of gay bars and clubs continue to have drag

shows weekly, and the atmosphere on those nights is one in

which the ordinary grimness of sexual cruising is for a few

hours replaced by a lighter, more playful mood. Sometimes
elaborate, as when such flamboyant characters as Mae West,
Ethel Merman, and Patti Labelle are imitated, and some-
times more down to earth, as when portrayals of Natalie
Cole, Whitney Houston, or Marilyn Monroe predominate,
drag allows gay men to take the persona-identification dy-
namic that is so much a part of collective gay experience
and seize it, use it, and transform it in a way that shatters

personal and collective assumptions about what it means to

be a man or a woman. Should anyone doubt the power of

drag, one need only look at the near-obsessive attention it

receives in mass-media coverage of gay events, while a series

of mainstream motion pictures, such as The Crying Game

140 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

and M. Butterfly, to name just two, have used drag similarly:
to make a searing and unforgettable political statement.
Drag obviously uses the symbols of the feminine in

our culture — hair, dresses, makeup, shoes — to advance a

number of truths: that all is not what it seems in the world

of heterosexual gender assumptions; that one need not be
unconsciously identified with a persona but can in fact con-
sciously and deliberately create a persona which will then
transport oneself and those around one into a new way of
thinking and being; and that the Androgyne is alive and
well and sleeping in the unconscious of the United States.

However, another form of persona play, the sadomasochis-

tic (S/M) leather subculture which exists mostly within the
urban gay male community, uses the various symbols of
masculinity to make a similar point about the persona-1
being political.

One need not be all that familiar with the S/M com-
munity to be cognizant of how distinctly theatrical much

of its trappings are. In fact, the attention to paraphernalia

the various, sometimes outlandishly complex items of
leather clothing; the plethora of objects used for restraint

and stimulations; and the various body modifications asso-

ciated with sadomasochistic rituals, such as piercings,

tattooings, shavings, and such — in my mind represents pre-

cisely the kind of persona play which drag provides to the
community but is simply, so to speak, in the key of the
Masculine. Indeed, the goings-on of the S/M community
are an object of fascination, horror, and confusion to the
same degree that drag is. This is because, in my opinion,
S/M represents the same dynamic: gay men consciously and
deliberately playing with a persona whose creation and pres-
ence challenge and confront all assumptions about what it

means to be a man or a woman in this society. Just as drag

does, S/M and the leather community indicate how the per-

Gay Men and Lesbians 141

sona is political for gay men within a society still rife with
homophobic sexual oppression.
If drag and the leather community represent extremes
of persona play, some of the more middle-of-the-road per-
sona play from -within the gay and lesbian community
might well be illustrated by the overrepresentation of gay
people in the arts, particularly the performing and visual
arts, where appearance and reality, what is and what seems
to be, are the twin poles of that social and aesthetic transfor-
mation which is art. Who better than gay and lesbian peo-
ple should know how to act, having been unconsciously
conditioned by a homophobic society to act a part from the
first dawning awareness of their homosexuality?
If the focus upon persona for gay men and lesbians
individually and as a community is derived in large part
from the very invisibility and suppression that homophobic
attitudes wreak upon psyche, then in addition to all the
positive, transformative, and therapeutic ways of dealing
with persona wounds illustrated above, one could almost
certainly expect what Jung called an enantiodromia, liter-

ally, a running back in the opposite direction, for gay peo-

ple. To put this less technically, gay men and lesbians can

equally often be subject to a not-so-helpful compensatory

overdevelopment of the persona.
Actually, in my position as clinician, having aided
many dozens of gay men and lesbians through the coming
out process, such a compensatory overdevelopment of the
persona, sometimes accompanied by a concomitant identi-
fication with this persona, is more often than not the rule
for the recently out. For this reason, I believe various fash-

ions and fads sweep the gay and lesbian community period-
ically, indeed, so regularly that one can practically assign a
year to the particular “look” in question — the “Castro
clone” in his jeans, muscle shirt, short hair, and moustache.

142 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

from the late 1970 s or early 1980 s; the “downtown power
fag” with the striped shirt, Italian suit, large print floral tie,

and gelled hair of the Reagan era; the androgynous “Ma-

donna wannabes” with their pendulous silver crucifixes,

fingerless black lace gloves, and boxer shorts of the late

1980 s or early 1990 s; or the “lipstick lesbian,” made infa-

mous by movies like Basic Instinct, with her silk blouses,

tinted hair, stiletto heels, and cosmetic touch-ups.

These personas, by their very collectivity, can repre-
sent on the one hand that healthy, socially transformative,
in-your-face kind of self-presentation which is the best part
of persona development. Nevertheless, such wholesale
adoption of a community, which is to say, collective way of
being in the world, particularly as a compensatory over-
statement, can simply be yet another falsification of the gay
and lesbian individual’s true self. To substitute conformity
to heterosexual conventions with conformity to gay or les-

bian community conventions is no great psychic gain and

can lead to as much unhappiness and emotional vacuity.
Unfortunately, often these new and so often overblown per-
sonas of “professional homosexuals,” whatever the variety,
can be clung to with great tenacity as a security blanket
not simply against homophobia but against the demands of
individuation itself, which requires a toleration of complex-
ity and conflict that many gay men and lesbians simply do
not have after years of being worn down by homophobia,
discrimination, fear, and self-loathing. In the best-case sce-

nario, which in my experience is by far the most common,

the development of such community-based personas is but
a middle phase in the coming out process, modified and
abandoned altogether as the individual grows more com-
fortable and mature as an out gay man or lesbian. In a man-
ner of speaking, I find that the coming out process in some
ways recapitulates the adolescent and young-adult develop-

Gay Men and Lesbians 143

mental process, no matter what age the individual, so that
such persona-based peer solidarity, normal among teenagers
and college-age individuals, is likewise normal for gay men
and lesbians whocoming out live out a kind of second,
after

more authentic adolescence on the road to maturity.

Traditional psychological ways of thinking have
tended to define homosexuality as pathological and there-
fore interpret such manifestations of a community identity
as similarly disturbed. What I have found is that many psy-
chotherapists do not take into account the fact that the ag-
gressively affected “queen” sitting in the office or the “bull

dyke” in Doc Martens and chains that they see is but a

persona. One can still read articles in the literature in which
the details of a gay and lesbian patient’s self-presentation
are taken not as persona but as self and judged as dysfunc-
tional, while in reality the true dysfunction is that such a
persona may still be needed as a defense against homopho-
bia, internal or external, because the individual does not
feel the freedom and permission to conform less and be the
complex person he or she actually is.

Once again, with regard to this particular persona dy-

namic common among gay men and lesbians, psychology
mistakes the pathological result of homophobia for homo-
sexuality as pathological in se. In fact, if one works psycho-
therapeutically from the perspective that homosexuality is a
normal variation of human sexual behavior and that the
psychically pathologizing element for gay men and lesbians,

homophobia, is external and subsequently internalized, one

will almost always find that the overblown walking stereo-
type that initially presents in therapy will, under conditions
of acceptance, nonjudgmentalism, and empathy, eventually
yield to a more nuanced revelation of the various sides of
the individual’s personality and homosexuality. The gay
and lesbian community, with its expertise in persona issues.

144 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

certainly knows the truth of this, as is evidenced by com-
monplaces concerning motorcycle queens who “look butch
until they open their mouths,” or concerning drag queens
whom no gay man in his right mind would dare to cross
physically. Unanalyzed homophobia on the part of the ther-

apist may conspire with the stereotypical self-presentation

of compensatorily persona-identified gay and lesbian indi-
viduals to fool one into thinking that all is what it seems.
It is my belief that the gay and lesbian community’s
playing with persona, from drag to leather to the arts in

general, carries into the culture at large something which

this society desperately needs. Knowing in their bones that
all is not what it seems, the experience of gay men and
lesbians provides a powerful corrective to the persona-based

conceptions of self that afflict the majority of individuals

whose sexuality does not conflict with cultural norms and
who therefore sleep in a kind of unconsciousness about the
fullness of who they might be. Gay people have not had
this luxury of unconsciousness and so bring to our collective
awareness the depths and complexity of human experience,
particularly around sexuality, gender, and relationships.

Moreover, the playfulness of the gay community,

where camp is an institution and being theatrical a true
vocation, provides a compensation for the capitalistic,

mechanistic, inhuman attitudes which, when onesidedly

pursued, will result in misery and destruction. This playful-
ness, especially around persona, has long been mistaken for

immaturity and has been pathologized —Freudians refer to

it as “developmental arrest” while some Jungians prefer to

see in it a “puer identification” based on a “mother com-
plex.” The fact of the matter is that the gay community’s
persona play, in its myriad forms, represents this culture’s

positive shadow. With so much emphasis within Jungian

psychology on shadow as unacceptable, frightening, and de-

Gay Men and Lesbians 145

structive, it is all too easy to forget that for individuals and
cultures overidentified with the darker side of life, the
shadow contains positive, life-giving, and potentially fruit-

ful ways of being which are threatening, of course, but es-

good and
sentially hopeful. I believe that much of the
homophobic hatred directed toward homosexuality comes
precisely from a resistance to acknowledging the power of
cultural transformation which the gay community and its

individual members have realized for themselves and by ex-

tension offer to the culture as a whole.

146 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

 6 .

Sexism and Persona:

Wounded Women,
Wounded Men

Ofallthe many arms of homophobia, certainly one im-

portant and particularly strong arm is what gay and lesbian
activists have come to call heterosexism, meaning thereby
the assumption that all individuals are inherently heterosex-
ual, so that on a social, political, and economic level, value
is placed on heterosexual individuals and couples. In this
chapter, I will be examining one of the most important
components of heterosexism, namely, our unconscious, col-

lective conceptions of gender: what it is to be a man, what

it is to be a woman. As always in such collective situations,

as we saw with people of color and gay and lesbian people,

the persona is the part of the psyche which absorbs the im-
pact of the peculiar set of gender assumptions we have been
socialized into here in the West. In the course of individua-

tion, the persona is also that part of the psyche which mani-
fests the transformation of this collectivity into a way of
being that more authentic and personal.
is

An illustration of what we are dealing with came across

my desk as I was writing this chapter. In one of the journals
I receive as a member of an organization of mental health
professionals, a counselor wrote a letter to the editor taking
exception to the discussion of women’s issues that had ap-
peared in a previous issue wherein women were discussed as
a “minority.” How, he asked, did women get away with

147
claiming minority status when they constitute 5 percent of
the American population, constituting thereby a majority,
rather than a minority, with the implication clearly being
that the previous month’s discussion of sexism and wom-
en’s oppression was an invalid attempt to claim a special
kind of status for women that did not belong to them or
that simply was not true. This unfortunately myopic atti-

tude (regrettably present in fields like psychology where dis-

ciplines such as statistics are valued because of the

objectivity they supposedly impart, while social, political,
economic, or cultural analyses are eschewed as outside of
the field or belonging to someone’s else discipline) made
clear to me that my intention in preparing this section on
sexism and persona was certainly not overkill, even with the
extraordinary progress that has been made in raising the
American consciousness about patriarchy and sexism.
Rather than looking at the way in which women are shock-

ingly underrepresented in all the institutions of social power

within our society —hence the appropriateness of the label
“minority” —our correspondent perhaps unintentionally
underlined the truth of the saying, “Figures lie, and liars

figure.”

Indeed, the figures lie about women in our society,

since, despite their numerical majority and their essential

presence in the cocreation of culture and human life, an
attitude prevails that automatically prizes who a man is or
what aman does and automatically devalues, trivializes, or
ignores who a woman is and what a woman does. Femi-
nism, that political movement born in the twentieth cen-

tury to do battle against this unjust system of male

superiority, patriarchy, for short, and its ideology of female
inadequacy, namely sexism, has struggled long and hard on
all levels of American culture to change not only attitudes
and consciousness but institutions and organizations into

148 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

something more balanced, inclusive, and woman-valuing.
The success of such explicitly feminist work at this date is

moot, having made a fair number of gains, for example, the

greater numbers of women in the workforce, the passage of

antidiscrimination laws on state and local levels, the pres-

ence of women in government and business with a great

deal of visibility and power, but having suffered simultane-
ously a number of major setbacks as well, for example, the
failure of the Equal Rights Amendment on the federal level
and the continuing poor payscale and low professional
status of working women when compared to men. With
regard to feminism’s more intangible goals, the success of
the movement is even more questionable, for not only has
the males-only attitude in government and business not
changed a great deal but the results of such attitudes
sexual harassment or a lack of child care within professional
circles, to name just two — are becoming even more strik-

ingly obvious and visible. Even if women do gain these

days, it still seems that this occurs only when and if men
can afford it.

Though I am wary of pronouncing feminism a failure

in some categorical way, it has certainly not succeeded in

convincing the bulk of American men, who by virtue of
their anatomy receive privileges and benefits socially, educa-
tionally, politically, and culturally under the current system,
to do much more than charity work or lip service in favor
of women’s rights. Practically, I have come to see that issues
raised by feminism need to be addressed in a different man-
ner for equality and cooperation to be fostered, but this
different praxis, I believe, needs to arise from a deeper un-
derstanding of what undergirds sexism in the first place,
namely, the dichotomous gender roles endemic to Western
culture.

Unlike other cultures, some of which have three or

Sexism and Persona 149

even four genders (as in some Polynesian or Native Ameri-
can tribes), European culture arose ’svith a conception of
only two genders —man and woman—and way of a think-
ing about these genders which was dichotomous; that is,

one was either a man woman—one could not be

or a both.
Of course, one’s immediate reaction to this way of describ-
ing Western ideas of gender is to feel the limitation which
this imposes upon the individual, a limitation certainly not
borne out either in literal anatomical reality, for babies are
born daily with two sets of genitalia, or in social reality,

where the full range of human behavior, thought, and feel-

ing cannot ever be fully contained in the simplistic versions

of “man” or “woman” handed down to us as individuals.
However, it is equally clear how important maintain-

ing the myth of two diochotomous genders is to certain

people, particularly those who benefit under the current
system, usually but not always men. By applying these rela-
tively narrow and essentially oppositional definitions of
what it means to be a woman or a man, patriarchy contin-
ues to operate through a rather ingenious system of divide
and conquer: convincing men of their superiority and
therefore their natural right to the privileges they enjoy
while simultaneously socializing women to believe in their

innate inferiority and therefore their lack of entitlement to

the privileges which men enjoy. In reality, such a system
benefits no one, neither man nor woman, for it is based on
a falsehood, what Beryl Lieff Benderly called the “myth of
two minds. Gender is not an ontological reality but rather
a social construction. Ifwe are not convinced by cross-cul-
tural research on groups who have constructed the whole

thing differently, then certainly our own experience could

and should teach us that much more is contained in the
conception of “man” or “woman” than we have been
taught.

150 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

 For many, if not most, -women nowadays, feminism
has been successful in making clear the damage to women
that such gender roles entail, and this level of injustice is

one which we are both conscious of and used to confront-

ing. But, in my own work with men, I have seen ample
evidence of that which feminism has not, and perhaps could
not, make clear to men, namely, the damage that such re-

strictive gender roles wreak on men’s souls, damage that,

being primarily psychic or emotional in nature, gets hidden

beneath the shower of privilege afforded to men who at-

tempt to live up to the male gender role. Indeed, after dec-

ades of discussion about sex roles and oppression from a
woman’s point of view with a feminist intent, men’s reac-
tion to such terminology is that they signal issues which do
not apply to them as men, just as the neutral term “sexual
orientation” reads “homosexuality” to many heterosexuals
who experience their own heterosexual orientation as “who
they are,” while it is those homosexuals who have issues
around “sexual orientation.” Similarly, with issues concern-

ing gender and sex roles, until very recently when a spate of
books began to appear connected with the so-called men’s
movement, it was as if onlywomen had a sex role, and an
oppressive one at that, while men were who they were. This
shift toward an examination of what constitutes the male
sex role in a sexist society and the increasing number of
male voices being raised against this patriarchally imposed
role are the most hopeful signs that issues of gender parity
and cooperation will finally be addressed in a credible way.

On the Fence: Jung, Jungians,

AND Gender
Jungian psychology, beginning with Jung, of course, has
had its own controversial relationship to this inherited set

Sexism and Persona 151

of assumptions around what it means to be a man or a
woman, and the history of analytical psychology on issues
of gender can be read in many different ways, depending
on whether one accepts what can only be best called the
persona of analytical psycholog)^ or one begins to delve a
bit more deeply into the theoretical and practical thicket
presented by such issues. On what I would call the personal
level, or what is nowadays called political correctness, a
strong case can be made for Jung and Jungian psychology’s
contribution to a transformation of one-sided patriarchal
ways of thinking. Jung himself was quite active and sup-
portive of a number of very gifted women, beginning with
his wife and including nearly the entire so-called first gener-
ation of Jungian analysts: Marie-Louise von Franz, M. Es-
ther Harding, Aniela Jaffe, Jolande Jacobi, and Toni Wolff.
Likewise, with regard to theory, it is beyond question that

Jung’s continuing emphasis on wholeness and balance

within the psyche is the basis upon which rests the idea that
the Masculine or Feminine constitute archetypes that exist
apart from individual men or women as well as the belief

that each of us must become conscious of and integrate our

contrasexual other, our anima or animus, conceptual pillars
which represent a major dissenting voice to the one-sided-
ness of patriarchal gender constructions. These two ideas

have given now almost three generations of individuals

since Jung the license to reformulate what it means to be a

man or a woman, to see that one must build an individual

relationship to both masculinity and femininity and that

one cannot rely on conventional definitions if one is to be

psychologically healthy.
Nevertheless, it is also beyond question that Jung and
many of his followers consistently backed away, again both
in theory and in practice, from the full implications of this
newer way of thinking about gender, especially at points

152 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

when the individual integration of the contrasexual other
might eventuate in social or political rather than purely in-

dividual transformation. Here the antipolitical shadow of

Jung’s psychology, his overdetermined focus upon the indi-
vidual to the neglect of the community, becomes clear, and
like all shadows, it is dark and not all that palatable. One
much-discussed area in which this shadow has been identi-

fied has been Jung’s relationship to National Socialism.

Whether one accepts his explanation that he was well-inten-
tioned but naive in accepting the editorship of a journal
that had become a vehicle for Nazi propaganda or one be-
lieves this explanation to be a retroactive and self-serving
revision of history in order to cover his sympathetic rela-
tionship to Nazism, what leaps out at one is how Jung’s
aversion to the social and political, framed for him as “col-

lective” phenomena, leads to a destructive neglect of and

blindness to a vital level of human existence, the communal
level in which all of us live, love, and work.^
Similarly, with regard to issues of gender, despite some
of the most liberating thoughts on masculinity, femininity,
and androgyny to come out of psychology in this cen-

tury, we still can read passages such as this one, from Jung’s
1927 discussion of the social place of “Woman in

Europe”:

The mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome

results. She may perhaps be a good comrade to a man with-
out having any access to his feelings. The reason is that her
animus (that is, her masculine rationalism, assuredly not
true reasonableness!) has stopped up the approaches to her
own feeling. She may even become frigid, as a defence
against the masculine type of sexuality that corresponds to
her masculine type of mind. Or, if the defence-reaction is

not successful, she develops, instead of the receptive sexual-

ity of woman, an aggressive urgent form of sexuality that is

Sexism and Persona 153

 more characteristic of a man. This reaction is likewise a
purposeful phenomenon, intended to throw a bridge across
by main force to the slowly vanishing man. A third possibil-
ity, especially favoured in Anglo-Saxon countries, is op-
tional homosexuality in the masculine role.^
«

Here we see that when confronted with the social, po-

litical, and economic issues of women’s changing roles in

the Europe of his time, specifically, the great decade of lib-

eration and social transformation between the wars, Jung’s
thinking suddenly becomes simplistic and regressive, using
the words “man” and “woman” as if they were identical
to conventional sex roles, presuming some sort of essential
feminine sexuality as opposed to some sort of essential mas-
culine sexuality, and clearly viewing any crossover with neg-
ative judgment and ill-concealed alarm.
And in case one might think that such overt sexism on
the part of Jung only goes one way, one sees the obverse in
the following passage from his 1922 lecture on “The Love
Problem of the Student”:

The homosexual relation between an older and a younger

man can thus be of advantage to both sides and have a
lasting value. An indispensable condition for the value of
such a relation is the steadfastness of the friendship and
their loyalty to it. But only too often this condition is lack-

ing. The more homosexual a man is, the more prone he is

to disloyalty and the seduction of boys. Even when loyalty
and true friendship prevail the results may be undesirable
for the development of personality. A friendship of this
kind naturally involves a special cult of feeling, of the femi-
nine element in a man. He becomes gushing, soulful,
aesthetic, over-sensitive, etc. — in a word, effeminate,
and this womanish behavior is detrimental to his char-
acter."^

154 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

 Once again, when confronted with the possibility of
living out the alternative relationship to conventional gen-

der roles so ardently advocated intrapsychically in his ideas

on contrasexuality, as in a homosexual relationship between
two men, we find Jung backpedaling with a great deal of
anxious concern over the idea of integrating too much of
the “feminine element” into one’s manhood, with, once
again, such words being used not in the finely nuanced, rich
archetypal sense but rather suddenly in the dullest, most
conventional sense of “man” and “woman.”
Both these passages show Jung attempting to be faith-

ful to his own quite brilliant insights on the essential an-

drogyny of the psyche while not wanting to let go of

conventional ideas of being a man or a woman. Unfortu-
nately, one cannot have it both ways. One cannot be au-
thentic and integrated just so long as it doesn’t go too far,

just so long as it doesn’t have any external social effect. For

a woman come to know, love, and act out of her psychic
to

masculinity will mean becoming “masculinized,” and, in

my opinion, there is nothing wrong with this, any more
than there is for a man to come to know, love, and act
out of his femininity, which almost by definition means
becoming more “effeminate.”
What Jung missed was the way in which it is conven-
tional sex roles, with their narrow and dichotomous system
of personality characteristics, which falsify human experi-
ence, and if one integrates one’s animus or anima, the result

could be and, in my opinion, should be not only a transfor-

mation of the individual’s inner and outer life but a trans-
formation of the social order which inculcates such one-
sidedness in the first place. By shrinking from the extra-
verted, sociopolitical level of individuation and attempting
to hide within the flattened persona of “pure psychology”

Sexism and Persona 155

wherein the individual exists in some rarefied plane apart
from all others, Jung has done himself and his ideas a great
disservice. At best, he seems hypocritical, advocating a revi-

sion and transformation of masculinity and femininity as

long as it does not go too far or get too transformed, at

worst, betraying his own convictions and becoming an un-
witting mouthpiece for the oppressive status quo.
It is only comparatively recently that the unconscious
sexism and patriarchalism of Jung has been confronted and
discussed more openly, naturally by women first and fore-
most but also by men. Nevertheless, a literature exists which
attempts to help Jungian psychology remain faithful to the
truly different way of viewing gender introduced by an un-
derstanding of masculinity and femininity as archetypal re-

alities apart from individual men and women while

simultaneously taking into account the need for activism on
a social and political level. Thus, Demaris Wehr, in one
of the first books of its kind within analytical psychology.
Liberating Archetypes: Jung and Feminism, can both affirm
the value of analytical psychology for her personally in her
introduction, while bringing forward such valid criticisms
of analytical psychology “To construct a theory on the
as

illusion of balance functions to mask the gender imbalance

that exists in patriarchy to avoid and thereby legitimate

. . . ,

the social problems of inequality between the sexes. Simi-

larly, the growing “men’s literature” within Jungian psy-
chology clearly intends to transform not just how men feel

about themselves but how they act in the world as fathers,

sons, lovers, and warriors.^

Women and Persona: Heavy on

THE Sugar, Hold the Spice
As is clear from the above, much of the discourse on gender
within Jungian psychology has proceeded, not surprisingly.

156 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

with reference to Jung’s conceptions of contrasexuality and
the archetypes of anima and animus. However, other ap-
proaches can be taken with regard to gender from within a
Jungian purview. Following our train of inquiry concerning
the persona, therefore, one could naturally expect that
something so culturally constructed as the sex roles of a
patriarchal society have their primary effect on the personas
of the individuals within that society.
For a woman, the application of the conventional fem-
inine role, that is, her socialization as a woman, results in

the creation of a persona which, of course, does little justice

to the fullness of who she actually is as a woman. This,

though, is a given with regard to any conventional persona
applied to anyone, be it the persona of doctor, the persona
of lesbian, or the persona of old person. What is important
to see with regard to sex role and women’s personas are two
deeper factors. First, the elements of conventional feminin-
ity into which a woman is socialized are essentially conflic-
tual and therefore not capable of being realized within any
one individual except at great psychic cost. Second, such
conventional femininity woman’s true way of
reflects less a

being with herself and more what men want or need

women to be in relation to them as men acting out their
own conventional masculine sex role. To put this second
point more simply, the conventional sex role for women is
defined from the outside in and is essentially dependent
upon men’s roles, men’s lives, and men’s expectations.
Meryl Streep, in a television interview about her role
in the movie Defending Your Life, mentioned that because
her character was created by a man, it was hard to play,

since acting this character meant enacting not a real

woman, but rather a male screenwriter’s fantasy of how he

would like a woman to make him feel. This insight, that a
woman’s identity is largely fashioned socially on the basis

Sexism and Persona 157

of how a man would like her to make him feel, is already a
fairly complex dynamic if an individual woman is to set
about creating for herself a persona that reflects her true
nature. Within a sexist society, someone outside of herself,
usually a man or a group of men, decides her true nature,
not she herself or her own self-awareness. But then, when
we look further into the actual content of what “woman”
is conventionally understood to be, we find a highly con-
flictual amalgam derived not from real women but rather
from the archetypal Feminine. Women are spiritual but
earthy, sexual yet transcendent, caretakers yet dependent,

strong enough to create a race yet weak and in need of

protection, cooperative and interrelated while at the same
time competitive and bitchy, they are virgins and whores
all at the same time!
Should it surprise anyone that persona issues predomi-
nate for women in therapy or that so many women find
themselves paralyzed in self-reflection, since any step in
nearly any direction of persona development, be it conven-
tional or feminist, calls forth an equal and opposite reac-
tion? If a woman wishes to express herself more clearly,

directly, and intellectually, she can be considered simultane-

ously mannish or empowered. Should she desire to enhance
her natural looks with makeup or jewelry, she can be seen
as taking care of herself or selling out to male standards. If
she works at a job outside the home, she can be viewed as
independent and self-reliant or ambitious and grasping. If
she does not work outside the home but chooses full-time
motherhood instead, she can be characterized as owning her
femininity fully or copping out from having it all. If she

marries, she can be applauded for fulfilling her womanly

destiny or accused of attaching herself to a man for greater

social status. If she does not marry, she can be an old maid
or a feisty individual. Within a patriarchal set of sex roles.

158 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

the woman’s side of which is defined from the outside and
is expected therefore to encompass and embody the entire
gamut of archetypal Femininity for men who need her to
be their femininity for them, true persona development for
a woman is an enormously complex relearning process
which means having to relentlessly search out from the
midst of a storm of images the one way of being, the one
decision, the one feeling that truly reflects her own soul
not her husband’s, not her father’s, not her son’s, not her
therapist’s, not her friend’s, not her mother’s — hers and
only hers.
Compound this situation further by the way that pa-
triarchal sex roles are set up to devalue women and trivialize

their selves and their activities, resulting in women’s as-

signed social roles often embodying nothing but the super-

ficial and trivial, for example, fashion and decorating, mere
ornamentation designed to aesthetically enhance men’s
lives, and one has the situation in which many women
sometimes have never experienced themselves except as the

persona of a persona, so to speak, or as Meryl Streep put it,

as a man’s idea of how he would like her to make him feel.

This situation, one should remark, is quite different than

simply identifying with a persona, say, that of wife or
mother, in which the role has a certain content and func-
tion. Women, within this system, sometimes have nothing
more of a role than simply being a role, the projection
screen upon which men project their fantasy to be embod-
ied and played out.
With all of the above, one sees how persona develop-
ment for women as the first step in the individuation proc-
ess is what I have come to call a desert experience, a time of

going away into herself, all alone, perhaps for a very long
time, in order to simply tune out all other voices and images
other than the ones that derive from her own soul. Ironi-

Sexism and Persona 159

cally and understandably, the persona development process
for a woman, in my experience, starts and remains an in-
tensely inward-directed, soul-based process, not unlike the
slow building of a house, piece by piece, from foundation
up, entailing examination and choice regarding nearly every
area of her inner and outer life, with the exhibition of the
new self in a persona as only the last stage in the process.
Betty and Diana, the two women I introduced in Part
Two, provide ample illustration of the gender-related issues

surrounding persona. For both these women, whose process

of healing we have viewed from
a more general perspective,
it was necessary become conscious of the specific ways in
to
which internalized expectations of what a “woman” is had
been incorporated wholesale into their persona so that they

could see exactly how such gender prescriptions did or did

not fit them as individuals, discarding those that did not
and retaining, indeed cherishing, those that did.

Betty is perhaps the clearest example of how sexism

and women’s personas collide to the detriment of women’s
lives and mental health. Since a persona is, in one sense,

nothing more than one’s social role, and since women in a

patriarchal society are given little scope in the kind of social

role they may adopt, the persona which Betty found herself
locked into, that of “suburban homemaker,” is unfortu-
nately one of the few personas, or social roles, permitted.
Despite activism by many self-described feminists to re-
deem this term, making it into a true career, what “home-
maker” denotes in this society is today less a career than a
default choice. However consciously chosen this social role

may be, the fact is that within a patriarchal system, the

things to which a homemaker devotes herself (or him-
self) — children, cooking, and housecleaning — are not ac-

tivities that our society values or prizes greatly. Fur-

thermore, for a vast number of women, including Betty,

160 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

this role was certainly not consciously chosen but was sim-
ply the tacit expectation of what she would be when
socially

she married. Thus, she fell into this persona, the same way
in which she fell into wearing white at her wedding or un-
thinkingly changed her name to her husband’s, sacrificing
yet again a piece of her own more authentic persona to
take on the persona or social role expected of her by her
husband.
Inherent in Jung’s approach to the psyche is the un-
derstanding that that which appears to us as psychopathol-
ogy is nearly always symbolic of the potential wholeness of
the psyche which is attempting, in sometimes unmodulated
and unconscious ways, to make itself seen, heard, and ap-
preciated. So it was with Betty’s “psychopathology,” that
is, the problems which had beset her before her inpatient
treatment and work with me, namely her alcoholism, com-
pulsive spending, and extramarital sexual activity, all of
which, in my view, represented attempts to get more for

herself, to consume and consume —be it liquor, products,

or men — as a way to compensate for the impoverishment

of the female role into which she had been trapped. The
crisis which catapulted her at last into treatment, which was
as hair-raising as consciousness-raising for everyone in-
volved, finally enabled her to break out of the persona of
—
homemaker indeed, for many months it seemed to her
she was more of a homewrecker than a homemaker and —
this step into action seems a vital piece of women’s individ-

uation which I believe is often missed by psychodynami-

cally oriented clinicians. Rather than simply see such
behaviors as “symptoms” or “acting out” which must be
resisted at all costs, whether through intellectual under-
standing, dint of will, or sublimation, I believe that for most
women, dismantling the personas thrust upon them by pa-
triarchal standards requires actions which in fact destroy or.

Sexism and Persona 161

in the best cases, radically and permanently alter the social

situations in which they are living. Seen symbolically but

appreciated in depth, Betty’s alcoholism, promiscuity, and
compulsive buying were all signs of a greedy, hungry, em-
powered, most of all active self needing very much to
emerge from behind “what a woman should be.”
From this perspective, our previous analysis of her
male Medusa dream, which we took as a sign of her return
to an undifferentiated state of being thanks to the collapse
of her previous way of life, takes on a certain kind of em-
blematic significance when looked at through the lens of
gender. Might it not be the case that undoing the personas
of “man” or “woman” returns us all to that primal, undif-
ferentiated state, to that “naked fetus . . . ugly and yet so
moving,” as Betty herself put it in our session? Indeed,

within a society of dichotomous gender roles, it often

seems, particularly I women, but also to some men,
think to
that what lies between “man” and “woman” is precisely a
kind of anxiety-provoking void, a nothing, rather than any
idealized androgynous entity. Already anxious about their
toehold on society as women, can one blame women for

being anxious at abandoning their personas in service of

something as unacknowledged, unclear, and vague as

“wholeness” or “authenticity”? If one is not a homemaker,

might not one evaporate off the face of the earth entirely?

We saw that the middle phase of Betty’s work centered

a great deal around her appearance. While the dream of
Tammy Faye Bakker had put a humorous spin on the way
in which she felt that she may need to compensate for her

loss of a previous persona, a more realistic and ongoing

issue, shared by nearly allwomen, was better represented by
the dream in which she had somehow miraculously lost fif-
teen pounds and was removing black T-shirts: her weight.

Again, it is not all that difficult to simply attribute women’s

162 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

concerns about weight and sip to internalized sexist expec-
tations from men which women then act out upon them-
selves, and this analysis has much to recommend it, for it
even explains why, in certain periods, larger female bodies
were not only acceptable but sought after —because the
men in power liked women that way. However, my work
with Betty around her fifteen pounds, extra weight which
she had slowly gained over the course of what we came to

call her “secret life” and then her “breakdown,” made me

think that her added bulk was actually a more symbolic
compensation for the fear of not existing outside the so-
cially prescribed role Her weight meant
she had been given.
that there was more to her, that she was more substantial,
that she would not just wither up and fade away should
she become herself more fully in the world. Thanks to her
recovery work in Alcoholics Anonymous, she was not par-
ticularly inclined, the way many women would be, to be-

come overly restrictive with herself or obsessed with

appearances. “I’m through with that for good,” she would
say. Nevertheless, the somewhat positive function her extra

weight served for her made me wonder if the huge discrep-

ancy between current standards of female thinness, which is

more an adolescent girl’s body type, and the actual state of

the American female body, which averages between 25 and
33 percent body fat, may not be a psychic compensation
for the cipher-like personas assigned to women out of
which they need to grow, psychologically and perhaps phys-
ically, in order to be healthy.
In the final phase of our work, Betty got her first job,

and once again, in terms of women’s individuation, this

incorporation of what is traditionally seen as a piece of a
man’s persona makes clear the need to enact a new way of
being, not simply to contemplate or understand. It is of
course "one of the ironies of feminist success that having a

Sexism and Persona 163

job has been now very much defined into the female per-
sona of the post- 1960s United States, so much so that
whether to work outside the home or not is one of the more
obvious tensions among feminists of different stripes, some
arguing that anything a woman chooses should be valued,
not simply those choices which conform to patriarchal stan-
dards, such as an outside career, while others contend that
women’s entry into traditionally male spheres of power rep-
resents an advance. How far women have advanced into
such spheres of power is debatable, just as the idea that
women can revolutionize their way of thinking about them-
selves while their lives would remain the same is a question-
able proposition. For Betty, her teaching assistant job was
her first job ever, and her feelings about it varied greatly,
from upwellings of some of her old ideas on being a
—
woman “The only women who work are those who have
failed,” was the sound of this voice, with failure defined as

failing to be enough of a woman to get a man to support

her — to the much more insistent excitement and anticipa-

tion which greeted each day. Without shirking the discus-

sion of equal economic justice, I feel Betty’s case points out

how important any job, well paid or not, high status or not,
career or simple labor, may be to a woman psychologically,
at least initially. To work, however politically correct it may

be, is still in 1994 a slap in the face of the traditionally

passive, home-oriented, dependent persona that women
have had fashioned for them by sexist assumptions, and
Betty’s job represented not just a new and improved per-

sona at work but rather the way in which persona transfor-

mation is social transformation for women. All the better

when the time comes that women receive equal pay for

equal work.
The other woman presented in Part Two, Diana, pro-
vides a kind of counterpoint to Betty’s story, first, because

164 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

Diana’s alcoholic family of origin was to a great degree
largely responsible for her difficulties in individuation
rather than the effect of feminine socialization per se. In
this way, and quite in keeping with the kind of patient she
was, Diana provides a challenge to those who would see

sexism and its effects as the sole lens through which one
should view a woman’s life. Yet, much of my work with
her, from beginning to end, had to do with helping her
through the bind presented to her as a woman.
For example, whereas Betty’s early dream of male Me-
dusas indicated to us her lack of differentiation on a psychic
level, Diana’s manner, persona, and behavior played out
this lack of differentiation outwardly. Having dreamt of
walking down the street and going to a party naked, Diana
early on, it seemed to me, could have been quite capable of
following through on this in outer life, and indeed she had
gone through a period of indiscriminate sexuality before her
marriage. Though much of this could be traced to the cha-
otic neglect she had grown up with, much of her persona-

lessness, and hence the undifferentiated nature of her way

of being in the world, can, like Betty’s, be put down to the

way in which conventional ideas about being a woman did
not address who she was as a person, so that the whole
conflictualamalgam of masculinity, femininity, and an-
drogyny was hung out for all to see.
In fact, it frequently seemed to me that both her hus-
band and eventually I myself in some ways had been plied
into serving conventional masculine roles for Diana by pro-
viding, as men often do for women, a container for the
conflicts which, ironically, patriarchal views of femininity
create for women in the first place. Such a situation is not
an easy one to extricate oneself from, either for women or
for men.
For instance, this conventional view of relationship.

Sexism and Persona 165

man as container, woman as contained, unwittingly creeps
into Jung’s thought via translation in one of the rare articles
devoted specifically to marriage, “Marriage as a Psychologi-

cal Relationship,” from 1925, wherein Jung in one p".ra-

graph puts forth the rather balanced view that

There is always so much experience available [in a complex

personality] that the simpler personality [in the relation-
ship] is surrounded, if not actually swamped by it; he is

swallowed up in his more complex partner and cannot see

his way out. It is an almost regular occurrence for a woman
to be wholly contained, spiritually, in her husband, and for
a husband to be wholly contained, emotionally, in his wife.

One could describe this as the problem of the “contained”

and the “container,”

only to be undercut by his translator, R. F. C. Hull, who in

a footnote explains, “In translating this and the following

passages, I have, for the sake of clarity, assumed that the
container is the man and the contained the woman. This
assumption is due entirely to the exigencies of English

grammar, and is not implied in the German text. Needless

to say, the situation could just as easily have been re-
versed.”^ With the relentless reinforcement of “he” refer-
ring to the container and “she” to the contained, Jung’s

actual point about marriage as a psychological relationship

of tension between the one-sidedness of both individuals

eventually evaporates over the course of the article, or at
the very least, requires the reader to perform mental exer-
tions to overcome both the unconscious conditioning that
sees women as needful of containment by men and the
exigencies of the English language which enforce this

sexism.
Initially, however, Diana did in fact need containment
of the kind which both her husband, with his diffidence

166 '
CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE
and emotional distance, and I, with my consciousness and
concern for her safety, were able, I think, helpfully to pro-
vide. The key word here, however, is “initially,” for never
once did I (nor I suspect her husband) believe such a situa-
tion to be ideal, but rather simply the place from which we
needed to start until Diana could come into her own as a

woman. Yet she is an illustration of how, with few resources

and little encouragement toward individuation, women can
remain infantilized and dependent upon men to provide
them a container which the development of a good sturdy
persona could and should provide.
Nevertheless, what looks chaotic and undifferentiated
from one standpoint may look quite different from another.
In terms of Diana’s initial presentation, therefore, the eclec-
tic style of dress she had managed to fashion for herself was
a symbol of the way in which, in one sense, Diana had
an advantage over Betty: whereas Betty had bought into
conventional ideas and suppressed the wide range of her
personhood through persona identification, Diana, who
had been for the most part deprived of such direction, was
instead living out the whole massa confusa of her potential
all over her everyday life. Rather than a recovery of self as

with Betty, Diana’s status as a woman, that is to say, a per-

son defined by conventional gender roles as someone less

than whole, a non-man, represented a kind of freedom for

her to delve into everything and anything thrown up to
her by her unconscious and her life. Women with more
consciousness and impulse control than Diana often experi-
ence this exclusion from the patriarchy as a wonderful kind
of freedom, and Diana herself would often jibe at me and
her husband for our seriousness, clearly full of enjoyment
that she did not have to bear such a burden.
In acquiring her persona over time, Diana, like Betty,
found herself happier, of course, and certainly more em-

Sexism and Persona 167

powered, and yet, because the essentially conflictual situa-
tion into which women are placed by patriarchal ways of
thinking cannot be solved simply through the creation of a
persona, much of the tension between freedom and society,
between being a container and being contained, abided.
While her job and promotion were a source of satisfaction
for her, she felt more and more that her real self lay else-
where. Similarly, her coming-into-herself signified less need
for compulsive socializing and yet entailed being with a
level of loneliness previously unexperienced. In this way, I

found the later stages of my work with Diana more trou-

bling, wondering if I perhaps had not really done her much
of favor by raising her consciousness, and thus, her experi-
ence of feminine alienation, or if I had, without intending
to, socialized her into a more masculine way of being to the
detriment of her essential feminine self As her dreamlife
attenuated, which we both at the time took to mean that
her course of work with me was coming to an organic close,

I became convinced that, should she wish to begin another

round of therapy, it should most probably be with a
woman, and that I, as a man, could only take her part way
in her journey.

Men and Persona: Heavy Lies the Head

With so much emphasis on women’s disadvantages in a pa-
triarchal system, one frequently overlooks the fact that in

such an unbalanced social construction of gender role, no

one, not even men, can really profit. Through their social-

ization, men, the “normative” human beings, the rule to

which women are the exception, develop within this system

believing for all intents and purposes that they are their

persona, having been given the socially assigned role of

doer, maker, achiever, ruler, and progenitor. This essen-

168 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

dally superficial way of seeing the world and experiencing
themselves is what one could call, using psychological
terms, a kind of socialization into unconsciousness. It is this

unconsciousness of self, inculcated into men through the

encouragement they receive to identify themselves with
their personas, that I believe is responsible for the overcom-
pensatory identification of masculinity with consciousness,
by which is often meant, not consciousness really, that is,

awareness, but rather intellectual or analytical ability

something a good deal different from consciousness.
Moreover, men find themselves in a dilemma similar

in dynamic to but different in content from that of women,

within a sex role equally conflicted, equally superficial,
equally incapable of accommodating the fullness of who
they are as individual men. Though the demands dictated
by their own gender role are a good deal different from
those dictated to women, the inherent impossibility of liv-

ing up to such expectations is identical. They are to father

and yet provide from a distance. They are to protect and

defend and yet not given the emotional or psychological
tools to relate to those they are protecting and defending.
They are to be independent and self-reliant and yet marry
and be a partner. Significantly, of course, as consciousness

is raised as to the impossibility of women’s roles in patriar-

chy, it is becoming clearer and clearer to men that to be

“successful” as a man may be a similarly impossible propo-
sition, requiring that they embody a kind of ideal beyond
the reach of anyone.
The traditional solution has been to simply exclude
one side of the equation from one’s sense of self and project
the other side onto “Others,” most often, of course,
women. Rather than acknowledge the two sides of phalloSy
both hardness, penetration, and directedness as well as soft-

ness, yielding, and flexibility, the erect phallos is seen as

Sexism and Persona 169

masculine; anything else, the quiescent phallos especially, is

viewed as feminine, childlike, and feeble, in spite of the

actual physical experience of men that their penises are soft
most of the time and only comparatively rarely hard. Men,
therefore, are sexual;women emotional. Men are the think-
ers; women the feelers. Men do; women simply are; men

are civilization; women nature.

On the level of persona, therefore, unlike women who

may have to unlearn a fairly complicated dynamic involving
their role as defined by others or confront a paralyzing set

of conflictual expectations, men most often are simply and

devastatingly identified with their personas, resulting in the
complete atrophy of their emotional, spiritual, and psycho-
logical lives, the fragility of which can be so close to the
surface as to render depth psychotherapy a somewhat haz-
ardous undertaking at times. What can be for women a
voyage of discovery into a new land of themselves for the
first time ever is often for a man the terrifying removal of a

suit of armor revealing a boy so confused and suppressed

around how to be in the world that nearly anything is pref-

erable to such vulnerability, such fear, such exposure, par-

ticularly to another man. It may be years in therapy before
this persona can be made flexible enough to provide for

accurate feeling identification, which may reveal that he has

been attempting to live up to a set of social expectations

within a profession or social milieu that does not in the

least reflect his true self

If the effect of conventional sex role socialization is

damaging to women’s sense of self, my work has shown me

that it is no less so for men, who are bought off by social

privilege into betraying the fuller, more complete, more

whole sense of themselves that is truncated through their
identification with the socially acceptable persona of con-
ventional masculinity provided to them under a patriarchal

170 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

social system. As Jung put it, the persona is usually re-
warded in cash, which creates for men an underlying psy-
chic fragility that probably any heterosexual woman can
attest to in her experiences with men.
To illustrate some of the ways in which men’s inner
life is deformed by the internalization of such one-sided
gender definitions, we need only look back to the two men
introduced in Part Two, Andrew and Carlo. Each of these
men, like Betty and Diana, presents two ways that the per-
sona reflects the unconscious conflicts built into being a
man today.
With Andrew, it is quite clear how the pressure to per-

form, to be someone, as a path to proving one’s masculinity

had led him to seize upon a persona, that of rebel artist,

much to the detriment of his wholeness as a person, partic-

ularly, and very ironically for an artist, to the detriment of

his creativity. While adopting a social role may indeed seem

to be a shortcut to being a person, a shortcut which men
are often encouraged to take, Andrew’s true inner urge to
createmade him acknowledge the failure of this path. There
was great shame for Andrew in admitting his creative block,
though, being mostly out of touch with his feelings at the
time we had begun our work, I needed for the most part to
intuit this shame for him, as he could not name and express
the feeling directly at first. Thus, in many ways he was
caught in a bind familiar to many of the men that I see
the expectation of productivity leads to the adoption of a
solution, namely identification with a persona, which,
rather than solving the issue, simply exacerbates the uncon-
sciousness which has given rise to the block in the first

place. Andrew is but one of many men I could name who,

pouring themselves into jobs that do not actually really feed

them on a deeper level but simply fulfill social expectations

Sexism and Persona 171

of the male role, end up emotionally strangled and unable
to work.

The lack of value placed on men’s emotional experi-

ence (which again Andrew demonstrated so well at the be-
ginning of our work) at this point conspires to keep men in
this place of soullessness. Without a language of feeling at

his disposal, Andrew could not articulate very well what in

fact was wrong besides the fact that he was an artist who
had not produced a work inmany months. Without a lan-
guage of feeling at their disposal, how can men in fact be-

come something richer and deeper than their persona, their

social role? This emotionlessness, I believe, is often the rea-
son that men so frequently resort to drug and alcohol abuse
as one of the few behaviors, socially accepted as masculine,

which allow them contact with what lies beneath their exte-
rior facade. If one is drunk or high, one can be maudlin,
enraged, excited; one can take off the lid and be freer, less

confined, less crushingly responsible.

Hence, by simply applying assiduous attention to feel-

ing and creating an atmosphere in which production came

second to experience, Andrew and I began to untie the knot
that had been wound around him by conventional stan-

dards of masculinity. As indicated earlier, this was a hum-

bling experience. Socialized to value largeness and strength,
men, including Andrew, can often feel belittled, foolish,

ashamed of attention to that which is small and weak: until

he began to see the quality of his paintings of everyday ob-
jects, he found it easy to dismiss and discount these works.
His self-portrait in the form of the ornately decorated
Band-Aid, very much in line with his attention to the mun-
dane, made clear to both of us the wrongheadedness of a
devotion to the dramatic and splashy and the need to see
beneath to the woundedness and the pain.
These are hard lessons for most men to swallow. Not

172 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

only does it not feel good to be small, to be humble, to be
hurt, but it is not even heroic. For this reason, it is not at

all uncommon for men to drop out of therapeutic work

when, having poked beneath the persona, they see the task

that actually faces them, the slow, hard, humble, boring

preparatory work so well captured in Andrew’s dream of
—
sanding the doorway the work of being with oneself
rather than doing something with the hope of becoming
someone. Many is the hurried, falsely upbeat message left

on my answering machine: “Thanks so much. I enjoyed

our three sessions and feel so much better that I don’t feel

the need to continue. And don’t worry about calling me.

I’ll call you when I need to.”

Carlo, at least initially, presented another false solu-

tion to some of these conflicts that face men, that of simply
dropping out of the equation and remaining in an adoles-
cent state. In obvious resistance to his Italian father’s rather
patriarchal insistence that he grow up and be a man — that
is, become self-supporting, get a job, act strong —Carlo
simply refused, choosing instead to remain a child and
finding abetment for his goal in his mother’s way of treating
him at home. Having chosen Carlo because one always sees
more clearly in extremity the essential dynamic, I am never-
theless aware that this solution to the impossibility of the
male role is one all too frequently adopted by men who,
rather than literally staying home with mother, find a way
to marry her instead, thus creating an unholy alliance be-
tween the worst aspects of woman’s sex role as caretaker

and the worst of man’s role as perpetual child. These men,

unlike Carlo, may have just enough persona to function in
the outer world and earn a living but notmuch more, the
rest of which is supplied by their wives who act as social
secretary, cook, personal valet, and emotional helpmeet, ar-

ranging for outings, taking care of the family’s physical

Sexism and Persona 173

needs, and serving as the husband’s faithful soundingboard
and support. Inside, however, is the same dynamic which
Carlo had literally lived out before seeing me: a man for all

intents and purposes still living at home as a child or a pet

with his mother. And should one doubt the level of social
support for this outcome of male and female socialization,
one need only look at how men are portrayed in television
commercials or situation comedies: frequently helpless, be-

fuddled, unable to do the most simple tasks around the

house, and utterly dependent upon the woman in an un-
abashedly infantile way.
This is the shadow of patriarchal masculinity, the ob-
verse of the heroic, powerful male, and it constitutes a sig-
nificant piece of many men’s experience of themselves. Yet,
without a vocabulary of emotional experience at their dis-

posal and encouraged by both the way being a child avoids

the pressure of mature masculinity and satisfies the women
around them, there is little stimulus to change this very
comfortable situation unless, as in Carlo’s case, men are
pushed by someone whose greater psychological maturity
begins to demand a change.
As I indicated at the end of my discussion of Diana, I

have become increasingly convinced that there needs to be

a same-sex initiation for such maturation to truly occur.
Women need to learn from more mature women to be

women, just as men need to learn from more mature men

to be men. Such a simple, almost self-evident truth, held as
sacred in nearly all cultures, seems to have been tragically

lost in the course of the modern, industrialized West. For

Carlo, as noted earlier, this initiation began, of course, with
his work with me, who quickly took on the role of the
mentor apart from the patriarchal father and the devouring
mother, but also was quite cleverly reinforced by his dream
of the gay construction crew, a group of' men whose

174 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

involvement with other men and attraction to masculinity

formed an essential step in his way toward discerning his

own relationship, hopefully a loving relationship, to a more
mature masculinity. The homoerotic quality of such an ini-

tiation into masculine maturity, explicit if not literally en-

acted in such initiation rites the world over, is another one

of those points in a man’s individuation which can either
make or break the analysis. For a man too overtly identified
with the socially acceptable heterosexual persona, the ruth-
less presentation of such unconsciously homoerotic material
may be difficult to see symbolically and unfortunately often
excites what used to be called “homosexual panic,” an ex-

treme anxiety about the possibility that one might not be

all that one might wish to appear to be to the world. In
this way, homophobia damages the inner and outer lives of
heterosexual men, for their fears deprive them of a natural
and loving relationship to masculinity and, therefore, to

other men upon which their maturation as men depends.

Having grown up in the Bay Area, Carlo had the advantage
overmany men of not having a great deal of internal homo-
phobia to deal with and thus was much more easily trusting
of the process with me and with the male peers he was
developing through his work.
The dark side of this process, his negative transference
toward me, the experience of me as demanding, insistent,

and controlling, can be seen as the way in which Carlo

came to terms with the side of patriarchal masculinity
which had wounded him as a man. His father, of course, is

the person who immediately leaps to mind, but one must

understand that his father, too, had been faced with some
of the same conflicts around masculinity and, in all proba-
bility, like many men from time immemorial, sought a so-
lution for the conflicts not in their own lives but rather in
the lives of their sons. Keeping this perspective, in my opin-

Sexism and Persona 175

ion, enables us as men to acknowledge the true wounded-
ness that such standards of masculinity have wrought
through the men who raised us (or who failed to) without
getting stuck in the self-infantilizing pit of blaming our fa-
thers. One quite effective way of doing this, naturally, is by
sticking with and through the negative father transference
that will undoubtedly occur with a male therapist, assuming
that the therapist can tolerate it and let it happen.
Carlo’s dream of self-emergence, in which he arose
from a sheath like a calla lily, provides with its phallic over-
tones a fitting symbol for the endpoint of such a process,
namely, an embodiment of the sacred image of the mascu-
line, an entree into phallic power and masculine wisdom.
Though perverted by one-sidedness into a battering ram
and an instrument of violence within patriarchy, phallos,
we would do well to note, gets its name from the ancient
Greek verb phanein: to appear, to be enlightened. To be
phallic is not simply to be strong but to be wise as well, and
this core of masculine wisdom is what opens up for men
when they become people rather than the perfect personas
our culture has trained them to be.

What is gender? I believe it is becoming increasingly clear

to women and men that, contrary to convention, gender is
considerably less fixed than we have been led to believe and
that one’s sex has less to do with one’s wholeness than one’s
own individuation. So simple is this idea that I think it is

easy to underestimate the momentous implications such a

view has for civilization as we know it, which accounts for

the slowness with which this apparently simple truth about

human beings, one of Jung’s great intuitions, is being put
into practice in the culture at large. Ours is a culture in

which the gender dichotomy has been made so central to

the definition of what it means to be human that any

176 - CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

change reverberates deeply and terrifyingly in the souls of
even those who ardently wish for movement.
As I hope is clear from both the discussion above and
the stories of the individuals presented, much of the battle-

ground for this transformation of our concept of what gen-

der is is occurring squarely on the turf marked out by this
work: the persona. Far from a mere appearance, the persona
is where people like Andrew, Betty, Carlo, and Diana, as

well as countless other men and women, begin to taste some

of the freedom and reality that lies behind simplistic codes
of male and female behavior and stake out a revolution in
human behavior and understanding based not on mere re-

ceived beliefs but on the fullness of who they actually are.

This challenge to what is, a hallmark of all transformation,

makes the persona of preeminent concern to all who desire

such fullness of being.

Sexism and Persona 177

 On Culture, Psyche,
and Outsiderhood:
Conclusion to Part Three

People defined as social outsiders are placed in a no-

win situation that appears first and most floridly on the
level of persona. To capitulate to outsiderhood means a sup-
pression of the self through persona falsification or identi-
fication, but to challenge outsiderhood may result in the

development of a persona which in its authenticity is a

threat to the stereotype and is therefore used to further at-
tack and suppress the individual. The result of such attack
or suppression is frequently the development of an even
more aggressive persona that may not actually reflect an in-

dividual’s true self with its subtleties, complexities, and in-

dividual nuances but which is perceived as necessary for

survival.

My hope in this part of the book was to show that far

from superficial or trivial, persona work can be the locus of
very vital, even revolutionary action on the part of individu-
als and that persona work, especially for people who suffer

from social, political, and economic injustice, is also a dan-

gerous step in the individuation process, which involves real
loss, real vulnerability, and real possibility of attack. It is

not the simple, direct, and satisfying process so often de-

picted in the literature. The bisexual married man who de-

velops and uses a more authentic persona risks losing a great
deal, including a wife, a family, and social status. The older

178 -
professional lesbian, though respected in her field, may
jeopardize a whole life’s work in coming out. The pre-
viously compliant Latina housewife who takes a job to sup-

plement her husband’s income and finds herself more at

home in her new role than either her family or culture have
theretofore permitted has a great deal at stake if she ad-
vances in her job. The African-American athlete who
chooses to make public his past drug use or his HIV status
may find himself either applauded for his candor or vilified
for his weakness or both simultaneously. In all of these ex-
amples, one sees how tempting it would be to simply step

back into what Jung called a regressive restoration of the

persona, to pretend that one’s bisexuality, lesbianism, ambi-
tion, addiction, or health status do not exist or are not im-
portant. In its ruthless movement forward, persona
development can be considered very much the cutting edge
of personal and cultural individuation.
Equally important for me in this discussion is to begin
integrating psychotherapeutic insights with social and polit-

ical analysis, for without an awareness of how psychother-

apy does not exist in a theoretical or scientific vacuum but
rather operates within a world of social, political, and eco-
nomic injustice which creates the very wounds patients seek
out help to heal, psychotherapists run the distinct risk of
simply perpetuating the very attitudes and systems which
created the wounds in the first place. This is not to say that
the root of all mental illness or emotional conflict is to be
placed at the doorstep of the latest “ism” of the month or
to use social, political, or economic cant to blame or dis-

count one’s own responsibility for action on one’s own be-

half. But it is far more common, especially with depth
psychology of whatever school, to identify the patient or
the family, rather than the society or the culture, as the
“sick one,” thereby ignoring the impact of the larger cul-

On Culture, Psyche, and Outsiderhood 179

rural issues on the individual psyche and absolving oneself
of the responsibility, as a psychotherapist, to 'svork for so-

cial, political, or economic justice as a way of preventing

mental illness in the first place. To truly understand and
appreciate the persona, that horizon where inner meets
outer and upper meets lower, shadow meets anima, and self
meets self and Self, means having to balance inner and
outer, choosing both and neither, with all the creative and
destructive tension that implies for the providers and recipi-

ents of healing.

180 CULTURAL POLITICS MEETS THE PSYCHE

Part Four

Persona and Spirit

Deer scalp mask from the Penobscot Clown Dance, Maine.
Made from the actual skin, ears,and antlers of a deer’s
head, this simple, evocative mask was worn in the course of
a trading dance performed by the clowns of the tribe, who
acted as liaisons to the world outside the tribe — a role
whose transcendent authority was conferred upon the
wearer through the use of the mask itself. (Photo: National
Museum of the American Indian)
 Introduction

Having started our exploration of the persona with

its origins in Jung’s psychological theory, we moved on,
appropriately and naturally, to an examination of the perso-
na’s place in the work of healing as well as the sociopolitical

context in which such healing takes place. In this part, we

will be widening our gaze even further to include the opera-
tion of persona in those aspects of culture that move past
the purely individual or even the communal or ethnic, as-
pects of culture which are summed up best in a term that
has become a bit voguish nowadays but which Jung found
quite useful: transpersonal. The need to go beyond oneself
seems innate to the human condition, whether one calls it

the will to union with God, to use traditional Judeo-

Christian theological language, or a religious instinct, as
Jung did, or even a connection to a higher power, as in

Alcoholics Anonymous. For this reason, to stay only with

one’s individual or social experience is to miss the most
fundamental piece of one’s humanity, and in light of the
subject of our inquiry, the persona, we shall be examining
how persona, too, participates in the human quest for tran-
scendence.
On this point, though, there is a disjuncture in West-
ern culture to be acknowledged, a disjuncture which can be
traced back to the Enlightenment certainly but whose roots
go even further back, to the time of the Renaissance, and
this disjuncture has, for good or ill, determined that rather
than a single chapter devoted to the persona and transcen-

183
dence, we will need to divide our examination into two
parts. With the rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman
thought in Europe around the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies in Italy, there was set into upon
motion a reliance
reason, that is, rational, analytical thought, which came into
full flower in the following centuries, most notably in En-

gland and France where this Enlightenment was responsible

for the creation of modern civilization as we in the West

know it. This application of rationality to the understand-

ing of the material world yielded not only knowledge of the
ways and means of the physical universe, both on earth and
in outer space, but also the ability to manipulate and affect

the course of this physical universe, giving rise to twin revo-

lutions, first the scientific and eventually the industrial.

So completely has this reliance on so-called rational

knowledge taken hold in the West that one tends to forget

that for the previous 99 percent of human history, that is,

for all the tens of thousands of years preceding the last one
hundred and fifty, knowledge of the physical world and the
manipulation of it was gained not through reason but
rather through religion. The physical world was not seen as

a collection of objects separate from “us” but rather as the

direct creative result of divine forces, upon which both we

as humans and the world around us depended for continua-
tion and sustenance. Now of course, this way of thinking
has been for the most part discredited, seen at best as irra-

tional and at worst as antirational, giving rise to a split in

Western civilization between the sacred and the secular.

For this reason, regrettably, this part of the book is

going to be divided into two, with chapter 8 devoted to

masks and explicitly religious ritual, while chapter 9 will

examine the use of masks in what one might call secular

ritual, in this instance, theater in its operatic form. I say

regrettably, for there once was a time in Western culture

184 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

when these two spheres of experience, religion and art, were
not seen as different, but in fact as coextensive and mutually
reinforcing. Before all the various historical nails were
driven into the coffin of the cohesive Weltanschauung that
characterized Europe for millenia, the creation of what we
understand today as “art” and display so proudly in our

museums was in fact a process that had its basis in the indi-

vidual artisan’s connection with the religious establishment

of his or her time and was understood as a “craft,” the

transformation of material for the purposes of aiding, cele-

brating, or representing a transcendent reality. Choose any
artifact — the prehistoric goddess figures, the tomb of King
Tutankhamen, the statues of Praxiteles, the wall paintings

of Pompeii, the crude symbols scratched into the walls of

the catacombs, the mosaics of Ravenna, French miniatures
of the Middle Ages, Bach’s Magnificat —and one becomes
aware how, indeed, the entire history of Western art is inti-

mately bound up with ultimate concerns, with a search for

transformation, whether it be pagan or Christian in con-
tent, figurative or symbolic in style, or painting, sculpture,
architecture, or music as to medium. Even the so-called
decorative arts (for Romans loved their glassware as much
as any proud couple- to-be registering at Neiman-Marcus)
might not be explicitly religious in intent but were most
certainly seen as the products of craftsmanship, that is, re-

sulting from a process of transformation, the knowledge of

which was transmitted to the individual artisan through a
process of initiation by elders. Thus, although I am obliged
here to separate my discussion of persona and spirituality
into sacred and secular, in the pages which follow, the artis-
tic and the spiritual will be treated not as separate fields of
experience but as one and the same. Spiritual experience
seeks, demands, and creates an expression of depth and
beauty, just as the product of such expression brings others

Introduction 185
closer to an understanding and experience of that which lies

beyond our mortal selves.

In fact, no better image exists to reorient our thinking

about the connection between art and spirituality than the
image that lies at the base of Jung’s concept of the persona,
and it is precisely with this image that these two last chap-
ters are concerned. The mask and its archetypally tranfor-
mative function, from which Jung himself coined the very
term persona, are worth our attention and amplification to
make clear how the aspects of human experience bound up
with persona are essential, both culturally and spiritually.

186
'

PERSONA AND SPIRIT

 8 .

Persona and Ritual:

The Mask as Archetypal Symbol
of Transformation

Scholars of religion have written volumes to define

and explore the notion of ritual in various cultures. Yet with

a little observation, even the nonexpert can readily under-

stand that ritual is meant to initiate us into a consciousness

of that which lies beyond our finite experience of ourselves,

into a transcendent experience of the world where our lives

and relationships take on ultimate meaning and value. One

can see this purpose behind even the most mundane rituals

in our daily lives —walking the dog, putting on a suit to go

to work, calling Mother in the afternoon — provided that
such actions are carried out with an awareness of their ritual

nature, which is to say, with a consciousness of their mean-

ing to us and to our sense of who we are. In this way it can
be argued, as Zen practitioners often have, that all ritual is

religious, even those rituals which have no explicit religious

content or purpose.
There is, of course, a valid distinction to be made be-
tween brushing one’s teeth, even with full consciousness
brought to bear, and those rituals which are undertaken for
explicitly transcendent purposes. Religious ritual presupposes

consciousness on the part of the participant, unlike walking

the dog or calling Mom, and this presumption of con-
sciousness makes clear the transcendent purpose of ritual as

an action undertaken specifically to help one glimpse that

187
which is beyond the limits of ordinary human experience.
Within the Christian tradition, for example, those rituals

denoted as sacraments came into being with such an express

purpose, to bring the believer into another level of aware-
ness concerning his or her place in the universe. The Eucha-
rist creates the church around the believer through his or
her initiation into the bodily life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. Baptism, through the symbolic reenactment of
birth, brings the individual into a new community and a
new state of consciousness. Within other religious tradi-

tions, the same transcendent purpose lies behind the respec-

tive rituals; the suttee of India, the elaborate rites de passage
of African tribes, and the fertility ceremonies of old Europe
all push the participants beyond the ordinary to the extraor-
dinary, beyond the limits of normal awareness to a higher
consciousness.
The essential element in this process is a transforma-
tion from one way of being to another. Sometimes this

transformation is inward — the development of a new vi-

sion, a new awareness, a new attitude, a new understand-

ing —while sometimes this transformation is outward — the
development of a new behavior, appearance, or way of life.
As mentioned earlier, some anthropologists, followed by a
number of Jungian analysts, have taken to using the word
liminal, derived from the Latin word for threshold, limen,

to indicate the way in which ritual involves the crossing of

a distinct point. Throughout the world, in this push to
what is beyond us, it is here, at this liminal point, that we
encounter masks. Why masks? What is it about a mask that
transforms consciousness, that lifts us over the threshold?

The Mask as New Identity

The first and perhaps the most obvious characteristic of a
mask is the way in which putting on a mask effectively

188 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

eliminates the wearer’s previous identity and creates a
wholly new one both on a physical as well as a more sym-
bolic level. This function of masks is in line with a more
general characteristic of religious ritual, namely, the manip-
ulation of material elements of the environment to create a
space and an identity outside of the ordinary or mundane.
From the humblest sacred circle drawn on the ground
around one with a stick in the dirt to the most exalted tem-
ple, religious ritual involves a level of material preparation
designed to abet the leap into transcendence. As the actual
space around the participant is changed, charged, and cre-
ated for the purpose at hand, so too is the ritual participant
to be changed, charged, and created anew. Hence, we
should hardly be surprised to find masks extensively used
throughout the world as an integral part of religious ritual.

Masks can be seen as a natural extension of ritual

clothing or body ornamentation which, as Erich Neumann

points out, always has a dual aspect, a “corporeal” or mate-
rial aspect as well as an “incorporeal” or more abstract/ sym-

bolic aspect of transformation. For the ritual participant,

the sacred headdress, the crucifix, the body paint, the white

robe which he or she wears carries both an abstract mean-

ing — the headress as a symbol of power, the crucifix as sym-
bol of redemption from death through suffering, body paint
as symbol of the various elements of the earth, the white
robe as symbol of purity or nothingness —while simultane-
ously effecting an actual physical or corporeal transforma-
tion of the body —an extension of height and breadth
itself

through a headress, the yoking of the neck with wood and

silver, revelation and decoration of the body, covering of
the body with a robe.^
Masks clearly exemplify this double function of ritual

clothing. In their corporeal aspect, the donning of a mask

represents the very essence of ritual, the obliteration of the

Persona and Ritual 189

old self in favor of creating a new and different self For this
reason, masks with their essential obliterative magic are for
the most part viewed in traditions where they are ritually
important not as aesthetically beautiful objects to be dis-

played and admired, but as very powerful instruments of

transformation to be regarded with awe and used with the
utmost care. Stage director Peter Brook describes an inci-
dent where a group of Western actors encounter Balinese
masks which they were to use in a production:

When [the masks] arrived, the Balinese actor who was with
us laid them out. All the actors, like children, threw them-
selves on the masks, put them on, started roaring with
laughter, looking at one another, looking in the mirror,
fooling around —having a ball, like children when you open
up the dressing-up hamper. I looked at the Balinese actor.

He was appalled; he was standing there shell-shocked

because for him the masks were sacred. He gave me a plead-
ing look, and I stopped everybody short. . . . Because our
group had worked long enough under different forms, the
potential respect was there; it was just that in our typical
Western way, one forgets.^

The key phrase here, of course, is “our typical Western

way,” which is to say from a civilization in which the sacred
has been gradually removed from daily life. In Bali, as
Brook found out, such is not the case, which also accounts

for the fascination which a Westerner like Brook has for a

culture like that of Bali. However, to understand the use of

masks in Bali means having to understand Balinese religion,

which like any religion is full of variety and contradiction,

made up of centuries and centuries of influences, beginning
with the most basic nature and ancestor worship, followed
by Buddhism, Tantra, and forms of Hinduism developed in

and imported, so to speak, from Java, out of which has

190 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

emerged a particularly Balinese form of religion, the wor-
ship of the god Siwa (Shiva) and his manifestations, which
exists as the religious practice of a minority within the pre-
dominant and aggressively proselytizing Muslim majority
of Indonesia. Thus, to understand the use of masks within
Bali means having to understand that this agrarian culture

sees the world divided into two, between good and bad,
between heavenly and earthly influences, though what a
Westerner might assign to each differs from the way the
Balinese see the world. For example, far from destructive
and earthly, volcanoes, especially the highest on the island,

Gunung Agung, are seen as good and heavenly, for out of

them flows divine good will in the form of water to nourish

plants. Hence, it is the height of the volcano which deter-

mines its connection with the divinity Siwa and thus its

beneficent effect on humans.

This Balinese division into high and low, heavenly and
earthly, is carried into the way of seeing the human body as

a kind of microcosm in itself, in which the head is seen as

heavenly and the feet as earthly. Hence, it makes sense that
masks, that is head or face coverings, would play such a
prominent part in Balinese ritual, for the head, of course,

according to their way of understanding the universe,

would be the part of the body most apt to represent the
realm of the gods. Their dualistic way of seeing the world,
as constituted by personified gods and demons, likewise de-
termines the content of their religious rituals which like
many native rituals are intended to call forth the power of
good and block or depotentiate the power of evil.
Here the use of the harong, or mask, comes into play,

though strictly speaking, the Balinese do not understand

the mask itself as an object but rather, once formed and
consecrated, as the very incarnation itself of the spirit or
force represented. For this reason, the word harong is not

Persona and Ritual 191

often used and is instead a kind of generic term for “god”
or “spirit” usually followed by a designation, so that the
masks, and the person wearing them during the ritual, actu-

ally become the spirit when worn and are referred to as such.
As one might expect, barong are created according to a
complex of religious rules which determine the material out
of which the mask is to be formed, the type of decoration,
and the manner of working upon the mask itself For exam-
ple, Barong Banaspati Raja, whose realm is that of burial
grounds and whose help is called upon to soften the powers
of potentially evil earthly demons, is created from the wood
of a tree grown on burial grounds and is consecrated the
way a temple would be, by a priest, before being put into
sacred use.
What makes the masks sacred to the Balinese or to any
tradition which uses masks as an integral part of their reli-

gious ritual? While the most obvious answer lies in what I

have called the immaterial, symbolic aspect, who or what

the masks actually depict, my feeling is that the general gai-
ety and enthusiasm naively shown by even Brook’s sophisti-

cated group of stage actors lie in the actual physical

transformation that the masks themselves, any masks, pro-
duce when worn. The Balinese themselves not only know
this but actually take such transformation for granted: ba-
rong is the spirit, not a depiction thereof, and the wearer
becomes the force in the course of the dance, drama, or

sacrifice. The mask creates or incarnates the god for those

who use it and those who see it.

The Mask as Obliteration of Self

As is clear, however, from the above, one cannot become
someone else without first divesting oneself of who one is.

In focusing upon what exists on the other side of the trans-

192 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

formative threshold, we would do well to notice that mov-
ing forward or upward always entails a leaving behind.
Here, masks also play an important part. Brook discovered
this effect of masks in his theater work:

One of the first, knockout exercises that you can do with

actors ... is putting a plain, blank, white mask on someone.
The moment you take someone’s face away in that way, it’s

the most electrifying impression: suddenly to find oneself

knowing that that thing one lives with, and which one
knows is transmitting something all the time, is no longer
there. It’s the most extraordinary sense of liberation. It is

one of those great exercises that whoever does for the first
time counts as a great moment: to suddenly find oneself
immediately for a certain time liberated from one’s own
subjectivity.^

Hardly any better description of the nature and pur-

pose of religious ritual could be found than Brook’s last

sentence, and here we find the material and not just the

symbolic importance of masks underscored. Masks not only

create one anew, but they do so by eliminating the self that

previously was. By obliterating the ordinary face, the ritual

participant is liberated — thus, the general burst of energy
and joy from Brook’s acting troupe when encountering the
Balinese masks, the same energy and joy shown by children
playing dress-up, and undoubtedly the same energy and joy
which is the answer to the famous Zen koan, “What was
your face before you were born?”
This use of masks as well as other corporeal methods
for obliterating the old self physically and symbolically,
such as forced nakedness or black body painting, can be
found quite frequently in a certain set of rituals, namely
initiation rituals. Victor Turner’s work on these rites is a
classic in the field of anthropology, and he describes this

general characteristic of such ceremonies:

Persona and Ritual 193

 The neophyte may be buried, forced to lie motionless in
the posture and direction of customary burial, may be
stained black, or may be forced to live for a while in the
company of masked and monstruous mummers represent-
ing, inter alia, the dead, or worse still, the un-dead. The
metaphor of dissolution is often applied to neophytes: they
are allowed to go filthy and identified with the earth, the
generalized matter into which every specific individual is

rendered down. . .

In this general push toward the dissolution of the previous

self in such rites, masks and the physical obliteration they
provide are at the heart of the ritual.

My own research into such archetypal symbolism en-

acted within the gay male community of the United States,

specifically within sadomasochistic circles and rituals, pro-

vides another example of such an “obliterative” use of
masks in the form of the black leather mask or hood, some-
times worn by the “top,” sometimes worn by the “bot-
tom,” but always in essentially the same context, that of
initiation into masculinity, into body, and into a commu-
nity of S/M practitioners.^ As with the Balinese, for whom
the use of masks is tied very essentially to a way of seeing,
understanding, and being in the world, one must under-
stand the use of masks and other ritual clothing within gay
male S/M circles from within the culture of the partici-

pants. In my opinion, the gay men participating in S/M

scenes are quite deliberately owning their phallic power as

men, their power over their own physical bodies and that
of consenting others, and often very consciously inducting
the bottom or initiate into the group of S/M practitioners,

in order, I believe, to redeem and heal some of the violence

and ostracism inflicted upon them as men and as homosex-
uals by a homophobic, heterosexist, and antisexual society

as a whole. Hence, who the players are in an S/M ritual is

194 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

quite often secondary to what they represent, namely, the

transpersonal force or spirit that the top or the bottom man

becomes in the course of the play. Thus, an entire complex
of ritual clothing is put to use which, I believe, uncon-
sciously serves the same function as masks all over the world
do in religious ritual: to aid in the transformation of self, to
lift one from the ordinary to the transcendent.
Significantly, one finds, just as with Brook’s theater
troupe, that such an elimination of self, such a liberation
from subjectivity, immediately results in an experience of
enjoyment, the essence of what we call play or fun. On this

point, those involved in gay male S/M are more accurate

than many of them suspect when they refer to their activi-
ties as “scenes” or “play,” group activities as “parties,” the
drugs often used in the course of these rituals as “party
favors,” and the equipment used as “toys.” This terminol-
ogy points to the liberating truth behind the sexual enact-
ment, a truth that many miss when looking at S/M from a
purely outside standpoint: there is pleasure and fun when
the physical manipulations succeed in breaking down previ-
ous roles, conventions, and ways of being. It is a freedom
that feels good.

I have chosen to insist a bit on the nonrepresentational as-

pect of the function of masks in ritual, how masks do what

they do, rather than the more obvious representational as-
pect, what masks depict, because within the Western tradi-

tion one does not often hear articulated precisely what

Brook focuses upon, the ejfect of masks upon the wearer’s
body and soul: that an obliteration of the self is a joyful
liberation. In a tradition and culture so fanatically devoted
to the care and maintenance of the ego, the transformative
religious function of the mask itself points to a way out of
such a one-sided and ultimately isolationist standpoint. Nor

Persona and Ritual 195

does one hear very often stressed the essentially playful, joy-
oriented purpose behind religious ritual, nourished as most
Westerners have been within a tradition at best suspicious

of, at worst hostile to, physical and material pleasure.

Masks, by obliterating the self, free one to play, to create,
to participate in creation.

Yet, such an insight is not entirely foreign to Western

culture. Take, for example, carnival. Fittingly placed within

the church calendar the day before the great season of self-

denial called Lent, which is inaugurated by Ash Wednesday,

a season of forty days the purpose of which is to prepare for
the height of the church year, the commemoration of
Christ’s Passion, death, and resurrection throughout Holy
Week and Easter, carnival and all its attendant folderol re-
mind the Christian of the somewhat more hidden meaning
of this period of the church year. Though one could of
course naively presume that carnival was cannily scheduled
in order to make the coming period of self-sacrifice more
bearable, a final blowout before the abandonment of the
pleasures of the flesh, this explanation, which makes a great
deal of common psychological sense, is really only the most
superficial and materialistic view of the place of carnival in
the Lent-Easter ritual complex.
Unlike in Romance languages, where the word for
Lent is simply related to the Latin word for forty, in English
the word is derived from the Middle English and Old High
German word for springtime, the archetypal time of blos-
soming, renewal, green, and joy. Lenten practices should be
viewed therefore as a preparatory obliteration, a liberation

into joy, an echo of the great obliteration of self and libera-

tion into joy represented by Christ’s death and resurrection.

Hence, carnival with its traditional use of masks, costumes,

and disguises is not the opposite of Lent but rather very

much connected to the abandonment of the ego in service

196 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

of liberation and joy which is the very basis of the Christian
myth.
And what a liberation carnival typically has been!

Modern Americans, familiar with the goings-on in New

Orleans each year, who number among the revelers that
flock to that city each year to wear sequined G-strings and
do drugs in the French Quarter, might be surprised both
by the religious origins of the observance as well as by the
nature and extent of the carousing that was an intimate part
of that European capital of carnival, Venice. In that city,

the wearing of masks indeed had the function of obliterat-

ing oneself in the service of liberation into joy, though the
joys partaken of were, as in New Orleans, of a particularly
one-sided, carnal nature, including the drinking, gambling,
and sexual adventurism which made such eighteenth-cen-
tury figures as Giovanni Casanova famous (or infamous).
The historian Aubrey Feist quotes historian Philippe Mon-
nier’s description of the city’s festival:

Six months of the year it lasts, from October to Christmas,

from Twelfth Night to Lent; on Ascension Day it starts

again for two weeks, and again upon St. Mark’s Day, and
whenever a doge is elected, whenever a procurator is cho-
sen, on the least occasion always, on the slightest pretext.
... In masks men and women do business and buy fish,

write their letters, pay their visits, and plead their causes in

courts. With a mask on his face a man may say or do as he

pleases.^

And from another source, the diaries of John Evelyn:

All the world repairs to Venice, to see the folly and madness
of the Carnival; the men and women and persons of all
conditions disguising themselves in antique dresses, with
extravagant music and a thousand gambols, traversing the
streets from house to house, all places being then accessible

Persona and Ritual 197

 and free to enter. Abroad, they fling eggs filled with sweet
water, but sometimes not over-sweet. They also have a bar-
barous custom of hunting bulls about the streets and piaz-
zas, which is very dangerous, the passages being generally
narrow. ... It is impossible to recount the universal mad-
ness of this place during this time of license.^

One can discern, in equally derivative form, the same

origins, themes, and ritual goings-on in that other great
Anglo-Saxon holiday of masks, Halloween. Celebrated, like

carnival, as the eve before a great holiday of the church

calendar. All Saints’ Day, in which the holiest people of
Christianity are to be honored and venerated, its occurrence
in the year corresponds, again like carnival, on a boundary,
the end of harvest and beginning of winter, again a time
of celebration, particularly of material bounty and richness.
Thus, once again we see the ritual use of masks to obliterate
the self and free one into an ability to enjoy, as hordes of
children beg for treats disguised as superheroes, as parties of
adults, with their everyday selves carefully hidden through
costumes rented or made, frolic in private parties and in

street festivals throughout the United States.

Mask as Representation:
The Anthropomorphic Mask
The other side of Halloween and the other use of masks for
this holiday in particular will lead us into yet other aspects
of the ritual function of masks. For Halloween costum.es
were not simply for play, originally, insofar as the night

before All Saints’ Day was seen, understandably enough, as

a night of grave spiritual danger when, in contrast to the

upcoming celebration of the holiest of the holy, the unholi-

est of the unholy were out and about. In the Anglo-Saxon

198 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

tradition, this conflict between good and evil represented in
the holiday of Halloween is also related to the fact that

October 3 1 corresponded to the last night of the old pagan

year of the Celts, the religion upon which Christianity was
imposed (or grafted, depending upon one’s point of view).
In this crux of spiritual conflict, masks and costumes were
adopted to obliterate oneself, only this time with an eye
toward protection from the evil spirits, protection tradition-
ally derived by what some might call sympathetic magic
that can still be observed in the costumes of today: by cloth-
ing oneself as an evil spirit, a ghost, a witch, or a demon,
one is able to fit in with the evil spirits traveling abroad on
All Hallows’ Eve and thereby escape attack.

Here we arrive at the most obvious function of the

ritual use of masks, its representational one. To wear a mask
is not simply to obliterate oneself or to free oneself into play
and joy, for the masks worn by ritual participants are not
the simple white circle that Brook uses in his theater games.
Masks represent someone, something, and so, as we have
seen, to don a mask is to become that person, that identity,
that thing. It is an act of creation, recreation, and identifi-

cation, all of which lead, as all religious rituals must, to an

expansion of oneself and consequently to a more spiritually
powerful and effective existence.
One can discern throughout the world essentially
three types of representation in masks: anthropomorphic,
or human faces; theriomorphic, or animal faces; and natural
forces. Within the Western tradition, the Greek use of
masks is perhaps the most appropriate to elaborate upon
with regard to the anthropomorphic mask, given that their
religious use of masks, which lies at the base of the word
persona and all its various derivations, is intimately con-
nected to their anthropomorphic conception of divinity.

Persona and Ritual 199

From the Latin words meaning “to sound through,” per
sonare (though Webster’s dictionary tags a possible relation-
ship to the Etruscan word specifically for mask, phersti), a.

persona denoted the actual mask used by actors in sacred

drama, and so by derivation, referred to the character repre-
sented by the mask. The important word, of course, in this
context is sacred, for classical Greek theater was most cer-
tainly not what we of the modern world call entertainment
but rather a representation of the fundamental myths of
Greek religion. Arthur Evans, in his work on the rites of
Dionysus, gives a sense of the place of theater within Greek
religion:

In this sacred spot in the latter part of the sixth century

B.C., there occurred “the greater miracle in all cultural his-
tory.” ... At some point, certain members of the Dionysian
chorus stepped forth and began to recite individual lines in
roles that were distinct from those of the chorus. ... In
time, these episodes of interaction among the individuals
and the chorus were formalized into two performance
genres: tragedy and comedy. . . . With these developments,
theater was born.
In its heyday in classical Athens, the theater of Dio-
nysos seated 17,000 people. . . . The dramatic presentations
at Athens were thus a major social and artistic event, involv-

ing large numbers of the population as spectators and do-

minating the life of the city during their production. The
must have been quite spectacular, for the
effect of the plays

actors and chorus wore elaborate masks and costumes, and

the chorus sang their lines (and danced as well). In its over-
all effect, the Athenian theater was much like a play, an
opera, a ballet and a public fair all rolled into one. Despite

these many aspects, however, it never lost its sense of being

a religious event. The altar of Dionysos was always evident,
and the front row seats in the center were reserved for his

priests, their bench bearing the inscription in large letters

“Sacred to Dionysos Eleuthereus.”®

200 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

 With regard to the actual masks used in these rites, by
all accounts they seem to have been less like facial masks
and more like pieces which covered the entire head of the
actor, constructed of light material, such as cork and linen,
with hair attached and facial features prominently drawn,
insofar as the purpose of using the mask in the first place

was to communicate to the audience who the actor was

portraying in the drama and what he was feeling as the

character he was playing. (Here the use of the pronoun he

is altogether appropriate, in that there were no female actors

in ancient Greek drama, creating yet another reason for the

mask, to enable the male actor to credibly play female

parts.) Given the distance of the audience from the actors

on stage, the facial expressions depicted were by necessity

exaggerated, and some evidence exists that the exigencies of
the dramas required a change of masks by the actors
throughout the course of the play to portray different char-
acters or even the same character in different states. On a

purely functional level, therefore, masks permitted one

actor to play many parts within a single production.

The disadvantage of masks as such a fundamental part

of representational drama is the lack of flexibility of expres-
sion which they afford the actor, a lack of flexibility perhaps
more of concern to us moderns, raised on cinematic close-

ups and Method acting, than to the ancients who seemed

to compensate for this comparative paucity of expression
through vocal virtuosity. Moreover, one must always re-

member that the purpose of Greek drama was not to enter-

tain the audience but rather to honor the gods. Producers of
Greek drama did not worry, like Hollywood moguls, about
whether or not the spectators could identify with the char-
acters being portrayed. Quite the opposite: the characters
on stage were on stage precisely because they were not peo-
ple like you and me. What was being presented at these

Persona and Ritual 201

festivals were stories that concerned a realm beyond the ev-
eryday, the ways and means of the sacred, for the enlighten-
ment and remembrance of those who, by witnessing the
drama, participated in it as well.

The ancient Greek use of masks was not simply to

sound through and be heard, as one might naively assume,
knowing that the masks the ancient Greeks used were fitted

with a type of megaphone, but on a deeper level to trans-

form the actor into the god or hero being depicted in the

sacred drama, to invest the ordinary person with a sacred,

extraordinary identity so as to transport the participants in
the sacred ritual to that time before time and effect the
transcendence. The poetry, song, and presentation of Greek
drama, indicated by the surviving texts but to a large extent
lost to us in all its details, undoubtedly served to carry forth
this ritual function upon both the actors and participants
through a heightened language, through a sensual experi-
ence of which the masks of gods and heroes were but a part.
In this tradition, the mask invests the actor with the god’s
power, the hero’s power, to strike awe, to play out the ar-

chetypal theme, to create the world, to go beyond. The sa-

cred quality of a mask seems true the world over.

Peter Brook describes a similar process for the
Balinese:

The Balinese actor starts by looking at a mask, holding it

in his hands. He looks at it for a long while, until he and

the mask begin to become like a reflection of each other; he
begins to feel it partly as his own face —but not totally,

because in another way he goes toward its independent life.

And gradually he begins to move his hand so that the mask

takes on a life, and he is watching it —he sort of empathizes
with it. And then something may happen . . . which is that

the breathing begins to modify; he begins to breathe differ-

ently with each mask.^

202 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

 For the ancient Greek and the Balinese, the mask as

representation of a divine identity enables the mortal actor

tobecome the immortal and eternal archetype which the
mask represents. The mask is in fact a symbol of transfor-

mation, not simply a decorative object or a clever disguise,

and as such, is the very instrument by which the ritual agent
appropriates the power of the archetypal dominant repre-

sented.
The element of exaggeration, therefore, is almost al-

ways present, for the mask, particularly the anthropomor-

phic or divinity-representing mask, is meant specifically to

effect a larger than life transformation. One should not pre-

sume, though, that all anthropomorphic masks are meant
to inspire fear or strike awe into the hearts of the spectators.
Within the Native American tradition, for example, the sa-

cred fool or ritual clown wears masks of human or animal

forms or physically transforms his body in ways —shaving
one side of the head, for example, or painting the body in

absurd ways — that create a ridiculous, laughable impres-

sion.^® Clearly the purpose of such exaggeration is to push
beyond the limit, to turn upside down the normal everyday
expectations and thereby to open up a gateway to a different
way of seeing and being.
Though it is common to call such rituals “clowning,”

the term is apt to mislead those unfamiliar with native tra-

ditions, for such clowning behavior is not intended as sim-

ple humor, as with circus clowns in traveling shows. This

darker side to clowning is well illustrated by the Mayo In-
dian culture of northwestern Mexico, where a blend of old
Catholicism and even older native traditions which predate
the arrival of the Spanish have given rise to a kind of Pas-
sion play in which the events of Holy Week are depicted by
societies of men who portray the Pharisees, termed pariseros
in the Mayan dialect. While these pariseros are naturally

Persona and Ritual 203

prepared for the role in the series of enactments through
elaborate costumes, including masks, individual characters
or chapakobam often participate in the ritual
drama in a way
strongly reminiscent of the clowns within North American
native tribes: performing sacred actions backwards or be-
having in ways strongly at odds with or outright offensive
to cultural norms. The masked chapakobam of the Mayo
will use dead animals as part of their rituals, use their left

hands to make the sign of the cross, pretend to defecate on

sacred objects or to eat feces collected from other chapako-
bamy and will explicitly and graphically portray sexual be-
havior, particularly with each other. Clearly these “clowns,”
archetypal tricksters very much in line with native traditions

throughout the Americas, provide a strong counterpoint to

the sacred representation of Jesus’s Passion and death and
are included in the Mayo drama not to make those watch-
ing laugh but to bring an awareness of the forces of evil

and the Devil into the consciousness of the participants and

observers. The anonymity afforded by the masks allows the
actors to go about this ritual function of offense and parody
without shame during the time of the ritual, after which
they are rebaptized and thereby made once again into
men.^^
By its nature, it seems, there is an ambivalence ever
present in the use of an anthropomorphic mask. As an in-
strument of liminality, the mask marks the point where the
gods —Greek, Mexican, Balinese, or Christian —meet and
touch the lives of human beings, beneficently or malevo-
lently. To forget the power of a mask and the threshhold it

marks is risky business.

Masks as Representation: The Animal

AND Nature-Force Mask
Public ceremonies depicting or commemorating important
historico-mythic events are, of course, but one type of reli-

204 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

gious ritual, and for the anthropomorphic mask, a type of
ritual for which it is particularly suited. But if we look fur-

ther, especially among the kinds of societies from whom so

many of my examples above have been drawn, cultures that

maintain a close, ongoing, and meaningful contact with the
realm beyond the merely human, we will find that commu-
nal drama is not the only place that masks are put to reli-

gious use, for masks are used throughout the world in those
religious rituals in which power is most ardently sought for

human benefit, namely, healing rituals. Indeed, Stephen

and Robin Larsen, transpersonal anthropologists, follow
Karl Kerenyi’s suggestion that the main function of the
mask within native religions is for purposes of healing and
only secondarily to conceal or terrify, and so their typology

of healing masks is useful in organizing an examination of

smaller-scale religious rituals in which masks are used.^^
The shamanistic mask is primary among such masks,
since within indigenous cultures throughout the world, the
shaman or medicine man/woman has nearly always been
the agent for personal healing. Just as religious ritual is for

the community the means by which to assure the health

and continuity of the village or group, so it is to religious
ritual that the individual in such cultures looks when one’s
physical or mental health is at issue. The shaman is an indi-
vidual who has usually been chosen by the powers of the
other world through some sort of sign early on in his or her
life and then undergone extensive training and discipline
in the techniques of mediating these forces to the human
community. While the signs of a shamanistic call are as
varied as the cultures throughout the world and the various
trials by which shamans develop their ability to perform
their sacred duties similarly varied, ranging from physical
tortures to simple meditation, a very common element is

the appearance of an animal familiar, that is, a spirit which

appears to the shaman in animal form as a sign of his or

Persona and Ritual 205

her vocation and as a companion in the journey toward
priesthood.
Once again, it is important to understand that without
the egocentric perspective of the industrialized West, native
societies did not see the animal world as radically different

from that of human beings but instead saw humans as coex-

isting in nature alongside animals. Thus, the various hunt-

ing rituals which societies developed were for the most part
not simply magical attempts to obtain a successful outcome
but were also respectful observances of the powers possessed
by the animals to be hunted. Likewise, rituals around food
preparation and consumption, sometimes but not always
including ritual sacrifice, were acknowledgments of the im-
minent possession of such powers which consuming the an-
imals would effect for the human being. That great scholar
of shamanism Mircea Eliade reports one such hunting ritual

among the aboriginal Chinese in which the hunters would

put on a bear skin in order to feel transformed into the
animal, thereby gaining understanding by precisely the kind
of “going out of the self” which masks archetypally provide
to their ritual users.
As one might expect, theriomorphic masks are particu-

larly common within shamanistic rituals, and such masks,

along with other articles of dress, are typically made of the
various body parts of the animal spirits whose spiritual aid

is sought: skins, pelts, heads, feathers, claws, paws, and so

on. As Eliade puts it, “This series of facts falls under a ‘law’

well known to the history of religions: one becomes what

one displaysy"^^ and his description of healing rites in South

America provides an excellent illustration of the basic con-
ceptual and ritual structure behind shamanic practice. In
the first place, however skilled the shaman may be in the

lore of actual curative substances from plants or animals,

illnesses, be they physical or otherwise, are generally under-

206 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

stood to have their root in a spiritual imbalance of some
kind, usually the loss of one’s soul, which must be sought
after, found, and returned to the individual before healing
can occur. For this reason, in many South American socie-

ties the shaman is obliged to leave his body and enter the
realm of the other world, a process which can be as simple
as praying to the spirits but which more frequently involves
the shaman going into a trance, through meditation, drugs,
tobacco, or other substances, and/or donning the masks and
clothing of the animal familiar so as to be possessed by the
spirit and thereby enter the other world.
The idea of possession in this case, one notes, is some-
what different from the conception of what occurs in Bali

when masks are used. In Bali, the barong is the god,

whereas in the shamanistic ritual which Eliade describes,

the shaman straddles the world of the human and the spirit-
animal, sometimes even entering into dialogue with the ani-
mal spirit to gain information as to how to proceed. While
capable of transforming himself into the animal spirit, the
shaman nevertheless does not become the spirit itself, as in

Bali, but rather enters into the spirit world of the animal,
speaking its language, following its directions, gaining its

powers.

The shamanistic animal mask, though, is not the only type

to be found, for a number of African societies use animal
masks in other ways. For instance, there are traditions in
which the mask represents an animal who played a vital role

in the creation of the world and in the life of the tribe’s

ancestors, and so is represented in a commemorative way

through a mask which is then worn in rituals that depict

the origins of the tribe, group, or clan. Such a conception

may be frankly totemistic, where the tribe actually traces its

origins to the sacred animal itself, as is the case among the

Persona and Ritual 207

Dangbe in Dahomey, where priestesses join in union with
the python and thus give birth to offspring considered to
be a snake, or it may simply be more mythological, as with
the Bambara of Mali, who tell of having learned farming
from an antelope. For the Bambara, this antelope “mask,”
which actually is less a mask and
more a highlyactually
stylized, very beautiful antelope sculpture worn more as a

headress above a veil of plant material which covers the

wearer’s entire body, is part of an entire ritual dance
wherein the dancer commemorates the origins of the tribe

by imitating the antelope’s leaps.

Given the closeness of animals and humans within this

understanding of the world, one of the striking characteris-

tics of African masks makes itself understood, for it is a
common feature of African masks that human and animal
features, or the features of many animals, are combined,
either through a skillful blending into a single mask of var-
iegated appearance or through multiple platforms or levels.
For many African tribes, the difference between the animal
world and the human is seen as very small, illustrated excel-

lently by a mask from the Dogon, also of Mali, where the

face covering is triangular in form and represents a mythical

bird, the kommondo, on top of which is an elaborate, cross-

like structure, representing the bird’s outstretched wings,

on top of which again is a small human couple, symbolizing

the first humans from which the Dogon consider them-
selves descended. This headdress/mask, worn during a

dance on top of the house of a deceased person, is meant to

help the ritual participants guide the soul of the dead to its

proper resting place and illustrates the way in which sha-

manistic and commemorative functions can overlap.
Human and animal forms, though, are by no means
the only kinds of ceremonial masks, and here, too, Africa

provides us with rich examples of masks which, properly

208 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

speaking, represent what one could call the forces of nature.
On the more abstract end of the continuum, Ladislas Segy
presents a headdress made of porcupine quills, sacrificial

blood, and mud, which members of the authorities would

wear in their function as enforcers of the law, for the mate-
rials of this mask, symbolizing heaven, earth, and water,
were meant to represent the forces of nature by which their

authority was derived. Is such a use of masking all that

different from that of the monarch’s crown, topped by a

cross, where the headdress represents in abstract form the
divine origin of the individual’s power? The difference, of
course, is that the African is aware of the myth behind the
mask, whereas we so-called modern Westerners almost al-
ways are not.
As we conclude, though, it is interesting to note that

all masks are not necessarily even worn. More common and
considerably less abstract are masks which represent in strik-

ing and frightening form the various demonic forces be-

lieved to inhabit the universe. While such masks are used

in Bali in ways we have previously seen, that is, in ritual

representations of cosmogonic myth, in Africa such masks

were not placed on the face but rather placed on the ground
as a way of collecting the spirits and thus serving as a kind
of depository of spiritual power. The mask in both these

cases is no longer simply a piece of ceremonial clothing but

rather is itself a sacred object, the incarnation of the natural
force depicted.

Mask as an Archetypal Symbol

OF Transformation
This healing of the breach between sacred and profane, be-
tween divine and mortal, between eternal and contingent,
is certainly the highest use of the mask within religious rit-

Persona and Ritual 209

ual. In eliminating the profane, ordinary self and liberating
the wearer from everyday constraints so as to permit an
expansion of self and a sense of freedom while simultane-
ously investing him or her with the sacred power of the
archetypal dominant represented by the mask be it an- —
thropomorphic, theriomorphic, or other — the mask classi-

cally and in multifariously derivative forms continues even

today to perform its religious function for individuals.

What does all this signify with regard to the persona,

especially the persona as a psychological entity? Given the
pervasively spiritual function of masks worldwide, even
among cultures such as those in the industrialized West
where the few ritual uses of masks, as in carnival and Hal-
loween, nevertheless have an unarguably religious origin,
my thought is that the persona serves not simply a psycho-
logical or social function but a potentially important spiri-

tual function, a function easily overlooked in a civilization

where religion has become debased currency in favor of an

ever-increasing faith in rationality, science, and technology.

If we delude ourselves into thinking that we human

as be-
ings do exist apart from the natural world, that we are ab-
stracted in a special, superior way from the world of plants
and animals, and that we represent the pinnacle of the uni-
verse, then indeed it is easy to overlook the spiritual effect
of the persona we adopt, creating one type of “look” one
day, only to change it the next day, and again the next
without a thought as to the effect of such changes upon our
souls. As we have seen, because of the unitary understand-

ing of the place of human beings in nature and in the realm

of the spirit, the adoption of a persona, for the Balinese, the
Dogon, the indigenous Mexican, or the Siberian shaman, is
a matter of great care and sacrality. It is precisely because
these people use material means, as their personas that they
understand in a way that modern Westerners, I think, too

210 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

often miss, that the persona is a focal point, a liminal

marker, a mediator of spiritual power.

This equivalence of the image with the self lies behind
the great terror of the photograph which nonindustrialized
people typically display. To “take” one’s picture is to take

one’s soul. In a world where the material and spiritual are

still understood as manifestations of a single realm, where

art, science, and religion have not yet been separated, the
material representation of an object or a person represents
the spiritual power of that object or person. These are truths

that, as far as I can see, modern, industrialized people have

lost sight of to our own detriment, and hence we find our-
selves in a kind of hall of mirrors, trapped by a self-reflective

superficiality, believing in magic in a way that no native

person ever would, believing the commercials which say
that by simply dyeing our hair, undergoing liposuction,
using the right kind of makeup, and wearing the right outfit
we can look like whomever, whatever we want.
This chapter on the spiritual use of masks makes clear
that the effect of such superficial manipulations may be
vastly more profound than we suspect, particularly in a soci-
ety where true divinities have been supplanted by mere
“stars” created by the mass media for the purposes of selling

products and making money. By following fads, by rigging

our bodies and faces to create the appearance of the latest

movie idols or sports figures, may we not be doing great

damage to our souls, damage not unlike the unskilled use
of a mask within a native society? Far from superficial and
trivial, the use of masks within so-called primitive societies
is a matter of great importance and power. What would
happen, I wonder, if modern people treated their personas
with a similar level of spiritual attention and care? The
grave importance of masks in religious ritual worldwide
demonstrates how deep the creation of an authentic persona

Persona and Ritual 211

can go. What we have seen in the previous parts of this

book, in individual stories and in cultural patterns, is rein-

forced by this survey of masks in religious ritual: that is,

that the persona is, or can be, the crossroads of the soul.

212 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

 9 .

The Artistic Function of the Mask:

Persona and Purpose in Italian Opera

In examples from ancient times or cultures where West-

ern industrialization and interference have not yet com-
pletely deformed religious traditions in existence literally

from prehistory, we moderns can perceive perhaps more

clearly the archetypal quality of masks, while closer to
home, so to speak, discerning the action and outlines of
archetypal experience is harder. If the archetypes in our lives
are viewed only through the perspective of “long ago and
far away,” we miss a vitally important piece of Jung’s pro-
gram, which was most certainly to enlarge and deepen our
present-day, here-and-now consciousness. However, the re-
lentless secularization of the modern world means that to
examine the subject begun in our previous chapter, namely,
the spiritual use of masks, within our own cultural tradition
entails looking at that sphere of human endeavor not usu-
ally appreciated today as a vehicle for the transcendent but
which, as I think I made clear earlier, has always been the
physical manifestation of spiritual truth. In a word, art.

Of course, so many of the various masks mentioned in

chapter 7 could be, and unfortunately often are, appreciated
solely with regard to their artistic merit, ignoring with a
typically Western attitude the profound cultural and spiri-

tual significance that lies behind and in them. Hence, there

is a great business being done daily in the buying and selling

of native masks, merely as decorative objects, with little

213
consciousness as to the profundity of cultural meaning that
lies behind and in these masks. Even such a theatrical
troupe as Peter Brook’s forgot themselves and lapsed into
secularity. So it is too often with our own artistic traditions

which have been gradually stripped of their connection to

the explicitly sacred and turned more and more into ab-
stract researches into material manipulations, without a
thought even to a possible symbolic level of meaning, much
less a spiritual one. This state of cultural affairs is well repre-
sented by so-called postmodernism and its taste for pas-

tiche, in which past achievements in Western art, just as

grounded in the spirituality of the respective historical peri-

ods as any of the masks from other cultures, are “quoted,”

that is to say, used out of context with little regard to the

spiritual significance of the works being used. Lest I seem
holier-than-thou in this regard, I confess to having a refrig-
erator-magnet version of Michelangelo’s David in my
kitchen, replete with various magnetic getups with which
to clothe him at my whim. It is with some shame, as I

write this, that I remind myself of the profound spiritual

significance of the original piece —but this is my point.

Even the best-meaning individual finds him- or herself

swamped, particularly in the United States, with an unend-
ing secularity. Where then to look within our cultural tradi-

tion for a ritual use of masks as a manifestation of spirit?

If we look to some of the oldest uses of masks from
within our own cultural tradition, we
them used most
find
extensively and powerfully within ancient Greek theater,
and this makes sense. There is something inherently theatri-
cal about a mask. Although most people’s experience of the-

ater nowadays revolves around the type of production that

begins on Broadway and then tours the country replete with
cast albums and T-shirts, one way to make the archetypal

insights of the previous chapter more immediately relevant

214 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

is to appreciate how our entire theatrical tradition here in
the West grew up directly from sources that can be traced
to two religious traditions. The first is, of course, ancient
Greece, but not directly, for it was really that incarnation

of ancient Greece which arose through the rediscovery and,

in many instances, reinterpretation of classical culture
known as the Italian Renaissance. The second, more dis-

tant, source of theater is, of course, Christianity and the

sacred rite of the Mass, around which arose quite organi-
cally rappresentazioni sacre, sacred plays, in which Biblical

stories would be presented to the communities of believers

for devotional purposes.

These two very different but very important traditions,

however, developed over a very long period of time and

stood in a rather close but definitely uneasy relationship to
one another —undeniably related, for Christian ritual and
theology could never have developed without classical cul-
ture, and yet undeniably in conflict, for to admit the valid-
ity of classical mythology or ritual would be to impugn
the exclusivity of Christian soteriology and the historico-
theological uniqueness of the person of Jesus Christ. From
this tension emerged a theatrical art form which would in

many ways represent a synthesis of these two traditions:

lyric opera.

On the formal level, one could argue that opera is the

culmination of all the arts. By marrying poetry and prose
with music and dance presented theatrically and visually,

opera represents an art form of a complexity and richness

wholly unlike that of other art forms, so that a high level of
sophistication and cultural breadth is demanded of audi-
ence and performer for opera to succeed artistically. Natu-
rally, this formal wealth makes opera popular and enduring
as well as inherently problematic. Easily parodied by those
who see in it an elitist irrelevance or who are ignorant of

The Artistic Function of the Mask 215

the various European national operatic traditions, opera can
impugned by those who love the form. In-
just as easily be

deed, no one quibbles

more than an opera lover about what
went wrong, what could have been better, what is missing
in any given performance, recording, season, or vocal tradi-
tion. This type of argumentativeness, on the part of those
hostile to opera as well as those devoted to it, is itself evi-

dence of how much opera attempts to encompass as an art

form and how extraordinarily difficult such a synthesis is to

achieve.
Most historians of opera agree that the origin of the
art form is to be found in the Italian, particularly the Flor-

entine, Renaissance. Peter Conrad puts it more poetically

than most when he writes:

Opera begins with a mystery: the revival of pagan worship,

in seditious opposition to Christianity, during the Italian

Renaissance. For the classically learned intellectuals of the

Florentine association known as the Camerata, opera was
an esoteric matter, to be investigated in camera. These initi-

ates saw it as a resurrection of Greek tragedy, a drama ritu-

alized by music . .
.‘

or, to use the traditional Italian term, a dramma per musicUy

that is, a drama presented by way of music.
Though such an emphasis on the so-called pagan or
classical origins of the art form ignores the way in which
the Western theatrical tradition was shaped by Christian
ritual in the union of sacred poetry and music historically

part of the Western religious tradition, what can be affirmed

with certainty is the religious origin, pagan and Christian,
of opera as art form. This fact may in one way account for

the near-religious avidity and cultish quality of the opera-

lover’s dedication to the form. That singers are called diva

and divo, goddesses and gods in Italian, and treated as such

216 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

socially is certainly not by chance, nor is the fact that some-
one like Richard Wagner explicitly conceived and built his
opera house in Bayreuth in order to create the atmosphere
of sacred ritual. Myth, whether pagan or biblical, consti-

tutes the plot of such an enormous number of operas that

writers on opera like Conrad are justified in seeing the oper-

atic experience as a religious and not solely a theatrical or

artistic experience, and whatever one might think
of Wagner, the fact is that his understanding of the
form within which he wrote included a consciousness of the
sacred.

As with all art forms, opera as we know it today went

through a process of organic growth in various countries
and regions where it developed, so that in each region of
Europe opera is typified by characteristics that have almost
everything to do with the particular national or regional
culture out of which it grew. In this regard, one of the
strongest operatic traditions in Europe, some would argue
the prototypical tradition, the Italian, is in so many ways an
excellent mirror of Italian culture. In fact, one could go so
far as to say that Italian opera, given its cultural and patri-

otic importance for the nation during the nineteenth cen-

tury, virtually gave birth to the modern Italian state.

Certain characteristics of Italian opera are especially

pertinent to our subject, the persona and its wide-ranging
importance in culture. The first such characteristic has al-

ready been mentioned, that peculiar blend of the pagan and

Christian which pervades Italian opera is a mixture that
characterizes Italy as a whole. On the grossest physical level,
nearly all the most important Christian churches in Italy
are but personas themselves, constructed upon the pagan
temples or the public meetinghalls, the basilicas, of classical
antiquity. Roman Catholicism, with the emphasis on
Roman, has as its unique strength its ability to assimilate

The Artistic Function of the Mask 217

even the most conflictual stylistic or religious elements and
to use them to further its religious agenda just as imperial
Rome once did culturally and politically. Hence, one finds
a consistent tension between these two very different reli-
gious world views, the pagan and the Christian, shot
through the Italian operatic tradition, beginning with the
Florentine Camerata straight through the modern period, a
tension exemplified by the protesta, a disclaimer, once re-
quired on opera scores by church authorities, that the com-
poser affirmed his commitment to the truths of the
Christian church despite references to pagan deities and
such within the opera itself.

The marriage of Italy’s homegrown theatrical tradi-

tion, the commedia dell’arte with its conventions, artifices,

and cast of characters, to the somewhat higher art of lyric

opera is another relevant fact to mention, if only because

the use of masks hit a highwater mark within the commedia
troupes. This largely improvised form of theater, which
began by most accounts in the sixteenth century in central

Italy and in which actors used a finite number of scenarios

and characters as a skeleton upon which to hang brilliant

displays of verbal and physical theatrical business, used

masks as an integral part of the production and for many of
the same reasons that the ancient Greeks seemed to. Masks
quickly enabled an audience to identify the characters,
which in the commedia dell’arte were stock characters,
many of which were associated with Italian cities and thus
were of great importance to identify particularly when play-
ing “home games,” so to speak. Likewise, the expressionless
quality of masks perforce heightened and emphasized the
verbal and physical virtuosity of the individual player.^
The fusion of the commedia dell’arte with opera, ac-
complished when composers began borrowing standard
commedia plots and situations for their own purposes, re-

218 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

veals yet another peculiar national characteristic in the Ital-

ian operatic tradition, namely a concern for Avhat one might

call the “enjoyment factor.” Italians love to be entertained,
which can of course mean moved to tears or driven to hilar-

ity and everything in between. Entertainment, and certainly

not enlightenment, was in fact the point of the commedia,
and so, too, is it largely the point of opera, especially in
Italy. Far from American stereotypes of opera as stuffy or
boring, frequented only by relics of another time and place,

opera in Italy is most certainly not a cerebral or purely for-

mal affair but occupies a place in culture much closer to

what musical comedy is for Americans, a form of popular

entertainment attended by all strata of society. Perhaps the
two best known examples of opera with the commedia
touch are Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Gioacchino Ros-
sini’s Barbiere di Siviglia which owe far more to the spirit

of Italy’s roving bands of players than to the originals by

Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais upon which these two rol-

licking comic operas are ostensibly based.

Given the Italian penchant for using what Jung would

call their extraverted feeling function, Italians expect not
just entertainment from their operas but a kind of emo-
tional transport. The means of that transport in opera is the
music, and so one finds as a particular concern among Ital-

ian opera composers two characteristics of Italian art in gen-

eral, a devotion to beauty and a concern for feeling. On
the technical level, these concerns signify an emphasis on
melody, making songfulness the sine qua non of every suc-
cessful Italian opera. Such emphasis on melodic beauty as

the medium for emotional transport was responsible for the

consolidation of a style that itself came to be called “beauti-
ful song,” bel canto, the archetypal nineteenth-century tra-
dition of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and
Vincenzo Bellini which was the culmination of the classical

The Artistic Function of the Mask 219

opera which came before and the starting point for all de-
velopments in Italian opera since. Just as almost everything
in Italian opera as a whole is subordinated to whether or
not it will provide a sufficient show, so in bel canto every-
thing on the musical level is subordinated to the melodic
line, so that an opera was counted a failure if it did not
feature music, usually arias or choruses, that the audience
could remember and sing on the way out of the theater.
This Italian obsession with beauty, by far the most
wondrous characteristic of this culture, can be summed up,
as Luigi Barzini so deftly demonstrates, in a single phrase, a
single concept: la figura? Literally denoting “face,” the con-

cept of figura dominates Italian culture. How one appears

to others, the impression one makes, the gestures one uses,

the way one behaves, and how the sum of all this is per-
ceived, judged, and appreciated by others has the greatest

import, for it is upon the figura that an Italian stands or

falls socially, economically, and romantically. To appear
poorly, fare brutta figura, literally “to make an ugly face,” is

the admonition an Italian gives to a friend when recom-

mending restraint: Fara brutta figura, it will make a bad

impression, it will look bad. To appear well, however, fare

bella figura, “to make a good face,” is every Italian’s aspira-
tion. From this desire for bella figura emerges the Italian
fashion industry, a millenial history of artistic production,
and a social code of behavior that, perhaps more than any
other Western country, is dominated by persona concerns.
In the Italian operatic tradition, naturally and particu-
larly in the influence derived from commedia dell’arte, the
persona and all that surrounds it are central. One can hardly
cite an Italian opera in which a false identity or a disguise
of some sort is not an integral part of the plot. The long-

lost relative or friend who comes back onto the scene with-
out being recognized is one such typical device. In Verdi’s

220 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

Simon Boccanegra, the title character, as doge of Genoa, dis-

covers that Amelia, the adopted daughter of his political

enemy Fiesco, is in fact his own daughter lost twenty-five

years earlier, giving rise to another typical set piece in opera:

the recognition duet. The deliberate disguise of either the
fool or the villain is another commonplace and can be used
comically or tragically. In Donizetti’s comedy Don Pas-
quale, with a plot that owes nearly everything to commedia
conventions, the elderly Don Pasquale, ignoring his age and
infirmity, ardently seeks a younger wife, who is slyly pro-

vided to him by his friend. Doctor Malatesta, in the form

of Malatesta’s disguised niece Norina, who is in on the plot,

and sets about making the old man’s life miserable after a
false marriage, all in order to teach the old fool a lesson.

Verdi’s Otello represents an example of a less literal adop-

tion of the disguise device directly from Shakespeare,
wherein lago pretends to be the Moorish general Otello’s
friend but is in fact implanting suspicion as to his wife Des-
demona’s fidelity into Otello’s mind in order to drive the

black man crazy and gain revenge for having been passed
over in assignment. The dissembling required by the innu-
merable pairs of star-crossed lovers whose families oppose
their union falls into a similar category of disguise as an
integral part of Italian opera plot. In II Signor Bruschino, a

lesser known comedy by Rossini, the heroine Sofia is being

forced to marry Bruschino’s son (a character who though
spoken of throughout the opera never actually appears)
against her will, so that her lover Florville takes it upon
himself to pretend to be Bruschino’s son in order to accom-
plish his goal — that of marrying the woman he loves.

Among better known operas in the Italian tradition,

all of Mozart’s three collaborations with Lorenzo da Ponte,
recently given new life by Peter Sellars’s well-known
modern-dress reinterpretations, have disguises as the lynch-

The Artistic Function of the Mask 221

pin of the plot. Le Nozze di Figaro has the love-struck young
man Cherubino desperately and quite comically attempting
to hide from the Count by dressing as a woman, while the
Countess, with her servant’s help, is attempting to catch
her philandering husband in flagrante delicto by disguising
herself as her maid Susanna to whom the Count has made
numerous advances. Don Giovanni has Giovanni and Lep-
orello, at the Don’s request, exchanging costumes so he can

avoid punishment and continue his seductions just after he

himself has been unmasked at a costume party by the three
people whose honor he has offended with his amoral amo-
rousness. In Cost fan tutte, Don Alfonso’s cynical bet with
Ferrando and Guglielmo on the faithfulness of their two
girlfriends, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, stands or falls on the
ability of the two of them to seduce the women while dis-
guised as Albanian soldiers. Mozart’s genius in this genre,
though, lay in his ability to take the commedia-derived con-
ventionality of these characters and dramatic situations and
infuse them with particularity and irony. In each of these

operas, the success of the disguise results in tragedy: if the

Countess succeeds in convincing the Count she is Susanna,
she wins the game but loses a faithful husband, just as the

Don’s success in seducing while in disguise is yet another

piece of his humanity given away in service of momentary
pleasure, and of course, like the Countess, Ferrando and
Guglielmo succeed as Albanians but find their faith in their
lovers hopelessly shattered. Flere again we meet the ambiva-
lence and power of the anthropomorphic mask.
The Italian fascination with disguise in opera, how-
ever, is not limited to plot. On the level of performance,
the Italian operatic tradition, particularly bel canto, is rich

in travesti or trouser parts, where female singers, usually

mezzo-soprano or contralto, play male roles. Such parts

proliferate, for example, in the operas of Rossini, a corn-

222 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

poser whose fondness for the mezzo-soprano, that is, a
lower female voice, determined that nearly all his most im-
portant dramatic works, Guillaume Tell Semiramide, Tan-
crediy and UAssedio di Corinto/Maometto //, have a travesti

role. Nor should one overlook, in this regard, the male

equivalent of the female travesti, that is, the notorious cas-
trato tradition, in which young boys were castrated so as

to retain the prepubertal highness of their voice, a quality

identified with femininity and purity. In writing about the

passions which drive opera, both on the part of the audi-
ence as well as the composer and singer, psychoanalytically
oriented writer Michel Poizat sees the quest for the pure
“vocal object” in opera, the perfect voice, the “voice of an
angel,” as a kind of quest for transcendence which makes
sense of both travesti and castrato: seen symbolically, both
practices provide for a transcendence of gender.^

Behind the Italian passion for disguise, indeed, behind

the whole operatic program, the drive for transcendence is

easily discerned. Opera is meant to bring the spectator into

another world, a higher world, a world of great comedy and

passion, a world of vocal purity and brilliance, a world of
emotional transport.

Verdi and Un Ballo in maschera

Because his name represents to so many all that is best and
most brilliant about Italian opera, one might imagine that
Giuseppe Verdi would be the composer who had summed
up most sublimely the various conventions and characteris-

tics of Italian opera, with its dedication to beauty, its focus

on entertainment, and its desire for transport. Yet, one
would be more accurate to say that the opposite is the case;
with Verdi Italian opera and all its conventions on nearly
every level, theatrically, formally, and musically, were trans-

The Artistic Function of the Mask 223

formed, not through a radical break with such conventions
but rather through his fulfillment of the demands of these
conventions and a push beyond them. With an artistic in-

telligence and a synthetic attitude brought to every level

within opera, Verdi single-handedly transcended the tradi-
tion in a way that previous Italian opera composers had
either not been able to do or had not been interested in
doing.
Verdi’s means for effecting such transformation in the
art might seem obvious to themodern reader but were, for
the time, quite unusual. He insisted on the dramatic coher-
ence of the story, at a time when stories were often, for
other composers, simply hastily-thrown-together pastiches
to be used as excuses for singing. To this end, quite unusu-
ally, Verdi worked slavishly with the librettist to produce a
text that fit his conception of the drama and the music. In
service of the emotional impact of the opera upon the audi-
ence, Verdi condensed plots to the barest minimum and
often structured his works so that each act was shorter than
the previous, leading to a kind of dramatic momentum, the
perception of which was not lost on the audience. In writ-
ing music of such rich orchestration, variety, and dramatic
characterization in an era where operas were commissioned
and produced in the hundreds every year with very little

care or attention to such factors, Verdi stood alone. At the

time of Verdi’s ascendance, Rossini, the reigning king of
Italian opera against whose work all others had theretofore
been judged, was notorious for borrowing melodies, over-
tures, and other music from one opera of his to use subse-

quently in another, just as that other giant of bel canto,

Donizetti, wrote the astounding total of sixty-seven operas
in an unfortunately brief period of thirty productive years,

a volume of work that undoubtedly contributed to his early

demise as well as to the relatively small percentage of his

224 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

output currently in the active repertoire. By contrast, Verdi,
in a productive period of over fifty years, wrote less than
half that many operas, the majority of which are still being
produced.
Though in his early years Verdi certainly used the con-

ventions handed down to him and created music that, if

not entirely forgettable, nevertheless was no better than oth-
ers, even in his early works one hears the musical originality,
the distinctive gift for characterization, and, above all, the
impulse to dare to be different that would emerge in full

flower with the three operas of his middle period which

mark his maturity as an artist: La TraviatUy his shocking

portrayal of a fallen woman, not in the costumes of a previ-

ous period, but in contemporary dress; Rigoletto, with its

uncharacteristically villainous tenor, its deformed protago-

nist, and its brutal tragedy; and II Trovatore, where the sheer
profusion of song and action serves the ear and the drama
in a way that goes far beyond bel canto. As an Italian, Verdi
and his work reflect all the various national characteristics

enumerated above. In particular the one most pertinent to

the topic at hand, namely, the persona, the figura, is treated
by Verdi throughout his career in a way that shows precisely
his genius and explains why he became, for all intents and
purposes, the artistic hero of Italian nationalism.
Rather than remaining on the level of commedia dis-

guises and plot twists, Verdi took that peculiar Italian

awareness of the conflict between persona and self, between

who one is and how one appears, and lifted it to the level
of a philosophical or moral concern. In every one of the
operas he created from this middle period on, the conflict
between persona and society, between public and private,

between what is and what seems to be, is essential to the

plot. In RigolettOy we have Verdi’s version of Don Giovanni,

the duke whose apparent nobility hides treachery, cruelty.

The Artistic Function of the Mask 225

and lust. In La Traviata, we have a courtesan whose nobility
far outreaches those of the more conventional characters
around her. In Trovatorey the hidden secret is the brother-
hood of Manrico, the outlaw troubador, and the Count,
who are in conflict both as representatives of social class as

well as suitors for the hand of Leonora. In Vepres siciliennesy

the commander of the forces of the French occupation of
Sicily and the Sicilian hero are actually father and son, cre-
ating unendurable, tragic conflict for the hero torn between
the call for national liberation and personal loyalty. In La
Forza del destinOy revenge for personal injury is pursued
throughout by hiding and disguises as the vendetta between
two men places the heroine in conflict between the man she
loves and the brother she is related to. Don Carlos presents
a quintet of characters whose personal and national loyalties

form an intricate conflictual web which is the engine for

the opera’s tragedy: King Philippe II of Spain is married to
Elizabeth, the French princess, who is in her turn in love

with Philippe’s son, Don Carlos. As an unconsummated affair

is brought to light by the King’s own mistress. Princess

Eboli, Don Carlos’s own best friend, Rodrigue, finds him-

self in conflict with the King’s policies toward the Nether-
lands. In Aiday the conflict is somewhat simpler, with
national loyalty pitted against personal feelings as Ai'da, the
foreign princess in captivity, is caught between her devotion
to her father the king and to her lover, the Egyptian prince,
Radames. Otelloy modeled closely upon Shakespeare, shows
Otello torn between faith in the deceitful lieutenant lago
and the seemingly pure Desdemona, a dilemma for Otello

that has both personal and political consequences.

Adored in his own time for incarnating in such situa-
tions the political aspirations of the RisorgimentOy or move-
ment for Italian national unity and independence from
Austria, Verdi did so artistically through the vehicle of the

226 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

persona, through the way that his characters’ social or polit-
ical positions are in conflict with their private passions or
their own individual character. However, none of Verdi’s
operas are so rich in persona concerns as the one whose very
title signals them: Un Ballo in maschera —A Masked Ball.

An opera whose richness and complexity is in some ways

underrated by opera critics, Ballo nevertheless for the pur-
poses of our study serves quite nicely in illustrating not only
the particularly Italian genius of Verdi’s art but, more gen-
erally, the various functions that persona serves artistically.
One irony concerning this opera about disguises, false-

hood, and betrayal is that the opera itself needed to be dis-

guised after Verdi had finished it. Originally written for the
opera house in Naples and finished in early 1858, the opera
was based on the French play by Eugene Scribe, Gustave III
de Suedey with a plot certainly not at all out of the ordinary
for an opera of that time, even if completely at odds with
the historical truth of the rather flamboyantly homosexual
Gustav himself In Verdi’s version, written with Antonio
Somma as librettist, Gustav, king of Sweden, falls in love
with Amelia, the wife of one of his army officers. Count
Ankarstroem, who, when he uncovers the illicit affair, assas-

sinates the king at a masked ball. In a climate of political

ferment and antiroyalist activities throughout Europe, the
government censors for the kingdom of Naples found the
opera and its portrayal of a regicide unacceptable and in-

sisted on a list of changes that for all intents and purposes

transformed Verdi’s original opera into an entirely different
work, setting off a long series of protracted discussions, ar-

guments, offers, and counteroffers, including two changes

of title, from Verdi’s original Gustavo III di Svezia to La
Vendetta in domino (Revenge in Costume), to the eventual
Un Ballo in maschera, which had been the subtitle of the
original French play. And the changes did not stop there.

The Artistic Function of the Mask 227

for a complete revision of the setting and the characters was
also required. No longer set in Sweden’s royal court, the
opera was now set in, of all places, colonial Boston, a setting

sufficiently distant and thus sufficiently nonthreatening to

the Neapolitan government. Accordingly, Gustav was trans-
formed into Riccardo, governor of Boston, and Count An-
karstroem into his secretary Renato. Thus, like many Italian
operas,whose creation and performance were unfortunately
often more a matter of theatrical expediency than artistic
integrity, Un Ballo in maschera currently exists in two ver-
sions as recent productions, such as the Metropolitan Op-
era’s in New York, have abandoned the traditional New
England setting and restored the original Swedish setting
along with the historical characters of Gustav and his
court.^ Nevertheless, this history of Ballo illustrates exactly

how bold Verdi intended his work to be as well as the politi-

cally powerful place this form of “entertainment” held in

the Italy of that time.

The overture of Ballo contains themes from the opera
and plays with elegant juxtapositions between the lyrical

melodies of the woodwinds and upper strings and various

hints of things at foot below, urgent sinister footsteps in the
basses treading about beneath the gentle glidings of song
above. Opening with a chorus of officers and nobles gently
singing the praises of their governor, Riccardo, the first

scene also contains, one discovers, a group of conspirators

who are not immediately recognizable and who begin a
heavily counterpointed, considerably darker accompani-
ment to this hymn of praise, expressing their hatred for

Riccardo and a desire to avenge the lives of those whom

Riccardo has killed. Thus, in a dramatic fashion available
only to opera, disparate and conflictual elements of plot and
character come together through the medium of musical
harmony to set the stage for the action to follow.

228 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

 Riccardo arrives, announced by Oscar the page, to re-

ceive his subjects’ petitions. That this opera contains Verdi’s

only travesti role, that of Oscar sung by a female soprano,
is significant. Though this detail is small, I believe it speaks
both to Verdi’s broader artistic intentions, which were to go

beyond the pre-existing operatic conventions of his time in

which trouser parts had become practically cliche, as well as

to the more particular points to be made dramatically in

Ballo itself, where the composer’s intention demon-
is to

strate that all is certainly not what it seems. The jaunty

melody with which Riccardo expresses to Oscar his rather
lofty sentiments concerning government, “Power is not
good if it does not dry its subject’s tears and reflect a lack

of corruption,” establishes in a single stroke Riccardo’s

character, a dynamic and playful man a bit unaware of the
disjunctures in his and other’s personalities, a person prone
to thinking that he is all that he thinks he is or seems to be.
As critic Joseph Kerman points out, music in opera is the
means by which a character can be established and sub-
verted,^ and Riccardo’s opening scene demonstrates both at

once, for it is only a matter of seconds after such statements

of power and honesty that Riccardo sings forth his seam-
lessly beautiful aria, “La rivedra nell’estasi,” having seen
Amelia’s name on a guest list to his ball and declaring, de-
spite her marriage to his secretary, that she is his love. Such
unconsciousness will prove to be Riccardo’s undoing.
As the public retires, Renato, who is both Amelia’s
husband and Riccardo’s secretary, enters the scene, and
seeing Riccardo’s self- absorption, believes he knows the rea-

son why, for he has come to inform the governor of his

knowledge of a plot against him. Their exchange, in which
Renato tells Riccardo in vague terms that he knows every-
thing and that even this room of his does not provide him
safe asylum, is of course interpreted by Riccardo and his

The Artistic Function of the Mask 229

momentarily guilty conscience to mean that Renato knows
of the illicit love he bears for Amelia, so that when Renato
reveals his real meaning, namely, that he has uncovered a
plot against Riccardo’s Riccardo dismisses it. “Oh, is
life,

that all?” he says, with a wave of the hand. The point here,
of course, is that Riccardo’s overriding concern with his
persona, with hiding his passion, is set up by Verdi to have
fatal consequences for him, just as Renato’s overriding
friendship and true concern for his government is destined
to be betrayed by the very ruler entrusted with it.

Renato’s stolid baritone aria which follows makes this

point musically. In its contrast to Oscar’s and Riccardo’s
high-spirited, nearly skittering melodies which both precede
and follow the scene, Renato’s depth is demonstrated, not
just by his baritone but by his words themselves. In taking
his own position seriously, “It is my duty to unmask the
conspirators,” he shows a consciousness of the importance
of his persona, that is, his social role, a consciousness not
shown by the ruler he serves. Thus, when he sings at the

end of the aria, “Hate strikes its victims more quickly than
even love,” he unwittingly foreshadows his own role in the

unfolding tragedy as the character most in touch with the

darker side of the goings-on at court, in large measure be-
cause of his fidelity to persona. In this way, Verdi puts to
use one of the persona’s choicest results in art: irony, that

cutting edge of what would be in gentler circumstances sim-

ply humorous, and, in the course of minutes, has estab-

lished the fundamental mainspring of the tragedy which is

to come. All is not what it seems in this government, to be

sure.

More evidence of Riccardo’s essential frivolity is

quickly presented as the first scene draws to a close around

the matter of Ulrica, a witch who is to be banished but

whom Oscar the page defends in a delightful comic show-

230 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

piece. His curiosity piqued and his appetite for play stimu-
lated, Riccardo decides to visit Ulrica in disguise, dressed as
a fisherman, and see if she actually has the powers of divina-
tion and clairvoyance attributed to her. This outing, whose
arrangements provide the scene with a rousing choral finale,

replete with the conspirators who plan to use Riccardo’s

visit to the witch as an opportunity to wreak their revenge,
is yet another example of Riccardo’s persona identification:
unable to see himself or his position accurately, he doubts
Ulrica’s power to see through to the heart of things, to see
the future. Having been warned of a conspiracy and hold-
ing within his own heart a hidden passion, what is Riccar-
do’s reaction? Let’s play dress-up, let’s create a comedy. The
juxtaposition of the lethal and the playful in this scene, with
Riccardo singing away as his potential assassins provide the
sinister musical background in the bass line, shows Verdi’s
mastery of the form, taking advantage of the double-sided-
ness of persona to create a moment simultaneously delight-
ful and dismaying. The Italian term for this type of finale,

a strettUy from the verb stringere, meaning to squeeze or to

tighten, is especially apt, for as the pace picks up and the

contrasts are heightened between consciousness and uncon-
sciousness, comedy and tragedy, we the audience find our-
selves squeezed into that uncomfortable liminality so often
marked by the persona.
Tlie scene that follows at the fortune-teller Ulrica’s
cave, in which the character of Ulrica is dramatically out-
lined in a single stroke, provides a stark and dramatic con-
trast to all the immediately preceding gaiety of Riccardo’s
court. The aria she sings, with its three opening orchestral
attacks, followed by a dark, surging music — Ulrica’s voice
sinuously and inexorably rising in an invocation of the
devil, asking Satan to come possess her and aid her in her

discernment —end in a climactic moment with the words.

The Artistic Function of the Mask 231

“Nothing more now can hide itself from my gaze.” This is

how powerful true insight is, we are being told in unequivo-

cal dramatic and musical terms by a scene specifically in-
tended to on our heads.
raise the hair

The disguised Riccardo, whose arrival is heralded by

characteristically fluttering flutes, is quickly told that he
must wait his place in line. In response to a sailor’s inquiry

as to what the future holds for him, Ulrica foretells good

fortune, a prediction which Riccardo makes true by slipping
both money and a letter of promotion into the pocket of
the man without his awareness. Is this magic or manipula-
tion? Again the question of what is real and what is not is

broached in this work of contrasts and disguises, for it is

Riccardo’s playful manipulation that actually makes Ulri-

ca’s prediction come true, and yet, Riccardo’s self-satisfac-

tion with the joke seems to indicate his lack of awareness

that Ulrica indeed has been proven correct in her vision.
Blind himself, he is blind as well to others’ ability to see
clearly. It is Ulrica who is clairvoyant, while he himself re-

mains fatefully above it all. As with Renato, the vocal con-

trast between Riccardo’s piping tenor and Ulrica’s mezzo-
soprano intensity makes clear even musically the relative

states of consciousness shown by these two characters.

A knock at the door and the announcement of a secret
visitor leads Ulrica to clear the room and receive none other
than Amelia, who has come to ask Ulrica’s advice. Riccardo,

who has not left but instead, expectably, hidden himself in

the room, overhears the conversation in which Amelia seeks
to know what would “root out from my heart the one
whose image dominates me, fatal and desired, he whom
heaven has given us as ruler.” In this way, the doubly dis-

guised Riccardo, both physically hidden on stage and

dressed up in fisherman’s garb, succeeds in discovering that
Amelia possesses a passion for him that corresponds to his

232 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

for her. Ulrica’s advice, that Amelia go to the foot of the

gallows and pull out the mandrake root for a potion that

would end her love for Riccardo, ends in a trio, Ulrica

promising oblivion through the mandrake potion, Amelia
desiring freedom from her torment, and Riccardo planning
to intercept her on her way, a trio of mixed motives,
masked intentions, and hidden plans. That Riccardo partic-

ipates in this trio from his hiding place while the two
women singing with the tenor are nevertheless unaware of
his presence shows Verdi using one the tricks of the trade
afforded to opera alone among all other forms of theater:
what would be impossible babble in spoken theater, three

characters declaiming at once, becomes in lyric theater an

occasion for musical sublimity.
After Amelia leaves, the crowd reassembles, and Ric-
cardo steps up to Ulrica. In typical fashion, he launches into
a lengthy impersonation with obvious enjoyment, singing a

sailor song and asking Ulrica to read his palm. Unfazed, she
perceives all is not what it seems. “Whoever you are,” she

says to him with stern words accompanied by trumpets, “be

aware that audacious words can one day end in tears,” and
then, unwillingly, proceeds to deliver her prediction — that
he will be killed by the hand of a friend. Though fear runs

through everyone present, including Riccardo, his reaction

is once again to take refuge in persona and make light of
the witch’s words. “A' scherzo od e follia sijfatta profezia, ma
come fa da ridere la lor credulita?.'' he sings with the tone of
one whistling in the dark, flutes twittering behind him, his

laughter sounding hollow: “Is this prophecy a joke or mad-

ness? Their credulity makes me laugh.” The famous ensem-
ble that follows, with Oscar’s soaring soprano line shivering
above Riccardo’s bravado, which in turn is underlined in
the lower voices by Ulrica’s and the conspirators’ deeper
intimations of the danger the governor continues to ignore.

The Artistic Function of the Mask 233

finishes with Ulrica’s further prediction that the assassin
will be the next man whose hand he shakes. Unbelieving,
he does what any man probably would. He goes up to his
best friend, Renato, and shakes his hand deliberately, re-
vealing himself to everyone in the scene. Yet, the handshake
can really only be interpreted as a demonstration of the ex-
treme self-deception to which Riccardo is prey, for he not
only harbors a passion for the wife of the man whose hand
he has sought to shake for safety but just moments before
resolved to meet this friend’s own wife in an attempted tryst

beneath the gallows! Is it a joke or is it madness, such un-

consciousness on the part of a ruler and a man, or is it

simply the inability to put away persona when it is impor-

tant and necessary to do so, when what is required is not
simply laughs and merriment but truth and integrity and
action? On this ironic note, the first act ends.

The second act, typically Romantic in its setting at the

gallows, provides Amelia her big scene. She rushes in, fully

intending to pull out the mandrake root, and yet her fear
and her love for Riccardo pull her in another direction. A
gorgeous showpiece of a soprano aria ensues as she wrestles

with her desire to end her passion, only to be shockingly

interrupted by Riccardo’s unexpected entrance. In the req-
uisite love duet which follows, a duet many critics consider
among Verdi’s most beautiful, Amelia finds her will being
worn away as Riccardo’s repeated protestations of love take
effect on her soul. In this doomed attempt to salvage her

persona in the face of an inner life quite at odds with her

role as a faithful, devoted wife, Amelia proves herself a Ro-
mantic heroine in the best tradition of Italian opera, in

which Lucia, Isolde, Aida, and all their sisters succumb

against their will to the impulses of a forbidden love.
Though she fails, Amelia’s consistent attempts to resist giv-

ing in to her feelings nevertheless provide a contrasting po-

234 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

sition with regard to persona. Whereas Riccardo clearly
delights in the deceptions provided by disguise and hiding,
deception that extends even to his awareness of himself and
his feelings, Amelia takes her persona, that is, her position
in society and her vow of fidelity to her husband, Renato,
quite seriously as the very means of maintaining integrity in

the face of overwhelming inner passion.

The poignancy of her failure on this score is made
manifest in dramatic terms when her husband, Renato, ar-
rives on the scene to protect Riccardo from the conspirators
he knows have followed the governor to this secret tryst.

Amelia succeeds in hiding her face in the darkness from her

husband by, ironically, donning a veil: having up to this

point lived in honesty and integrity, she has forfeited her

persona in favor of the passion for Riccardo which has
smoldered underneath. Brazen and undeterred by Renato’s
warning, Riccardo has his friend promise to accompany the
veiled lady back into town for him, while he flees the arrival
of the murderous conspirators, thus determining that Re-
nato will ensure the safety of his own unfaithful wife. The
situation is thereby set for another example of the connec-
tion between irony, humor, and persona, for when the con-
spirators arrive, expecting to find Riccardo, they instead

find Renato and, to his great dismay, proceed to unveil his

own wife by his side. The act ends with one of those superb
Verdian finales where the intersection of personal and polit-

ical, tragedy and comedy, appearance and reality create a

theatrical experience of overwhelming tension. The chorus
of conspirators laughingly sings of the scene they have un-
covered, a husband with his own wife in a secret tryst, while
Renato realizes the extent to which his friendship and integ-

rity hav^ been betrayed by both Riccardo and Amelia. In-

deed, the chorus of would-be assassins makes the point
explicitly: la tragedia mutb in commedia,’’ has

The Artistic Function of the Mask 235

changed into comedy, and their bouncing music provides
a painfully mocking accompaniment to Renato’s fury and
Amelia’s tears. Scenes such as these in which humor is used
to increase the tragic impact of the action center stage are a
specialty of the Verdian repertory, a dramatic device that
depends on the audience’s ability to perceive the dual level

of the action at once, the persona of comedy and the tragic

truth beneath.
Inviting the assassins to his house the next day so as to
join in their cause and seek revenge for the insult to his

honor, Renato opens the third and final act of the opera,
dragging Amelia home behind him to the accompaniment of
a great rush of music. If the various disguises, personae, and
dissembling have thus far provided irony, tension, tragedy,
comedy, and psychological and political insights into the

characters and the story, Amelia’s pleadings to her husband

that the scene he discovered is indeed not what it seemed,
that her guilt is only apparent, and that he ought not to
condemn her simply on suspicion provide persona-based
irony of yet another sort — that of the innocent person un-

justly accused. However, as Italian opera makes little room

for clear thinking or measured consideration, impelled rather
by immediate action and passionate utterance above all, Re-
nato prepares to execute his seemingly unfaithful wife until
he is at last moved by yet a stronger feeling than that of
revenge. Her lament over losing her only son if Renato were
to kill her, depriving their son of his mother, is a quiet, sim-
ple aria of arresting, mournful beauty and provides a brief
moment of respite in the dramatic action. And since a moth-
er’s love, for Italians at least, conquers all, Renato relents and
allows Amelia to go to their son. Instead of killing his wife,
he very appropriately turns to the portrait of Riccardo to
deliver his own baritone showstopper, tu'' “It was you
who stained this soul,” an aria which begins with blare of

236 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

angry brass and moves slowly into the realm of gentle strings
where hurt and betrayal dwell, ending sweetly with flute and
harp in the most undisguisedly emotional moment in the
opera, a moment of disillusionment and silence. The masks
have been removed, or so Renato believes, and what he has
seen beneath the masks his own governor and wife have worn
has determined the actions he will be taking to bring this
show to a close.
Of course, the irony of this development is that Ame-
lia and Riccardo, though admittedly in love, had not actu-
ally acted upon their passion, and so Renato is as mistaken
and deceived by appearances as Riccardo. The tragedy of
this error unfolds as the conspirators Tom and Samuel
enter, somewhat surprised at Renato’s offer to help them
assassinate Riccardo. This so-called congiura or conspiracy
scene, a set piece well known in Italian opera, continues the

irony of that which is hidden versus that which is revealed,

as the three men argue over who will receive the honor of
killing the governor, an issue to be decided by the drawing
of names, unseen of course, from an urn. Returning from
her son, Amelia is forced to do the honor of choosing the
name, unaware of what she is doing or why but strongly
suspecting that no good is afoot. Of course, she chooses
Renato’s name.
At this moment of high drama, there is a flurry of
woodwinds, and Oscar the page arrives, with, of all things,
an invitation to a masked ball at the house of Riccardo that
night. That Riccardo’s response to being almost assassinated
and having attempted with all his power to seduce the wife
of his best friend and ally would be to go through with a
huge party should at this point in Verdi’s opera hardly be
surprising. Riccardo’s unconsciousness of the darker side of

life which creeps around him and his dedication to the per-

sona of comic enjoyment have been this character’s most

The Artistic Function of the Mask 237

salient features since the first lines of the opera. However,
Oscar’s skittering, piping descriptions of the party to come
does more than provide simple comic relief, for it is used as
the foil against the emotional state of the other four in the
scene and in this way once again heightens the suspense of
what is to come.
A scene ensues which finally presents Riccardo in an-
other light: by himself in his study, pensive and preoccu-
upon what has happened as he signs
pied, Riccardo reflects
an order to send Renato and Amelia to England, renounc-
ing his unhappy love for Amelia and acknowledging his
duty to uphold his and their integrity. This scene of the
lonely ruler absorbed in thought is a favorite set piece of
Verdi’s. In Don Carlos, Philippe II, who has been presented to
the audience as a rigid authoritarian, is shown toward the
end by himself in private quarters, singing of his love for his
wife and lamenting his inability to win her love for himself
Likewise, Montfort, the pitiless French general of \^pres sic-

iliennes, reflects sadly upon the fact that his political enemy,
the young firebrand and Sicilian patriot Arrigo, is actually

his own son. These scenes of loneliness at the top, which

are without a doubt some of the most affecting in all his

operas, of course owe much of their emotional and dra-

matic effectiveness to the persona issues which lay at their

heart. As in Ballo, the audience is finally given a glimpse of

the true Riccardo, the governor genuinely concerned with
more than fun and games and the man capable of sacrifice
in the face of duty, in short, a Riccardo capable of fulfilling
the demands of his persona rather than using it and abusing
it, and we know by now, in a way the character on stage
still does not, that it is a case of too little too late, for at this

juncture Oscar arrives with a letter, obviously from Amelia,

warning Riccardo of the assassination plot planned for the
ball that evening. Here Verdi uses the music once again not

238 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

to establish a character but to subvert him, for v^hat we hear
in Riccardo’s vocal line is not the kind of even tone and
steady rhythms that, for instance, have characterized Re-
nato, but rather a flowing, emotional, and romantic tone,
as if Riccardo’s firmness of intention is being worn away by
his passion. Indeed, in deciding to go to the ball rather than
stay away and risk looking afraid, he contemplates seeing
Amelia by singing an echo of his very first aria, rivedra
neirestasiy ” a musical indication that for Riccardo nothing
fundamental has changed, that there has been no develop-
ment of character, no learning since his first act entrance.

Such lack of development can only mean misfortune.

Perhaps the greatest pleasure that Verdi affords is the
complete lack of gratuitous elements in his composition, no
dramatic tricks thrown in simply to divert, nothing purely
conventional. So it is with the final scene of Un Ballo in
maschera, for what would be the conventionally required “big
finish” of a royal masked ball becomes in Verdi’s hands
much, much more. First, since the entire opera has been con-
structed on themes of deception, irony, and foolishness, no
better ending, one might almost say that no other ending,
could be found than to conclude this drama of deception in

the atmosphere of a masquerade. Second, the theme of per-

sonal pleasure pitted against social duty, so typically Verdian,
finds a wonderful incarnation in the scene of this royal cos-

tume party where the confusion between who is who behind

the masks is an entirely appropriate symbol for the conflict
between private life and public responsibility. Third, purely

on the level of dramatic technique, the third act masquerade

pulls the audience into the action as the stage swirls with
hidden identities, providing spectacle, to be sure, but provid-
ing along with it an even greater measure of suspense.
As the protagonists attempt on stage to discover who
each other are, we, too, in the audience follow the confus-

The Artistic Function of the Mask 239

ing scene with ever-growing tension. Oscar unmasks Re-
nato who in his turn, of course, wishes to unmask Riccardo.
Instead, he is teased by the page in another coloratura so-
prano ditty for which this character is known, singing
lightly “Oscar knows but he will not tell,” to Renato’s in-
creasing anger and determination. Riccardo, for his part,

spends the scene going about in search of the woman whose

letter warned him of the plot against him. When he finds
her, her disguise having given him the clue, he does not
immediately realize that it is, of course, Amelia, until he at

last unmasks her. The scene between Riccardo and Amelia

plays out with further irony, for the very moment when he
tells her that he has taken steps to sacrifice his love for her
and send her and Renato to England, Renato discovers
them and carries out his intention, stabbing Riccardo in
revenge. It is only after the fatal blow has been struck that
Renato discovers, with Riccardo’s letter proferred forth,
that he has indeed been mistaken. The death scene, to the
strains of violins and a mournful clarinet, is thus Riccardo’s
attempt to disclose the truth for once, to resolve public duty
and private feeling, and in this sense perhaps it is fitting

that this moment of resolution is his last. The opera ends

with a chorus around the dying Riccardo, music that simul-
taneously expresses both the tragic horror and the gentle
ascent into heaven that Riccardo’s death represents.
With Un Ballo in maschera, Verdi has given us an artis-
tic primer of sorts in persona and its role in human experi-

ence. When not honored, persona suffocates and destroys.

In treating his social role so lightly, Riccardo finds himself
inevitably brought into mortal danger, danger into which
his own unconsciousness of persona has directly led him.
When too avidly clung to, persona deceives. Amelia’s at-

tempt to use her persona of faithful wife to combat her true

feeling cannot long be maintained, just as Riccardo’s own

240 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

disguises result in at least as much self-deception as decep-
tion of others. Yet, when its role is understood and enjoyed,
persona provides play. Verdi the composer has filled this

opera with numerous moments of sheer entertainment by

deliberately using the juxtaposition of what is against what
seems to be. Oscar, the page boy who is actually a woman,
provides some of the most delightful music in all of opera.
The trios and ensembles, examples of a mature Verdi in

complete command of his musical and dramatic resources,

rely to a great extent for their effectiveness on the contrast
between vocal types and character motivations. When held
against deeper truth, the persona can become the instru-
ment of that most human of all creations, irony. In some
ways, the conflict between private feeling and public life

that typifies all of Verdi’s work results in his becoming a

master of the ironic in a way not fully appreciated by many
critics. When it is thrown against incongruities, the persona
is an instrument of humor. In Verdi, it is the dark and
sometimes bitter humor of an Italian; it is irony, not simple
fun. It is not by chance that Verdi wrote only two comedies
out of all his operas and that only one, Falstajf, was success-
ful. When used consciously and deliberately, as it is by
Verdi throughout Ballo, the persona provides texture and
complexity, but when used self-seekingly and uncon-
sciously, persona flattens and falsifies. The characters of Un
Ballo in maschera are intended to show us these truths about
the persona, and who better than an Italian could teach us
such lessons?

Though the masks being used in theater nowadays are not

the literal, material masks of Native Americans or Asian
shamans, I hope that the above discussion of the kind of
secular ritual in which modern Westerners participate eluci-
dates the insights that at least one form of ritual, theater.

The Artistic Function of the Mask 241

can still provide as to what it means to be human. Having
begun this work originally with the intention of supplying
the Jungian literature with a missing piece, a kind of apolo-
gia and celebration of the persona in all its ambiguity and
with all its ramifications, I hope that the wide-ranging
points of view I have adopted in examining this essential

part of the psyche make clear my own opinion on the im-

portance of the persona to human life. For as with all arche-
typal realities, including the persona, our experience of
them lies not simply within the literature of psychology nor
within the clinical consulting room but rather in the ongo-
ing experience of ourselves in relation to the world around
us and the world within us. To see persona in a political,

religious, social, and artistic context is vital, not just to help

Jung’s own unique insights into the psyche gain broader

currency — either they will or they will not despite Jungian

proselytizing —but to help deepen our own view of the psy-

che, to move it away from narrow, technical discussions and
into the wider field of culture in general.
Through our persona, our psyche. Psyche itself shows
itself as alive and ever changing. In our persona, that which
is sacred and immaterial in our world meets that which is

profane and material, and the union of these disparate reali-

ties, brought together by the persona, form the whole per-

sonality which is the aim of individuation itself My hope
is that this long-ignored concept of Jung’s can be revivified
and put to the wide range of therapeutic and critical uses to

which I have put my hand in this book. Far from superfi-

cial, the persona is the locus for a great deal of transforma-

tive power, which if misused can harm but when used with
awareness can certainly, and very deeply, make one whole.

242 PERSONA AND SPIRIT

 NOTES

The abbreviation cw refers to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung,

20 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967-1978).

Part One

Introduction

1 James Hillman, Anima: The Anatomy of a Personified Notion

(Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985), pp. 79-85.

Chapter 1. The Persona in Jungs Theory

and in Jungian Thought
1 . Peter Homans, Jung in Context: Modernity and the Making
ofa Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

2. Ibid., p. 91.

3. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vin-

tage, 1989), p. 170.

4. CW6, p. 218.

5. CW 6, pp. 465-66.
6. CW 6, 468. p.

7. The example Jung uses is that of the homosexual man who

projects his “masculine” persona out onto other men and
then seeks this projected masculinity through a homosexual
relationship, a situation which thus results in the homosex-
ual man’s identity with the anima, and hence the perceived
“femininity” which the homosexual man enacts through his
homosexuality. Because of Jung’s failure to distinguish be-
tween gender, social sex role, and sexual orientation and his

lack of objective research on sexual orientation, this view of

homosexuality and its relationship to persona and anima is

243
 deeply flawed. See Robert H. Hopcke, Jung, Jungians, and
Homosexuality (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1989) and
Men's Dreams, Men's Healing (Boston: Shambhala Publica-
tions, 1990).

8. The original 1916 version is included as an appendix in vol-

ume 7 of the Collected Works for those readers interested in
the historical development of Jung’s thought.

9. CW7,p. 157.

10. CW7, pp. 157-58.

11. This interesting derivation is described by Jung in an even
more interesting document, his critique of Ira Progoff’s doc-
toral thesis; the critique was published as “Comments on
a Doctoral Thesis” in C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and
Encounters, edited by William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 210.

12. CW7, p. 158.

13. Bianca Garufi, an Italian Jungian analyst, notes that in Jung-

ian psychology, “creative expression [is held] to be almost
the equivalent of the cure.” See “Fashion Viewed as a Body-
Soul Relationship” in Money, Food, Drink and Fashion and
Analytic Training: Depth Dimensions of Physical Existence,
The Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress for Ana-
lytical Psychology, edited by John Beebe (Fellbach-Oeffingen:

Verlag Adolf Bonz GmbH, 1983), p. 151.

14. CW7, p. 163.

15. CW7, pp. 167-68.

16. CW7, p. 174.

17. CW7, p. 192.

18. CW7,p. 193.

19. CW7, p. 194.

20. CW7, p. 195.

21. CW7, p. 196.

22. CW7, p. 192.

23. CW7, p. 201.

24., CW7, pp. 198-99.

244 NOTES
25. CW7, p. 210.

26. CW 9, Part p. 20. I,

27. CW 9, Part pp. 122-23.

I,

28. CW 18, p. 49.

29. C. G. Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in
1928-1930, edited by William McGuire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 74.

30. CW18, p. 579.

31. CW16, p. 176.

32. This essentially shamanic model of healing, that of the

wounded healer, led Jung to be the first to suggest that prac-

titioners of psychoanalysis should themselves be analyzed, a

stipulation adopted by Freud and now an essential part of
psychotherapeutic training.

33. CW 13, p. 121.

34. CW 10, p. 127. Jung’s influence on the development of Al-

coholics Anonymous, documented in the correspondence
with Bill W. and published in Parabola in an issue on addic-
tion (1987, Vol. 12, No. 2), is yet another intriguing con-
nection since the echoes of Jung’s words can be heard in AA
meetings: “It is weakness, not strength, which binds us to
one another. ...” The Twelve Steps might be seen, at least
in part, as intended to remove a false persona based on denial
and create a new self-definition, persona, if you will, based
on the reality of an individual’s addictive behavior.
35. CW 13, p. 180n, in “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon”
(1942), and CW 14, p. 356n in the section on “Rex and
Regina” in Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56).

36. Jung, Dream Analysis, p. 73.

Part Two
Chapter^. Persona Identification

1. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

(Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1954, p. 78.

Notes 245
 2. CW9, pp. 126-137.
3. CW 7, p. 74.

4. CW 7, p. 60.
1.

Chapter 3. Lack of Persona

Frances Wickes, The Inner World of Choice (Englewood

Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 1, 8.

Part Three

Introduction

1. CW17,p.7.
2. Joseph Henderson, “The Cultural Unconscious,” Quadrant
21, no. 2 (1988): p. 15.

Chapter 4. People of Color and the

Dilemma ofInvisibility
1. Polly Young-Eisendrath, “The Absence of Black Americans
and Jungian Analysts,” Quadrant Yo\. 20, no. 2 (1982): p.
42.

2. Ibid., p. 43.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 46.

5. CW7, p. 192.

Chapter 5. Gay Men and Lesbians

1. Robert H. Hopcke, “Homophobia and Analytical Psychol-

ogy,” in Same-Sex Love and the Path to Wholeness^ Robert H.
Hopcke, Karin Lofthus Carrington, and Scott Wirth, eds.

(Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1993), pp. 68-87.

2. George Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (Gar-

den City, N.Y.: Anchor Press Doubleday, 1972), p. 8.

3. See Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry:

. The Politics of Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1981) and

246 NOTES
 Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory ofMale Homosex-
4.
uality (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1988).

The literature on homosexuality in Jungian circles is quickly

growing after years of neglect. See Same-Sex Love and the
Path to Wholeness for an introduction to the breadth and
depth of this expanding field.

Chapter 6. Sexism and Persona

1 . Beryl Lieff Benderly, The Myth of Two Minds: What Gender
Means and Doesn't Mean (New York: Doubleday, 1987).
2. See Aryeh Maidenbaum and Stephen A. Martin, eds.. Lin-
gering Shadows: Jungians, Freudians,and Anti-Semitism (Bos-
ton: Shambhala Publications, 1991).
3. CW 10, p. 119.

4. CW 10, p. 107.

5. Demaris Wehr, Liberating Archetypes (Boston: Beacon Press,

1987), p. 68.
6. Arthur Colman and Libby Colman, The Father: Mythology
and Changing Roles (Chicago: Chiron Publications, 1988);
Andrew Samuels, ed. The Father: Contemporary Jungian Per-
spectives (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Guy
Corneau, Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine
Identity (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991); Graham
Jackson, The Secret Lore of Gardening: Patterns of Male Inti-
macy and The Living Room Mysteries: Patterns of Male Inti-
macy, Book 2 (Toronto: Inner City Press, 1993); Robert
Moore and Douglas Gilette, King Warrior Magician Lover:
Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (San
Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991).
7. CW 17, p. 195.

Part Four

Chapter 8. Persona and Ritual

1 . Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Arche-
type (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 107.

Notes 247
 2. Urs Ramseyer, The Art and Culture of Bali (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986).

3. “Lie and Glorious Adjective: An Interview with Peter

Brook,” Parabola 6 no. 3, Mask and Metaphor (1981), p.
62.

4. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects ofNdembu Rit-

ual (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967), p.
98.

5. Robert H. Hopcke, “S/M and the Psychology of Gay Male

Initiation: An Archetypal Perspective,” in Leatherfolk: Radi-
cal Sex, People, Politics and Practice, Mark Thompson, ed.,

(Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), pp. 65-76.

6. Aubrey Feist, The Lion of St. Mark’s: Venice, the Story of a

City from Attila to Napoleon (Indianapolis & New York: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971), p. 252.
7. Feist, p. 245.
8. Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy: Sex-Roles and the Madness
ofDionysos (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 80-81.
9. “Peter Brook,” p. 63.

10. For a detailed and diverse survey of the clowning tradition

and rituals which still survive in the various Native American
tribes, see Peggy V. Beck and Anna L. Walters, “Sacred Fools

and Clowns,” chap. 13 The Sacred: Ways of Knowledge,

Sources of Life (Tsaile [Navajo Nation], Arizona: Navajo
Community College Press, 1977), pp. 301-25.

11. Janet Brody Esser, ed. Behind the Mask in Mexico (Santa Fe:
Museum of New Mexico Press), 1988.
12. Stephen and Robin Larsen, “The Healing Mask,” Parabola
6, no. 3 (1981): 78-84.
13. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 459.

14. Ibid., p. 179.

15. Ladislas Segy, Masks ofBlack Africa (New York: Dover Publi-
cations, 1976), pp. 44-46.
16. Ibid., plate 13.

17. Ibid., plate 22.

248 NOTES
Chapter 9. The Artistic Function of the Mask

1. Peter Conrad, A
Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of
Opera (New York: Poseidon Press, 1987), p. 19.
2. See Pierre Louis Duchatre, The Italian Comedy, trans. Ran-
dolph T. Weaver (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), pp.
41-49, for a discussion of the use of masks in commedia
dell’arte. See also Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin:
A Critical Study of the Commedia dell Arte (Cambridge, En-
gland: The University Press, 1963), pp. 40-93.

3. Luigi Barzini, The Italians (New York: Athenaeum, 1994).

4. Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle
in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1992), pp. 113-21.

5. Charles Osborne, Verdi: A Life in the Theatre (New York:
Fromm International Publishing Company, 1987), pp.
148-158. Stiffelio, an opera written for a debut in the then-
Austrian territory of Trieste, has a similar history. The plot,

which concerns an Austrian minister and his unfaithful wife,

was seen as too much of a challenge to the prevailing reli-

gious and political hegemony of the church, and so the Aus-

trian government, already all too aware of Verdi’s reputation
as the composer of Italian unification, insisted on changes
which essentially ruined the opera. An original autograph
manuscript of the work, though, recently came to life and
was produced in 1993 at the Metropolitan Opera in New
York City, thus restoring this opera to the form intended by
Verdi.

6. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1988), pp. 215-19.

Notes 249
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dolph T. Weaver. New York: Dover Publications, 1966.

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Hillman, James. Anima: The Anatomy of a Personified Notion.

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Book 2. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1993.
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scious, 1969; vol. 10, Civilization in Transition, 1964; vol.
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fornia Press, 1988.

Larsen, Stephen, and Robin Larsen. “The Healing Mask.” Pa-

rabola 6, no. 3 (1981).

Lewes, Kenneth. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexual-

ity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

“Lie and Glorious Adjective: An Interview with Peter Brook,”

Parabola 6, no. 3 (1981).
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the Commedia delTArte. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1963.

Osborne, Charles. Verdi: A Life in the Theatre. New York: Fromm

International Publishing Company, 1987.
Poizat, Michel. The AngeTs Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in
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versity Press, 1986.

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tions, 1976.

Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects ofNdembu Ritual.

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Wehr, Demaris. Liberating Archetypes. Boston: Beacon Press,

1987.
Weinberg, George. Society and the Healthy Homosexual. Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1972.
Wickes, Frances. The Inner World of Choice. Englewood Cliffs,

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 CREDITS

Thanks are extended to the following publishers, institu-

tions, and individuals for permission to reprint or repro-
duce material copyrighted or controlled by them.

Princeton University Press and Routledge and Kegan

Paul Ltd, for The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, translated
by R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX: vol. 6, Psychological
Types, copyright © 1971; vol. 7, Two Essays on Analytical
Psychology, copyright © 1953, 1966; vol. 9, I, The Arche-
types and the Collective Unconscious, copyright © 1959,
1969; vol. 10 Civilization in Transition, copyright
, © 1964,
1970; vol. 13, Alchemical Studies, copyright, © 1967; vol.
16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, copyright © 1954, 1966;
vol. 17, The Development of Personality, copyright© 1954;

vol. 18, The Symbolic Life, copyright © 1950, 1953, 1955,

1958, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1970, 1973, 1976.
The C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology,
Inc., of New York for “The Absence of Black Americans as

Jungian Analysts” by Polly Young Eisendrath in Quadrant

20, no. 2, copyright © 1982.
Peter Brook and Parabola for “Lie and Glorious Ad-
jective: An Interview with Peter Brook” in Parabola 6 no. 3
(Fall, 1981).
The National Museum of the American Indian,
Smithsonian Institution, for the photograph of the Deer
Scalp Mask worn in the Clown Dance.
The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism,
San Francisco, for the photograph of C. G. Jung.

254
 INDEX

Active imagination, 45, 81 Bakker, Tammy Faye, 53-54, 162

Africa, 207-209; masks in ritual, Bali, 190-192, 193, 202-203, 207,
207-209 209; masks of, 190, 191-192,
African-Americans, 100, 101, 105, 193, 202-203, 209; religion of,

106, 108, 114-116; stereotypes 190-191, 207

of, 112 Barong, 191-192, 207
Alcoholics Anonymous, 51, 163, Barzini, Luigi, 220
183, 245
Battle, Kathleen, 115
Allport, Gordon, 122
Beaumarchais, Pierre- Augustin, 219
Ambisexualiry, 124, 129
Behaviorism, 130
Analytical psychology, 3, 5-6, 95,
Bel canto, 219-220, 222, 225
96, 100-101, 108, 119, 125-
Bellini, Vincenzo, 219-220
127, 139, 151-156, 166; extra-
Bieber, Irving, 124
version and, 3, 5-6; and gender,
Brook, Peter, 190, 192, 193, 195,
151-156, 166; on homosexual-
ity, 125-127; introversion and, 199, 202, 214
3-5; women analysts in, 152
Anamnesis, 52 Caravaggio, 26
Anderson, Marian, 115 Carnival, 196-198
Androgyne, 126-127, l4l Casanova, Giovanni, 197
Androgyny, 43, 44, l4l, 155 Castrati tradition in opera, 223
Anima/animus, 6, 11, 16, 17-18, Choice, in individuation, 81-82
19-20, 23, 35-36, 111-112, Christianity; see Religion
152, 153, 155, 156, 180, 243; Clowning, in Native American ritual,
in Asian/Eastern cultures, 111-
203-204
112; concept of “male anima,”
Collective unconscious, 12-13, 14,
36; and masculinity, 35-36;
15, 16, 18
and persona, 11, 16, 17-18,
Coming out, 132, 137-138, 143-
1 1 1-1 12, 243; and sex roles,
144; psychological dynamics of,
11,35-36, 152, 153, 155, 156
132
Anima mundi, 4
Art, 184-185,213-214
Commedia dell’arte, 218-219, 220

Asians/Asian-Americans, 106, 111- Complex, 6, 18, 105

1 12, 1 13-1 14; stereotypes of,
Conformity, social, 105-106, 114,
112 143
Assimilation, ethnic, 98-101, Conrad, Peter, 216
105-106 Countertransference, 83, 84,
Athena, 42 118-119

255
Cross-dressing, 140-141, 222-223, Gay men. See Homosexuality
229; in movies, 140; travesti tra- Gender, 147-149, 150, 176, 223
dition in opera, 222-223, 229 Gender roles. See Sex roles
Cultural unconscious, 95 Greece, ancient, 200-202, 214, 215
Gorgons, see Medusa
Danae, 42
da Ponte, Lorenzo, 221 Halloween, 198-199
Davies, Robertson, 52, 135 Henderson, Joseph, 96, 97
Debarras, Saint, 92 Hercules, 21
Deianeira, 20-21 Heterosexism, 147
Dionysus, 200 Heterosexuality, 124, 125-126, 130
Donizetti, Gaetano, 219, 220, 224 Hillman, James, 4
Drag, see Cross-dressing Homans, Peter, 9
Dreams, 31-35, 39-44, 45-46, 47, Homophobia, 121-132, 139, 144-
50-54, 55, 57, 62-66, 69-70, 145, 147; in psychology, 14-
71, 72-75, 77-78, 79, 80-81, 145; psychological effects of,
82, 83-85, 115, 123-124, 127-132, 139; as shadow pro-
134-139, 162; “big,” 138; com- jection, 125-127
pensatory, 52-53; duplication Homosexuality, 73, 95, 121-146,
in, 135; initial, 33, 34, 62, 64; 151, 154, 175, 194-195, 243;
objective vs. subjective interpre- attempts to cure or change,
tation of, 34-35, 136; series of, 129-130; change in psychologi-

74; symbolic nature of, 79, 84; cal thought on, 121-122, 129-
of therapist, 83-84 130; development of, 128; gay/
lesbian community, 137, 139-
Ego (self), 12, 14, 18, 32, 34; and 146, 194-195; psychoanalytic
persona, 12, 14, 18 theory of, 124-125, 129, 145;
Eliade, Mircea, 206 religious attitudes toward, 129-
Enlightenment, the, 183-184 130; as symbol for heterosexu-
Eucharist, 138-139 als, 175
Evelyn, John, 197-198 Hopper, Edward, 48
Extraversion, 3, 5-6, 30; in analytical
psychology, 3, 5-6 Identity disorder, 60
Immigration, in United States,
Fashion, 142-143, 159 98-100
Feist, Aubrey, 197 Individual, in psychology, 93-94
Feminine, 42-43, I4l, 152, Individuality, 12, 13, 14, 22
158-159 Individuation, 16, 27, 29, 47, 54,

Femininity, 11, 17, 18, 35-36, 152, 81, 108-118, 127-139, 142-
157 146, 159, 160, 163-168, 171-
Feminism, 148-149, 151, 156 176, 179, 242; of gay men/
Francis, Saint, 134-135 lesbians, 127-139, 142-146; of
Freud, Sigmund, 9, 75-76, 86, 124, men, 171-176; of people of
'
129 color, 108-118; of women.

256 INDEX
 159-160, 163-168; of young Lesbians. See Homosexuality

people, 54 Libido, 86
Inflation, 15-16 Liminality, 48, 49, 78, 199, 231

Introversion, 3-5
Italy, 217-241; culture, 219, 220; Marriage, 165-166

opera in, 217-241 Masculine, 42-43, 141-142, 152

Masculinity, 11, 17-18, 33-34, 35-
Jung, C. G., 2, 4-5, 6, 9-24, 25, 27, 36, 152, 169, 172, 175; and
anima, 35-36
28, 54, 58, 66, 75-76, 86, 93,
Masks, 7-8, 12-13, 14, 15, 16, 20,
94, 95, 108, 111, 124, 125,
182, 186, 188-214; African,
152, 153, 154, 165-166, 170,
208-209; in ancient Greece,
176, 183,213,219, 242, 243;
on homosexual- 12-13, 201-202, 214; Balinese,
on gender, 1 52;
190, 191, 193, 202-203; and
ity, 1 54, 243; on individuation
of young people, 54; on libido,
carnival, 197-198; and Hallow-

on marriage, 165-166; and een, 198-199; in Native Ameri-

86;
Nazism, 153; and persona,
can ritual, 203-204; in religious
6,
ritual, 188-190, 193, 194,
9-24, 25, 58, 242; on psycho-
195-196, 198-199, 203-204,
logical theory, 27, 95; psycho-
205-209, 210-212, 213; in sa-
logical type of, 4-5; and
domasochism, 193-194; sha-
psychopathology, 28; on trans-
manistic, 205-206, 241; types
ference, 75-76
—Works: “The Archetypes of the
of, 199, 205
Medusa, 26, 40-44
Collective Unconscious,” 20;
“Melting pot,” 98, 99, 100,
“Concerning Rebirth,” 20;
105-106
“The Love Problem of the Stu-
Men, 31-37, 45-49, 54-55, 59-66,
dent,” 154; “Marriage as a Psy-
71-78, 113-114, 116-117,
chological Relationship,”
132-139, 151, 156, 168-171,
165-166; Psychological Types, 9,
172-173, 174, 175-176; and
10, 16; “The Relations between
feelings, 170, 174; and persona,
the Ego and the Unconscious,”
170-171; psychotherapy with,
10, 12; “The Tavistock Lec-
31-37, 45-49, 54-55, 59-66,
tures,” 21, 22; Two Essays in An-
71-78, 113-114, 116-117,
alytical Psychobgy, 10; “Woman
132-139, 172-173, 174, 175-
in Europe,” 23, 153
176; sex roles of, 33-34, 151,
168-171
Kerenyi, Karl, 205
Midlife, 55, 57
Kerman, Joseph, 229 Monnier, Philippe, 197
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 219,
Larsen, Stephen and Robin, 205 221 222,

Latinos/Latinas, in United States, Mussolini, Benito, 22

105, 106, 108, 116-117; stereo-
types of, 112 Native Americans, 100, 106, 108,
Lent, 196-197 112, 182, 203-204; Mayo tribe

Index 257
 (Mexico), 203-204; Penobscot Perseus, 41-42
tribe (Maine), 182 Persona, 3, 6-7, 10-24, 242; and
Nazism, 153 anima, 11, 16, 17-18, 20, 111-
Nessus, 20-21 112; in Asian culture, 18;
Neumann, Erich, 43, 189 “blank,” 110-112, 114, 118; in
Norman, Jessye, 115 children, 19; and culture, 96-
97, 112, 178-180; development
Object relations (psychoanalysis),
of, 54-57, 58-59, 65-66, 71-
102, 103, 107
75, 81, 82, 83-84, 86, 87, 88,
Oedipus complex, 129
136-137, 167; dissolution of
Opera, 184, 216-241; characteristics
14-15,23, 26, 37, 40, 44,
of, 219-223, 224, 225,231,
135-137; etymology of term,
233, 236, 239; development of
12, 13, 20, 199-200; false, 115,
216-220; false identity and dis-
117, 121-132, 135, 136; in
guise in, 221-223, 231,232,
gay/lesbian community, 139-
233, 239, 240; in Italy, 217-
146; and gay men/lesbians,
223; and persona conflicts,
225-227, 231,234, 235, 237, 131-132, 142-146; and gender,
147; identification with, 16-17,
238, 240-241; women in,
234-235 24, 29, 30-31,33, 37, 38, 49,

Operas: Aida (Verdi), 226; LAssedio 58-59, 111, 112, 113, 131-
di Corinto (Rossini), 223; Un 132, 142, 167, 171; images for,

Ballo in maschera (Verdi), 8, 21, 23, 32; in individuation,

227-24 1 ; // Barbiere di Siviglia 27-29, 179; lack of, 58-59, 60,
(Rossini), 219; Cost fan tutte 54-66, 67-68, 70; in medical

(Mozart), 222; Don Carlos or psychiatric treatment, 22-23;

(Verdi), 226, 238; Don Gio- and men, 170-176; missing or
vanni (Mozart), 222; Don Pas- neglected, 18-19, 24, 29, 111;
quale (Donizetti), 221; Fahtaff in opera, 220, 225-227, 229,
(Verdi), 241; La Forza del des- 230, 231,235, 237, 238, 240-
tino (Verdi), 226; Guillaume Tell 24 1 overdeveloped, 142-145;
;

(Rossini), 223; Maometto II

and racism, 105, 108-112,
(Rossini), 223; Le Nozze di Fi-
115-116, 119-120; regressive
garo (Mozart), 219; Otello
restoration of, 15, 18, 24, 179;
(Verdi), 221, 226; Rigoletto
religious function of, 210-212;
(Verdi), 225, 226; Semiramide
and sex roles, 156-158, 160-
(Rossini), 223; II Signor Brusch-
177; and shadow, 96; and soul,
ino (Rossini), 221; Simon Bocca-
10, 14; and women, 156-168
negra (Verdi), 221; Tancredi
Personality disorders, 103, 108
(Rossini), 223; La Traviata
Personal unconscious, 14
(Verdi), 225, 226; // Trovatore
(Verdi), 225, 226; Les Vepres sici-
Phallos, 169-170, 176

liennes (Verdi), 226, 238 Pluralism, 100-101, 104-107

Poizat, Michel, 223
Participation mystique, 18-19 Polydectes, 42
Patriarchy, 148, 150, 156, 174 Prejudice, 122

258 INDEX
Projection, 105, 107, 125 Renaissance, the, 183-184, 215-216
Projective identification, 107 Ritual, see Religion

Psychoanalysis, 93, 95, 102, 124- Roman Catholicism, 129, 131-133,

125, 129-130; theory of homo- 217-218
sexuality in, 124-125, 129-130 Rossini, Gioachino, 219, 221, 223,

Psychology, 94-95, 139 224

Psychopathology, Jungian view of,

28, 161 Sadomasochism (S/M), 141-142,

113- 194-195
Psychotherapy, 27-29; 31-40, 44-
56, 58-67, 69-70, 71-90, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 10
120, 132-139, 179-180; Segy, Ladislas, 209
beginning, 66-67; with gay self, see Ego
men and lesbians, 132-139, Self, 43, 180

144-145; liminality in, 48-49; Sexism, 148-149, 156, 160, 166; in

with men, 31-37, 45-49, 54- analytical psychology, 156, 166

55, 59-66,71-78, 113-114, Sex roles, 33-34, 126, 141-142,
116-117, 132-139, 172-176; 148-149, 151, 154, 157-161,
with people of color, 108-120; 165, 168-171, 175-176; men’s,

and persona development, 88- 33-34, 151, 168-171, 175-

114-
89, 113; political dimension of, 176; women’s, 148-149, 157-
179-180; racism and, 117-119; 158, 159, 160-161, 165

termination of, 55; transference Sexual development, 128

in 75-76; with women, 37-44, Shadow, 5, 6, 35, 76, 96, 119, 124,

49-54, 55-57, 66-70, 78-87, 125, 127, 145-146, 153, 174,

116, 158 180; positive, 145-146

Shakespeare, William, 221, 226
Race, concept of, 108 Shamanism, 205-206, 241
Racism, 99-107, 109-112, 115- Society, impact of, 95-97, 110-117,
119; in analytical psychology, 119, 121; on individual, 95-96;
101, 119; internalized, 107- on persona formation, 96-97,
111, 118; psychological effects 110-117, 119, 121
of, 109-112, 115-117, 119; Soul, 10, 14
psychology of, 102-104, 107- Soul-figure. Anima/animus
108; in psychotherapy, 117- Spirituality. See Religion

119; in United States, 99-101, Splitting, 102-103, 107

104-107, 118, 119 Stein, Murray, 48
Rado, Sandor, 124 Stereotypes, 104-105, 112, 118,
Religion, 129-130, 183, 185-198, 125, 178; in movies, 104-105
203-209,215,216; and art, Stonewall riots, 121-122, 140
185-186; Balinese, 190-192; Streep, Meryl, 157
Christian, 129-130, 196-197, Synchronicity, 54, 56, 78
203-204,215.216; Native
American, 203-204; ritual in, Tao Te Ching, 17
187-188, 189, 193-194, 195, Theater, 12-13, 184, 200-202,
198, 203-204, 205-209 214-215, 241; in ancient

Index 259
 Greece, 12-13, 200-202; devel- Wagner, Richard, 217
opment of Western, 214-215 Wehr, Demaris, 156
Transference, 75-78, 82-85, 88, Weinberg, George, 122-123, 124
175; and countertransference, Wickes, Frances, 81
83, 84 Women, 37-44, 49-54, 55-57, 66-
Transvestism. See Cross-dressing 70, 78, 87, 114, 116, 148-149,
Turner, Victor, 193-194 152, 153-154, 156-168, 234-
235; in analytical psychology,
United States, 98-101, 126, 128, 152; Jung’s views on, 153-154;
148-149; culture in, 98-101, and persona, 156-168; and
126, 128; sexism in, 148-149 weight, 162-163; psychother-
apy with, 37-44, 49-54, 55-
Venice, 197-198 57, 66-70, 78-87, 114-116,
Verdi, Giuseppe, 8, 221, 223-241; 158; in opera, 234-235; sex

conception of opera, 223-225, roles of, 148-149, 157-158

238, 239, 240-241; history of

Un Ballo in maschera, 227-228; Young-Eisendrath, Polly, 101-105,

and Italian nationalism, 225, 107, 119

226-227; and use of irony,

230, 234, 235-236, 239, 241 Zeus, 42

260 INDEX
 ^^operty of

San Mate
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"Hopcke sees what many Jungians have missed: the important role that the

persona plays in the individuation process. The beautifully detailed case

studies make clear that these are soul issues— that the adoption of a per-

sona IS a serious, sacred, and potentially transformative event."

—Christine Downing, author of the goddess and

MYTHS AND MYSTERIES OF SAME-SEX LOVE

The persona is our mask— the place in our personality where who we are

perceived to be confronts who we really are. But, as C. G. Jung under-

stood, the persona is not to be disregarded in the search for our true selves,

but rather to be honored as an essential part of the rich and complex con-

figuration of the whole person. Robert Hopcke underscores the persona's

essential role of mediator between our inner and outer worlds. He follows

the concept from Jung's original theory into its persistent manifestations in

traditional rituals and the arts, and on into the lives of real men and women
to explore such questions as:

o What is the result of identifying too completely with one's

persona?

° Is it possible not to have a persona?

o What part does persona play in sex roles and communication

between the sexes?

o How do people whose inner selves clash with cultural expectations

—like women, gays and lesbians, and people of color— use their

personas to adapt?

Robert H. HoPGKE is a Jungian -oriented psychotherapist in private

practice in Berkeley, California. He is also the author of A GUIDED TOUR

OF THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C. C. JUNG; JUNG, JUNGIANS, AND
HOMOSEXUALITY; and MEN'S DREAMS, MEN'S HEALING.
©1995 Shambhala Publications, Inc. Printed in US A
Cover art by Graciela Galup

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Boston & London SAN MATEO, CA., 94402-15!