Persona

1. Etymology

Persona is Latin for the mask worn by an actor—also, by extension, a character or role. Jung keeps the theatrical root: the persona is the face turned toward the collective, not the whole of who one is.

Related forms: persona-identification; social archetype; German Persona. Ordinary English “person” and “personality” share the lineage but are not Jung’s technical mask.

2. Plain summary

The persona is the face you show the world—the role that helps you meet people, keep a job, and get along in a group. It is useful. It is not fake by nature. Trouble starts when you think the mask is you.

Picture the friendly nurse voice at work, the tough coach on the field, or the always-agreeable guest at dinner. Those roles grease social life. If someone has almost no persona, they may blunder through every room; if someone is only persona, they may lose track of the life behind the role—and the shadow often grows darker underneath a bright front.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common persona-related figures and motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
social mask / public face; actor’s mask (etymology); professional role (doctor, teacher, analyst, laborer); gender role / stage-of-life role (adolescence, parent); multiple personas over a lifetime; combined personas at one moment; “social archetype”; adaptation / personal convenience; functional complex; “that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is”; neglected persona (social solecisms, “soulful bores,” tactless Cassandra picture in lexicon tradition); persona-identification / over-identification with role; pathology when only external orientation remains; persona vs shadow compensation (bright front / dark underside); relation to anima/animus when roles and soul-images tangle; collective compromises for living in community; cultural variation of persona criteria; maturation failure (persona stuck at an earlier age); protective covering and social asset.

3. Academic elucidation

4. Lexicon

Persona. The “I,” usually ideal aspects of ourselves, that we present to the outside world. … The persona is … a functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience.

The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

(Sharp, 1991, p. [provisional — unverified])

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986)

The term derives from the Latin word for the mask worn by actors in classical times. Hence, persona refers to the mask or face a person puts on to confront the world. … Jung’s conception of the persona is of an archetype … Sometimes, the persona is referred to as the ‘social archetype’… It follows that persona is not to be thought of as inherently pathological or false. There is a risk of pathology if a person identifies too closely with his/her persona.

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

From this point of view the conscious personality is a more or less arbitrary segment of the collective psyche.

This arbitrary segment of collective psyche—often fashioned with considerable pains—I have called the persona. The term persona is really a very appropriate expression for this, for originally it meant the mask once worn by actors to indicate the role they played.
(Jung, 1928/1966, CW 7, p. 216, ¶245)

Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. … The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname.
(Jung, 1928/1966, CW 7, p. 216, ¶246)

This mask, i.e., the ad hoc adopted attitude, I have called the persona, which was the name for the masks worn by actors in antiquity. The man who identifies with this mask I would call “personal” as opposed to “individual.”
(Jung, 1921/1971, CW 6, p. 642, ¶800)

See also: complex; shadow; anima; animus; archetype; active imagination. (Queued — not yet linked: projection, psychoid, ego.)

References

Jung, C. G. (1966). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (2nd ed., Vol. 7, pp. 215–216, ¶¶244–246). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1928)

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 6, p. 642, ¶800). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.