Persona is the term Jung used to denote the outer face that is presented to the world, which he appropriated from the word for the mask worn by actors in antiquity to indicate the roles they played. Jung conceived of it as an archetype by which he meant that it is universal and it is this archetypal core of persona that facilitates the relating which has evolved as an integral part of humans as social beings. Different cultures and different historical times give rise to different outer personas as do different life stages and events in an individual’s development. According to Jung, it is the archetypal core that gives the persona its powerful religious dimension, which raises it from the banal, workaday outer vestment of an individual via its connection to the depths of the psyche.
In spite of this archetypal core, Jung often emphasizes the superficial aspects of the persona. For instance, in his paper The persona as a segment of the collective psyche, he makes the point that the...
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Casement, A. (2020). Persona. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_502
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