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Carl Jung Saw It Coming. This Secret Personality Trait is Making or Destroying You
He spent his entire career trying to warn us.
After years of learning from Carl Jung, I figured out I was a stranger to myself. There’s a version of me I had never fully met. My persona. A term psychiatrist and psychotherapist Jung used to describe a necessary compromise between your hidden self and the expectations of society. “The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual,” he wrote in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Carl Jung spent his entire career figuring out the human psyche.
He found something strange.
Most people go through life identifying with only one side of themselves. The professional, the good son/daughter or the analytical thinker. The loving mother or father. He thought specific personas overshadow psychological growth. For Jung, “the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas — the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of his own biography.”
