Survival Personality and the False Self
A Review of How and Why We Hide Who We Really Are
Everyone wears a mask. Some are elegantly painted and quite attractive, others are hideous and vulgar, built for defense. Some wear the mask so tightly they forget they are wearing it in the first place, and a very small percentage have learned to take the mask off. Nonetheless we are all wearing a mask.
The mask is all the parts of ourselves we choose to show people. Through a series of trial and error and close observance as children we learned which traits helped us and which didn’t. Those that brought about pleasurable, peaceful reactions from others around us we bolstered, relying on them to help our relationships and connections. Those traits deemed unworthy we silenced and shoved into our subconscious—disidentifying with them in the process.
Of course this is a very conformist perspective. After all, due to our fundamental need as humans to have empathic relationships and feel like we are a part of a group, it would make sense that traits aiding this would be brought forward. It is important to note that this development is 1) done at a time when we are children and not capable of reasoning why some traits are better than others (or even have the level of awareness necessary to understand what we are doing) and 2) the traits we deem more beneficial are highly dependent on the subculture we grew up in. Therefore someone could present as a suburban, friendly-neighbor type who is always kind and full of smiles, or as a gang member who dresses and behaves in a way designed to intimidate. Both have developed their mask at the same level, albeit according to different subcultural standards.
Across the many different psychologies present, many have discussed the nature of the false self. We will discuss two of the important ones below that will give us a full picture of why we wear the mask.
Psychosynthesis
In terms of psychosynthesis—which uses a transpersonal model of the psyche to map the dimensions of human potential—the false self is described in terms of a survival personality. Labeling it a survival personality is important since it is often developed during childhood, where the rational brain is not able to step in to stop the process. It is indeed out of our dependence on our caregivers for survival that the mask is constructed.
In their book, The Primal Wound, John Firman and Ann Gila describe how fundamental relationships are to humans. When we are not able to experience empathic connections that see and accept us for who we are, our sense of self falters and we potentially face the threat of nonbeing. In order not to face this we split our feelings towards the relationships we do have, creating a positive and negative perspective of the person we are in relationship to.
Overtime, these extremes get too exhausting to consciously hold onto—the positive being too disillusioned and the negative being too painful. In order to not get swept away by the tumultuous fluctuation between positive and negative, we develop a survival personality—a false self. This false self allows us to continue being in the non-empathic relationship without truly losing who we are. For a more detailed look at this process, read my other article here.
As a consequence, the false self becomes whatever the other in the non-empathic relationship wants it to be. For many this is why they get stuck living their lives as their parents wanted them to rather than following their own true inner calling. Since the false self’s entire role is to deny and cover up the true self, one’s life becomes forced by the demands and expectations of the environment to become someone they are not.
The survival personality isn’t just an empty shell of self. Often the survival personality can achieve much in life well beyond the average individual. Many overachievers are operating from pressures they felt by their initial caregivers. How one curates their survival personality is dependent on how pressured the person feels by the environment. The higher the commitment to these demands determines how developed the survival personality will be.
It often takes tremendous courage to overcome the grips of the survival personality. Doing so involves facing one’s own threat of nonbeing—a threat often more horrifying than physical death. However, when one does learn to disidentify (re: this article) from their survival personality center and reconnect with their true, authentic self, they will find their life takes on deeper levels of richness and meaning—something lacking with adherence to the survival personality.
The Jungian Persona
Perhaps the most famous word for describing the process of wearing the mask comes from Carl Jung—the persona. The persona is the positive aspects of the personality we have identified with and chosen to promote to the outside world as being “us.” This decision invariably creates the shadow—the personas opposite. The shadow is simply all the parts of the personality we have rejected about ourselves and cast to the subconscious. Simple enough.
While Jung’s writing is notoriously hard to digest, Murray Stein presents a wonderfully articulated description of Jung’s psyche in his book, Jung’s Map of the Soul. He writes that,
“The shadow and the persona are both ego-alien ‘persons’ that inhabit the psyche along with the conscious personality that we know ourselves to be. There is the official and ‘public person’ that Jung called the persona, and this is more or less identified with ego-consciousness and forms the psycho-social identity of the individual” (Stein, pg. 109).
Even though the persona is “alien” to the ego, i.e. it doesn’t feel like the authentic self, the ego is more at ease with it since it is compatible with social norms. It is in this compatibility that we become complacent with living our life from this inauthentic center.
Jung borrowed the word persona, as he did with much of his terminology, from Latin. The Romans used the word persona to refer to the mask actors wore on stage. It is this very process of putting on a mask and assuming a role that we all do to be accepted by others. Much like the actor, once the role is assumed they rattle off their lines—literally to rote memorization. There is little awareness in the act since it is pre-scripted.
We see this in our culture when someone asks “how are you?” and we reply with “good,” or “doing well,” or any other bland, generic response that is expected. Answering truthfully is often met with scorn as the person asking didn’t actually care, they were only asking out of so called social niceties. It is often shocking to have someone respond to these generic complacencies with something truly random. The more unconscious the person who has absentmindedly asked “how are you,” the more disturbed they will be when you respond with an enthusiastic “fan-fucking-tastic!”
This prevalence of persona promotion makes it extremely difficult to learn to disidentify with one's own persona. It can feel like they are going against what society expects of them—which is indeed true, albeit superficially—which cuts deep into the core of nonbeing. In our primitive days as a species being outcast from the tribe meant literal death, as the individual often could not survive in the wilderness alone. This fear lies very near the primal wound of needing others to accept us, and the persona is an easy fix to a serious issue.
It should be noted that it is only difficult in the first stages of persona disintegration. As one learns to develop deeper levels of authentic self, not only will the self-esteem necessary to transcend conformity be in abundance but the individual will be able to purposefully and authentically craft the persona in a way that can be true to one’s self and still maintain a degree of social acceptance from others. In fact, empathy and empathetic traits tend to correlate with consciousness expansion.
Conclusion
As we can see, the mask we wear is one of the most fundamental and important aspects of the psyche to understand. We can go our whole lives completely beholden to the mask, maybe even living a full life, but an inauthentic one. For true psychological depth and maturity to occur we must assess our persona, our self we created just to be bare minimum accepted, and begin to transcend our limited self awareness. Your future self is counting on you.
— Recommended Reading —
The Primal Wound by John Firman and Ann Gila
Jung’s Map of the Soul by Murray Stein
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