The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 8

with a clearer definition. We have already noted Freud’s distinction of the Ego, the Id, and the Super-ego (Chap. 7, § 12). More recently Jung (Two Essays, 1926) has been making a parallel attempt to define thewhat shall we say?—parts, active forces, powers, rdles?—in the intricate mental interplay of Homo sapiens. His essay throws much helpful light upon the conditions and limitations of the adaptation of this strange animal Man to happy participation in a continually more complex and penetrating social existence, and yields us some convenient new forms of expression.

As the starting-point of the self-conscious life of a man or a higher mammal, he explains, is the realization of the “I,” the “Ego ’—the realization of oneself as pitted against the universe. To the very shallow and unthinking this ego is all that one is, but, as we now realize, a great undefined field of mental activity goes on in everyone, outside the conscious ego, and nearly everyone discovers sooner or later divisions of motive which are in a sort of struggle for the control of the ego. Before Mr. Everyman was in knickerbockers he had learnt that it would not suffice always to say: “I want,’ “I will,’ or “I won’t.” There were times when he found himself saying : *T want and I don’t want,” or “I will and I won't.” From the start he has had this balancing going on in him.

Often but not always these conflicts resolved themselves into a struggle between what he was informed was his better and his worse self. Generally the worse self had a quality of being more flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone than the better. It was as if, under the pressures of external and internal experience, a ruler was arising within him to which his conscious ego in general had to be subservient. It was a part of his ego arising to dominate the rest of his ego. What is this second more selected self in Mr. Everyman and _ all of us ?

Dr. Jung has devised for it the excellent name of the “ persona.” It seems to be in many respects the same thing for which Freud uses the term Super-ego. The persona is begotten of a need to escape from the complexity, the realized dangers, and the dissatisfactions of the ego. Material—but here Jung parts company from Freud—is drawn in to it from the Unconscious outside the ego. ‘The persona is the self we want and do our best to imagine ourselves to be. It is how we present ourselves to ourselves and the world. It is the story we tell ourselves about 828

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ourselves. It is not a fixed thing. It varies with our audience and our mood just as the various performances of a play may vary with audience and mood. Now something is out, now something is added, now an understudy plays. But generally it is how we wish others to take us. It is a mask into which we weave very many extraneous and suggested things that we suppose people to expect of us. And it is always thrusting down incompatible impulses, desires, and cravings out of sight, out of our ego into the Unconscious. And also it thrusts down incompatible and disturbing memories. ‘These suppressed elements, denied recognition and honour, are usually less lucid, more in the quality of emotion and blind feeling. They become like a dark shadow of the persona, they are everything it is not; they are, as it were, in necessary conflict with the persona for the ego. For this suppressed and insurgent underself in the Unconscious, Jung suggests the name of the anima.”

The difference between those two aspecis of the self is not necessarily a moral one ; the persona is not necessarily good, the anima not necessarily bad. The persona is the mask, and the mask may be, for example, that of a stern implacable judge upon the bench, a pig-headed, intolerant man, while the suppressed and imprisoned anima cries and worries for mercy and consideration. But the normal anima is something suppressed, something getting loose in dream values or unwary impulses, in the inadvertencies of hypnotism or drunkenness or fatigue. The tension of its upward thrust towards recognition and effect in the ego may lead to serious nervous lesions and mental disorder.

Jung makes a very interesting but very questionable distinction between this dark shadow of the persona in men and in women. The persona imposed upon the average woman is, by tradition, social and economic conditions and physiological necessities, different in its nature from that of the average man. There is in women generally more suppression of judgments and above all of initiatives and less of emotions and receptive response than in man. The suppressed elements of a woman are therefore commonly more wilful than those of a man. Jung would go to the length of making a difference between an anima in the case of a man and an animus in the case of the woman. His choice of these words is not we think so happy and unambiguous as his choice of persona. Anima and, even more so in English,