Persona: what’s it like to escape them for a while?
When Rebbe Nachman traveled to the land of Israel, in 1798, he traveled incognito. In fact, he warned his followers not to tell anyone who he was, as he traveled from town to town on his way to Istanbul and then to Israel. He traveled like a common person - “like a merchant” - without making any kind of big deal or calling attention to himself. Even though we was already quite well known at the time, he didn’t anyone even being aware of his arrival in any town along the way. He didn’t want any of the special attention that well-known rebbes like him would ordinarily get.
Note, already, how different this is from how many modern people go about their lives. Though this may be an outdated projection from a relatively old man on the “youth of today”, it seems there is so much notation and documentation as one moves through time and space, an online timeline (your “story”) that provides others with (often-highly-curated) information on where I have been, what I have been doing, what I think about what I was doing, who I was with, and perhaps even what I ate. (I always crack up when people simply post something like “Went to Applebees. Had the Bourbon Street Steak.”)
There is certainly something frightening about how social media generates comparison-culture and the creation of a false self, but I am concerned right now about something more elemental: the danger of living within a perpetual reflected self-image. Meaning, a person could fall into the trap of only seeing their experiences, their thoughts, and even their physical bodies through the lens of how it will look from other people’s perspective. Even setting aside for a moment the artifice that would play into curating, airbrushing, photoshopping, and making repeated attempts to look or sound just so, the simple reality of seeing (and judging) one’s self from outside of one’s self, based upon other people’s projected perceptions. Constantly seeing one’s self in terms of how one will look, sound, be perceived, etc. on someone else’s “feed” could have the damaging effect of denying and attacking any sense of interiority and healthy relationship with one’s self.
In light of this, consider the courageous and mysterious act of traveling incognito, whereby a famous or well-known person moves outside of their reputation, separate from their reputation. Rebbe Nachman was taking action toward a journey that was entirely private, self-contained. Just him and his interiority.
Now consider what it’s like to be Kim Kardashian. Imagine being on vacation and not being able to relax because you have a personality/influence/brand that must be maintained, which will require photos, posing, make-up, and a schedule. Do you think that, after the photographer leaves, you can just snap into vacation mode?
Of course, it is somewhat of a false dichotomy to imagine myself and the Kardashians having entirely different experiences. We are actually quite similar in the sense that we both have a persona (or multiple personae). Carl Jung defined the persona as “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.”
In fact, Jung talked about persona in the context of identifying the specific danger of being a celebrity: “It is easy to study these things nowadays, when the photographs of public personalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain kind of behavior is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavor to come up to these expectations. Only, the danger is that they become identical with their personas - the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of his own biography."
Jung indicates that, in certain cases, the damage is done. I think he would agree that, while we all wear masks and personae, living “exclusively” against the background of one’s own biography it not inevitable. I think he would also agree that having masks that we put on from time to time is not inherently a bad thing. Rather,"the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas—the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice.”
Masks are a part of life, but identification with those masks need not be. There is a practice that allows us to identify and navigate our identification with the personae we act out and the masks we wear. Hitbodedut - literally, self-isolation - calls on people to take to the woods or fields, preferably at night, in order to speak with God. Part of this process involves listening to one’s own words and working toward discerning other people’s voices that have infiltrated my own words and thoughts.