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By Root 5627 0

fashion from some way of life that has become like a prison to them. They may imagine that, by bailing out from an unsatisfactory marriage or job without properly understanding the reasons why their life has been unsatisfactory, they can `make a new start' which will solve all their difficulties. They may imagine that if they in some way `project a new image' or elect a new government their fortunes may be miraculously transformed, simply because they are changing the externals without identifying the true cause of their problems. And nowhere does the power of this projection become potentially more damaging and disillusioning than when the ego becomes unconsciously possessed by the archetype of the Self, usually as a result of being drawn into identification with the collective ego of some religious or political group. The victims imagine they have gone through some profound religious or political `conversion' and for a while enjoy the Dream Stage of viewing the world in a dramatically new way, convinced they have `seen the light: But all this `ego-Self confusion' has really brought them is an inflation of the ego, without properly discovering their individual inner self at all.

The most significant way in which the archetypal plots can tell us about the real world, however, is not when we see them projected outwards, but when we return to their original meaning and use them as a guide to understanding how human behaviour actually works. In this respect we have already seen something of how events in real life are shaped by the pattern of Tragedy. But, oddly enough, we can learn as much about the workings of human nature from that plot which seems, with all its absurdities and artificial conventions, less obviously related to the real world than any of them: the plot of Comedy.

The persona

There are two particular respects in which Comedy sheds invaluable light on human behaviour, both relating to the light it can shed on that crucially important factor in human psychology, the persona.

If human egotism is all-but universal and has the potential to create such immense problems, the chief reason why it is not more obviously intrusive in all our lives lies in the extent to which it can be hidden from view. This is one purpose of that social front we all put up to the world, the persona, when we use it as a device to reduce social stresses and strains by concealing our true feelings. In this respect we use it not just to provide a socially convenient disguise for our own egotism but to hide from other people the extent to which we have noticed theirs.

We are familiar with the image of what may happen when someone is rung on the telephone by a caller who is tiresome or unwanted. Down the line to the caller, the recipient may seem the soul of patience and politeness. But to other people in the room, he or she may be grimacing or cupping a hand over the mouthpiece to make a sense of irritation only too clear. At this level, the persona, the mask we put on for other people, is invaluable, as a means to avoid giving offence and generally to make it easier for us to relate with each other. In this respect, the persona is a social device we employ all the time, to curb our impulses to aggression, to appear friendly and sociable, to conceal the extent to which we ourselves are ego-centred.

At a deeper level, however, people may come to adopt a persona more unconsciously, and it then becomes more a matter of self-deception than of deceiving others. This is where we can talk about someone having `a persona problem', one test of which is what other people say about them when they are not present. If there is a serious gap between anyone's conscious view of themselves and what others say behind their back, this is likely to be because they are in the grip of negative aspects of their personality of which they themselves are unconscious. Such is the shadow cast by their one-sided egotism. Everyone around them can see a truth to which they themselves are oblivious. And this crucial feature of human psychology is of course particularly