Public Face | Full Circle POV

Archive for the tag “Public Face”

15 Nov 2014

“To Thine Own Self Be True” is No Easy Feat

Emerson captures where I think each person’s center of gravity should lie:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people may think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. (“Self-Reliance,” p. 33 – for full citation go to Bookshelf)

Out Standing in One’s Field

As I’ve written before, our Persona is the necessary adaptation we make to the external environment that is a compromise between our internal selves and outer circumstances. We can’t disregard the world around us, but how easy it is to let those external circumstances habitually dictate our realities. For me, Soul is our lived experience, our unique inner self, that gift that is ours alone. What does it profit a person to gain the world and lose one’s soul? The center of gravity resides best within our own truths, with a respectful nod to the realities of the world. Center of gravity means the primary, not exclusive, focal point.

Posted in Analytical Psychology, Ego, Persona, Personal Development, Psyche, Psychology, Ralph Waldo Emerson and tagged Analytical Psychology, Conscious, Ego, persona, Persona/Ego, personal development, Psyche, psychology, Public Face, Ralph Waldo Emerson | Leave a comment

28 Oct 2014

The Suit: Persona Embodied

In checking out Andrew Sullivan’s blog this morning, my attention was drawn to a great article by A.A. Gill about the venerable and enduring Suit. Gill captures the story of the suit:

There is not a corner of the world where the suit is not the default clobber of power, authority, knowledge, judgement, trust and, most importantly, continuity….

No one knows or can say what the spell of the suit is, or how it works, but still it exudes its inoffensive writ.

It is the naivety of young men to believe that it’s what they think that is important; that surface and show and fashion are what the established order uses to maintain itself. But just look at those group photographs of powerful men, of left and right, outside conferences and meetings, and see the power of the suit. It’s not in the singular but the collective. If there were only one in the world, it would be a mad thing, but its strength comes from the massed ranks, the united power, the union of flannel.

Remember the flap when President Obama wore a tan suit to a briefing on the terrorist group ISIS?

Shutters and Blinds

Posted in Analytical Psychology, Ego, Persona, Psychology and tagged C. G. Jung, Conscious, Ego, persona, Persona/Ego, professional image, Public Face | Leave a comment

10 Oct 2014

The Organization’s Conscious Realm

According to Corlett and Pearson:

The conscious realm of the organizational psyche is the arena where the ego-directed actions and behaviors of those who are in charge hold sway over productive activity and the shaping of the organization’s culture. This is the zone of affairs dealt with exhaustively by conventional organization theory and management theory. There is, however an aspect of this activity that cannot be seen through conventional lenses. An underlying texture, both collective and influenced by the unconscious, begins coming into focus when the observer adopts a Jungian perspective. This underlying texture has two principal threads; the center of consciousness [Ego] and the organization’s public face [Persona]….

The center of consciousness is an organizational process, comprising the myriad conscious activities–reflecting, planning, controlling, coordinating, and implementing–necessary for managing the work of the organization (p. 27).

The conscious aspect of the public face, the brand identity, does two things for the organization. First, it transmits the organization’s ideal image of itself. Think of the bank that touts itself as the “friendly neighbor down at the corner.” Second, the public face screens from the operating environment aspects of the organization that the center of consciousness wants to hide (p. 32).

In the end, an organization’s public face is a compromise between how the center of consciousness wants to present the organization and what the environment wants or expects of the organization. In seeking to find its niche, the organization inevitably caters to some degree to what its public wants. In so doing it may to a greater or lesser degree have to sublimate parts of itself. The sublimated [repressed] material will end up in the organization’s shadow (p. 33).

(John G. Corlett and Carol S. Pearson, (2003), p. 27. (See Bookshelf for full citation.)