IJSP Number 6, 2024

91 3. RUNNING AWAY FROM ONESELF Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Robin Williams Of course, that mask has in psychology a very famous name, it is named persona , and C.G. Jung spoke generously about it [10]. Self-importance connects exclusively to what we can call persona , or the superficial ‘photo-shopped’ ego - image we present to the world. But, as we very well know from Jung’s find, the persona is not our ego , and, consequently, we should not make such a serious confusion. We may roughly say that self-importance can be identified with the persona while self-esteem is a more special quality that addresses the ego , namely the core of oneself. As such, the emphasis on self-importance, or the persona, is nothing more than a very contemporary formula to running away from oneself, as Bob Marley, in his marvellous song, emphasized it: “You running and running, and you running away” … “but you can’t run away from yourself” [11]. Or, in other words, you can run as much as you like – and modern life is, more or less, about running –, but you can’t run away from your- self because there has to be a self that is running away (from oneself). To solve such a paradox, we can split the personality in an ego and the persona and it is the latter that tries to run and run faster as if it were at the Olympic games, trying to win the golden medal in athletics. Such a running ‘personality’ is the more or less perfect recipe for evading a problematic self – the ego that “can’t run away from himself”. Sadly, an unfortunate recipe that cannot and will not resolve anyone’s problems just because one has found this convenient mask or theatrical prop to hide behind. It is not only hiding oneself behind the convenient ‘face-lift’ of the self-important persona , but it can also conveniently hide all the fears of being discovered (as a weak self-esteem), and, maybe even more important, to hide one’s own incapacity to do something about all those inconvenient issues that burden and plague the problematic and underdeveloped ego for the years past and decades to come. In the end, it is not just a very complicated and never-ending process of cover-up – the fear of being discovered as a fake –, but also the constant preoccupation with one-self that has to be presented in a socially acceptable and appraisable form (if possible, with a visible tattoo). The amounts of psychic energy involved in such a multi-levelled process or constant ‘hide and seek’ game one plays with others and with oneself, are immense. Such energetical involvement is like a constant