IJSP Number 7, 2025

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 7, 2025 Page | 57 malicious commentaries. The only great fear in this social game played by the pseudo-self is indifference, a non-reaction, a non-stroke or the lack of reaction to what one has to present about oneself. What Jung called ‘ persona ’ can be seen as an equivalent for what M. Bowen labelled as ‘ pseudo-self ’. We can better illustrate the idea of what the persona actually is with a citation from M. Esther Harding’s book The I and the Not I where the whole process and genealogy of the persona is presented (following of course the original thoughts of Jung himself). From the early manifestations of every newborn manifested in every direction “untrammelled by any thought of appropriateness or of consequences” the child will be put under the direct influence of the educational pressure right afterwards: “But immediately he is subjected to a process of training - a training that has been imposed upon him before he even had an “I” that could protest, a training whose object is to teach him how to adapt to society, what is permissible or not, what will produce love and acceptance and what will be frowned upon or punished. At this very early stage in his development, a child begins to develop a persona , a mask of good and adapted behavior.” [14] Accordingly, the moulding process the newborn is subjected to begins in the earliest stages of life. It seems that the lack of an ‘I’ does not matter at all; on the contrary, it is probably easier to ‘fabricate’ and induce a persona in the earliest stages of childhood. In that process, the Ego would only be an impediment, which would complicate things. While the Ego is formed out of opposition to someone or to something – the ‘I’ is different from everything that is ‘non-I’ – the persona is not willing to oppose anything to the social pressure, which is ultimately its mirror and its main contributor. As such, it seems to be much easier to build the persona as the desirable and pliable face of the child instead of the antagonistic and difficult formation of the Ego . In another paragraph of the same book, we find an interesting description of the interconnectedness between what we call the ‘I’ and the persona : “When the delicate, gelatinous stuff of the immature psyche is met by the reality of the outer external world a hardening process takes place, which we speak of as adaptation, and around the natural psyche there forms a kind of skin, a mask, by means of which the sensitive individual can adjust itself to the requirements of the environment. The initial sense of “I-ness” is largely concerned with this persona “I”. In the initial stages, in the child, it is quite precarious, and indeed it may even remain so into adult life.” [15] Such a fragility or precariousness is not found solely in the child or in those early developmental stages of the ontogenesis. If everything goes well, as planned and expected, the ‘I-ness’ represented by the persona can present itself in its own shiny and impeccably arranged window dressing. A glowing persona will successfully mask a superficial and underdeveloped Ego . Even the immaturity of the Ego can be very well hidden behind the generous mask a persona can provide. Consequently, the ‘I’ will not be a very solid self or Ego , but more of an appendix to the presentable and sociable persona or pseudo-self , for that matter. As such, the growth of the persona is an inflationary process, which constantly and continuously devalues the Ego until all that remains of it is just an empty and shallow shell (as illustrated in the last Harry Potter film by the remains of Lord Voldemort crouched under a bench in a very bright train station). The persona is like a child that needs constant pampering, a child who has to relay on his image and on what he or she has to show in order to be somebody. In this case the