Who is mentally healthy and who is not?

The most important thing you should know when deciding to vote for a candidate

Persona and Shadow are the most important things you can learn when deciding what candidate to vote for, but what cause to support, what institution you can believe in, what bill to vote for and who you can trust and who you can’t …

… but far and away learning about Persona and Shadow is the most valuable skill you can develop in your personal relationships, and most importantly of all in your love relationship, is to see through the Persona into the Shadow side of everyone in your life, especially the person you are falling in love with.  Failed relationships, whether in family, friends or professionals, and all failed marriages and love relationships are the result of one cause – the inability to see through the Persona into the Shadow side of the person you are involved with.  (Con artists, swindlers, politicians and actors have the best Personas of all.)

Every single human being on this earth – and that includes everyone of you reading this – has a Persona and a Shadow, two indispensable components of our personality that no one is without. 

We all have a Persona, and we all have a Shadow – no exception.  The frightening part is that we are completely unaware of them and how they control our lives, and every relationship in it.  Thanks to the brilliant discoveries of CG Jung, mankind is on the brink of beginning to learn of these all powerful components in our personality that so powerfully control our lives, and determine the success and happiness in it.

So what is the Persona?  What is the Shadow?

The Persona

The Persona is all of the wonderful qualities, virtues, abilities and talents we have, or at least we wish we have, and most of all we want others to think we have. 

The Persona is the ideal person we want to be, and are deluded into believing that we are.  While we have some of these wonderful qualities and abilities, we seldom have all of those we think we have, and of those we do have we often do not have them to the same extent we think we do. 

Jung took the word “Persona” from the ancient Greek theater where the actors held up one mask to show they were angry, another mask to show they were sad, and still another to show they were happy or in some other frame of mind.  The same is true in Japanese and other theatrical systems – and we still do the same today, starting with the way we dress ourselves every morning. 

We put on one set of clothes – or costume – if we’re going out on a job interview, and a completely different set or clothes or costume if we’re going to a nightclub.  We put on one set of clothes if we’re going to church, another set of clothes if we’re going to a funeral, and still another set of clothes if we’re going to a barbecue or a football game.  Every occasion requires a different “costume,” a different set of clothes so that we dress appropriately in order to be accepted on that occasion – for that is the key to choosing what we are going to wear – being accepted by the people we are going to be with.

That is the ball bearing upon which our Persona personality revolves – being accepted.  Everything we say, do and wear is designed to be accepted by the person or persons we are meeting with. 

Politicians pay fortunes to experts in creating for the politician the Persona the voters will accept.  They go to endless lengths to find out what the people want to hear in order to vote for them, using endless polls, focus groups, and research techniques.  They go to endless lengths to hide any of the candidates Shadow side, just as we all do in applying for a job, or during our courtship to someone we’re falling in love with. 

It is extremely important for each of us to find out what are the qualities that really exist in our Persona – what are the wonderful qualities we actually possess, and to what extent – and what are the qualities we think we have, but actually do not, or at least not to the extent we think we have them.

The Shadow

… and the Personal Negative Shadow

The Shadow contains both positive and negative qualities of our personality that we are unaware of - our attributes, gifts and potentials lying dormant within because they are unknown to us, as well as all of the faults, defects, deficiencies and weaknesses that exist in every one of us, that we don’t know exists or at least we won’t acknowledge they exist in us.  (We'll deal with the positive aspects of the personality below.)

Though we may be slightly aware of some of the faults and defects that exist in our Personal Negative Shadow, the part of our Shadow that we, by the grace of God, have become conscious of, other faults and deficiencies exist in the deeper layer of our personality, the unconscious, this area of the Shadow we are totally unaware of. 

We will go to any lengths to hide from others any of our Personal Negative Shadow components, any of the negative components that exist in us ... though others can see clearly our faults, defects and deficiencies, especially members of our family and our loved ones.  You want to know what a man is really like, what are the components of his Shadow, ask his wife or his children.  As Thornton Wilder said of Mr. Antrobus, the paragon of public virtue in his play “The Skin of our Teeth,” Antrobus’s own knowledge of his secret shadow “… causes his stomach to go in a knot every time he sees a policeman.”   We need only remember the split between the Persona’s of the two governors of the neighboring states of New York and New Jersey when their sexual deviation was revealed and which stood in total contrast to their political Persona they had so effectively created in themselves to win their governorships and become such beloved public figures.

(Not only does the Shadow contain all of our negative qualities, it also contains all of our potential growth, all of the great person we can become if only – and here Jung has given us one of the greatest, most important psychological truths – if only we become conscious of our defects or faults, face them, and learn the remarkable technique that Jung invented to transform that fault, weakness, into its positive counterpart and greatly expand our conscious personality.  Much more on this later.)

The split between an individual’s Persona and Shadow determines how healthy or how neurotic they are …

… how able they are to be in touch with reality

The ability to see through an individual’s Persona into their Shadow side, both the faults, defects, deficiencies and weaknesses in their Personal Negative Shadow, as well as the faults, defects, deficiencies and weaknesses in their deeper Shadow, in their unconscious of which they are unaware, is everything in life, and everything in choosing a mentally healthy, stable, and mature politician and avoiding the neurotic, narcissistic, disassociated or delusional politician to govern us.

Nothing is more important for a healthy democracy and for the people, the voters of all parties, to learn to see through the Persona of the candidates and see what faults, defects, deficiencies and weaknesses exist in their Shadow side. 

Let us now look at the mental health – or lack of it - of Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, John McCain … and Bill Clinton, who it is no secret was running for co-President.