Symbol Watcher

Video Link: Face Transplant Recipient Talks About Being Thankful and Forgiving

I’ve been following the story of Connie Culp with some fascination and much admiration. She is the 47-year-old woman who underwent the first total face transplant in America. She lost her face five years ago when her husband blew it away with a gun shot blast.

Connie’s story has captured me because she has lived through — on a physical level — one of the more painful psychological experiences a person can have: Connie has lost her face.

From our earliest childhood, we are taught the importance of adapting to the larger society, of fitting in.  Jung reminds us in his work, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious (Volume 7), that we adjust our individuality to conform to the various segments of society with which we’re associated: our families,  employers, ethnic and cultural groups, social networks, religious affiliations, etc. “This arbitrary segment of collective psyche — often fashioned with considerable pains — I have called the persona. The term persona is really a very appropriate expression for this, for originally it meant the mask once worn by actors to indicate the role they played.  . . . Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be.”

I am so struck by Connie and her story. Especially in Western culture, we are judged so severely for our looks. We change our dress and hair (especially women) to fit in to the particular social situation. Studies have shown we are more receptive to attractive people on first meeting than people we deem unattractive. As humans, we even have an embedded blue print for attractiveness that has to do with the symmetry of our facial features. In an interview that aired this morning (I’ve included an excerpt above), Connie tells Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer a wonderful story of how she turned an encounter with a little girl who was frightened by her looks into a learning experience for both the child and the girl’s father.

What happens to us when our personas are stripped away? When we are cast out because we are no longer the “compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be”?

Some of us are cast out because of something we did that the group finds unacceptable and some of us are cast out because we are victims of someone else’s negative projections, misunderstandings or out-and-out anger. I’ve experienced both and Connie has certainly experienced the latter in one of the most painful ways I can imagine.

Jung tells us that we still need our various personas as tools to function effectively in a collective world, but he stresses that it is unwise to identify too much with any one mask because if we lose that mask, it may be a fall from which we won’t be able to recover.

It seems to me this is a lesson Connie has learned well and is trying to teach the rest of us. Whenever we are stripped of one of our masks, it can give us the hard-earned gift of coming into closer contact with our core individuality, if we’re willing to let go of the who who is no longer.

As Connie pointed out to the little girl in the grocery store, her face is not who she is.  It seems to me that Connie’s wisdom is in her ability to let go of her old identity, to be grateful for and make the most of the  new life she has been given and forgive her husband for the pain he caused her.  

– Writeye

Posted on May 8th, 2009 under Current Events, Jungian Psychology • Tags: Connie Culp, face transplant recipient, persona. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback