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In the storm scene in King Lear, Shakespeare presents us with the spectacle of human life at its most bare and unadorned, when all the fabric of civilized living has been stripped away. ‘Is man no more than this?’ cries the King, confronted with the naked ‘Poor Tom’, ‘unaccommodated man’, ‘the thing itself’ ( King Lear, III, iv. 105-10). Towards the end of her rich, subtle and profound paper Jane Haynes tells us that once she might have believed that the truth is revealed in nakedness. Perhaps like Ronnie Laing (with whom she worked closely in the late 1960s) she would have said, ‘If we could strip away all the exigencies and contingencies and reveal to each other our naked presence…’ (Laing 1967, p. 33) Laing, like Jung, was suspicious of collective social being, seeing only its inauthentic aspect. Haynes, however, argues that it is only through social living, through our intersubjective being with others that we can come to the recognition of ourselves. A truly naked presence, far from being the aim of self- realization, is in fact a disaster for it, just as it is for King Lear. Haynes describes this as ‘the nightmare of an existence where dialogue breaks down’. If we are to become what we are, we must express ourselves with others and we can only do this through that social aspect of our being that Jung termed the persona. While the persona may give a sterile presentation that denies or entombs our interiority, it may also be life giving and provide the means through which our lives are given form and meaning.
Haynes emphasizes the relation between the persona and the face and, more broadly, the whole body as a means of self-expression. The face carries the history of the person and is both revealing and inscrutable. She points out that our first communication with others is a dialogue of the face: infant research has given ample evidence of the complex facial interaction that goes on between mother and infant. When the infant learns to smile, he or she has joined