Jung wrote that it was a difficult task to differentiate the personal and collective psyche. One of the factors one came up against was the persona—one’s “mask” or “role.” This represented the segment of the collective psyche that one mistakenly regarded as individual. When one analyzed this, the personality dissolved into the collective psyche, which resulted in the release of a stream of fantasies: “All the treasures of mythological thinking and feeling are unlocked.”152 The difference between this state and insanity lay in the fact that it was intentional.
