The great, somewhat crazed philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that “whatever is profound loves a mask.” What might this mean?
I think of Marlon Brando, master of masks, who said about acting that, “Whenever we want something from somebody or…want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.”
I am also reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s line from Mother Night: “We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be.” So how do we choose who we pretend to be?
For so many patients, such masks are compulsively, unconsciously enforced rather than chosen. Stockholm Syndrome sets in from minute one, and artifice becomes blurred with the real. The “kidnapping” here is the person’s own subjective reality.
Such people are often confused about the difference between pretending and so-called reality, as if the latter is always “objectively” true. What is missing is the face of their own lived experienced. For such frozen souls, every face is a mask with nothing behind it but malice or disapproval (to paraphrase Nietzsche.) Reality is itself a masquerade, intolerably empty and isolating.
A disordered narcissist protects against such existential exile via a forward-facing mask of toughness or indifference, a smirk at what troubles mere mortals—or, in cases of covert narcissism, an unruffled calmness or agreeability. Attack, deflection, or in the covert case compliance, are all compulsively employed to ward off a peek behind an artifice more real than any dreaded (and therefore “unreal”) emotionality.
Meanwhile those around the machismo-type are compelled to slip on a mask of their own, one of compliance and deference, joining the pensively bright danse macabre.
Children or sometimes spouses of narcissistically-defended caregivers internalize an angry, scowling, or eternally sorrowful caregiver-figure, emotions which the children or partner feel responsible for appeasing.
Such a patient’s mask in these cases is most often one of false cheerfulness, resilience, and compassion for others, all for the sake of survival. What lay behind their own visage is abstract or difficult to contemplate; they have yet to be introduced to their own face as authenticity has been consistently discouraged, devalued, or made dangerous.
Many therapists miss the latter, as a calm, welcoming safety can be terrifying for some of our patients.
This means even calmly curious face of the therapist is likely a mask, bound to slip at some point and reveal familiar contempt or disapproval.
I am thinking of those who are virulently anti-mask in our rancorous debate over COVID and safety. The anti-maskers see the surgical mask as signifying cowardly compliance or worse; what they miss is their own thinly veiled terror of the same, covered by their own mask of rage or accusation.
Ideally, we are afforded some buffer or distance between our public and private selves; we wear a variety of masks in various settings, as the Brando quote suggests. But Brando himself was in childhood saturated in a bitter phoniness, leading to his lifelong public scowl and private self-torment.
In the fine documentary Listen to me Marlon (essentially viewing for fans) we learn that this wizard of personas was raised by two alcoholic parents, a critical and absent father eking out a living, and a seductive mother who (it is implied) fostered an overly close relationship with her son. Marlon learned to wear a mask of love concealing a bitter and even hateful disappointment in his world and those in it, and maybe even himself for playing along. You are all so easily fooled; you are blind, selfish, and stupid. Then comes fiery self-reproach, as he himself needs to play along to be with others.
Brando always trashed his profession or those glorifying his talent. Life like show business was a sham because all of life is show business; there is never a face behind the mask, only a gaping maw of self-interest. There wasn’t enough food or fame in the world to fill such an empty darkness. The horror….
Children of alcoholics are often masters of pretense, false-self compliance in Winnicott’s terms, as reality is whatever the person in charge says it is. But the circumstances in which such masks are required could not be more viscerally real, a gripping theater of the absurd.
All of us in one way or another, and to some degree, don or prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet. Such public personas or masks are skillfully facilitated by artists such as Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, Beyonce, David Bowie, or Andy Warhol with his blank stare and wig. Sometimes artists, politicians, or other public figures become consumed by their own persona. Then the mask can never come off, lest the shamefully broken or despairing face is revealed.
In such cases there is never enough power or influence over others, a perpetual lack to security, the mask ever in danger of slipping. Many of my patients have never been introduced to their own face, convinced such visage (a true self) is loathesome or unacceptable. Any panic and fear is covered by a façade of competence, as required by the “inner scowler” or angry caregiver, long absorbed into the psyche. This leads to an internalized panopticon of vigilance against spontaneity or vulnerability.
We might say the first “home” a baby has is a caregiver’s face, and by this I mean a whole climate of affectivity. (Winnicott thought so too.)
Many patients (and psychotherapists) grow up parentified and forcibly competent, setting aside their faces for masks of precocity, along with the segregation of authenticity or vulnerable dependence. They surveil their internal world for any sign of inadequacy or disobedience (i.e., protest or distress.)
Later in therapy, any actual dependence upon a caregiver-figure (the therapist), is both desired and terrifying, lest the therapist’s calm concern slip to reveal a familiar fury, disapproval or, worst of all, anxious overwhelm “due to” the patient’s inordinate demands—i.e., authentic connection. After all the patient is defying the panopticon guard, that inner grimace again, even in seeking help: a prison break of authenticity.
In my book I wrote about Winnicott and his notion of the mother/caregiver as mirroring the infant, the first face an infant sees. Here internalization (or self-organization) begins, as that face is absorbed into the tenderly nascent psyche, setting the stage for one’s entire development.
It may be true that babies have their own innate need for love and attachment, as Carveth suggests in his fine recent book. But how are such needs welcomed, attuned or responded to?
Faces (as opposed to masks) are responsive, attuned, flexible in a good-enough way—co-created rather than imposed. The baby feels love, is love, before “love” can be said. Babies disarm us with their openness and guileless dependence.
We might see a caregiver’s face as a reflective display of the affective value of the infant’s presence—their existential welcome into the world, setting the stage for their entire development and limitless-seeming (rather than constrained) discovery of self and others.
In fact there is something of the infinite behind all of our faces, some presence indefinable yet potent, versus a darker void of unattended agony in cases of exile.
Perhaps Nietzsche, himself a fractured soul, knew we cannot really know one’s true face, nor our own, because—in my view—we need a relational mirror to reflect it. Nietzsche also understood we all (ideally) choose roles to play to some degree, that there is great truth in pretending, as in art, perhaps more so than in the messy sprawl of life (as Shakespeare well knew)—presuming one can distinguish the difference.
The difference between relative freedom and toxicity however lies in the freedom and flexibility of choice (to some degree or another), versus the compulsion to attend the internal scowler.
Some of these themes are found in childhood play, where masks of comical threat are donned, the caregiver now a hungry monster, chasing their child and growling, the child shrieking, both playing on the edges of unconscious terror.
An infant needs the foundational face of love and safety, and attendant playing: that transitional space between real and imaginary, waking and dreaming. The face of a teddy bear is real and not-real. The infant sees themselves there, and some thing magically found. We need the in-between.
Winnicott saw a lack of playfulness, the grey space between real and pretend, as catastrophic. Too much reality leads to depression, too much fantasy leads to dissociation, addiction, or other intensive protections from intolerable voids. Emotionality becomes a language game of logic, a self-protection of the mask of rationality, furthering numbing or deadness.
This then is the good-enough therapist’s task—to reintroduce the patient to their own face(s), the authentically unplanned or spontaneous personage that bypasses the committee of the conceptual. Over time the patient learns that in seeing the therapist’s care and empathic curiosity, they are also looking at themselves.
They may also need to see the therapist’s own fear or anger, even their own hate, followed by a transition back to the face of interest and concern: so-called rupture and repair. In this way the patient’s own anger or rage is made acceptable. This is something I will discuss in a future column.