It might be claimed that my recent comments on ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ personality can be adequately explained by assigning roles to the various outer personalities.
The ‘inner’ personality is the set of predispositions and set responses that one builds from an early age and do not change or change only marginally in response to various environments or roles that one might play. Religious beliefs, beliefs regarding one’s parentage, ones heritage, one’s name etc do not change readily.
Roles are those we play when at work, when with a lover, as a parent with children, as a scout master and so on.
I note the difference between roles and outer personality in the following analogue: consider a police officer of ten years sitting by the fire at home and a person who is dressing up as a policeman and playing the role for a fancy dress party. The role of policeman is impacting on them both, but the fancy dresser is playing a role only whereas the real policeman still feels that he is a policeman (it is part of his identity) even when at home relaxing.
When in uniform, the policeman will feel no more like he is ‘playing the role’ of policeman than he/we feel that we ‘are playing the role’ of human. In other words, there is not a fully conscious background mind emulating the foreground expression (the role) but consciousness, in that moment, is fully incorporated in the role. Thus it is an ‘external’ personality. Note that as a policeman this individual could be called upon to play a role eg to "act like a normal member of the public" eg as a plain clothed policeman.
Assuming that it is possible to have several Outer personalities and switch between them in the course of a day, there must also be an inner personality that is common to all outer personalities. Thus you may feel that you ARE a policeman and act accordingly, but you ARE also a parent and can act as such as well - not just act but you feel that you ARE a parent rather than just playing that role. But a baby-sitter could play the role, so a distinction between the two needs to be made.
Note that objectively (eg in making notes of a subjects behaviour) there is no need to make any distinction. Role playing and identification is all that needs to be noted eg the baby-sitter is playing the role but does not identify herself as a parent. No such intellectual distinctions are made subjectively (though one could think about it and arrive at such conclusions). Rather, the feeling of ‘being’ a policeman is palpably real.
Now we turn to such identification as mentioned by Alex Green - being an American could be role play, part of the outer personality or part of the inner personality. Let’s consider the difference between these three:-
As part of the inner personality one feels that one is American and this can not change under any circumstances. If, for instance, such a person moved to another country and became a citizen of that country, one would still feel that one was really an American.
Lets say that the above becomes an Australian citizen. If the above character took on the oz accent, stood up for Australia in debates and felt that he was Australian (when in the company of other Australians), then we could say that the outer personality had become Australian (has an Australian personality).
Now we imagine that the employment of our subject is that of detective. As a detective, in a particular operation he must pretend to be a Canadian. This is role playing only.
Thus the one person can have three nationalities simultaneously and not feel any conflict with that.
As the distinction between role, external personality, inner personality and self are not generally made, when observing a person having a particular manner we don’t lucidly convey the gravity of the apparent role that person is playing when we describe it to other people.
We do have some distinctions when describing religious devotion eg a person who calls themselves, say, Roman Catholic because it is sexy to do so is playing a role; a person who goes to church as a Catholic only because everyone has to go to some church is not ‘devout’ (outer personality); a person who believes the Scriptures and would not dream of breaking the ten commandments in either in word or essence is devout (inner personality).
Generally, the distinction between outer and inner personality is not made ie there is no clear distinction and there are no substitutes for the phrases I have introduced to illustrate my point. Thus a policeman that turns out to be a criminal was playing the role of policeman, maybe some outer personality but no inner personality involved. At best we can say that he didn’t ‘identify’ himself as a policeman.
© Robert Karl Stonjek 2002