Like the quarter, you are always acting in a role. The roles you play aren’t your fixed and unchanging identity. Rather, you are acting a particular way based on the rules of the situation you are in. Like the chess pieces, your role is relative to what surrounds you. In some situations, you may play the role of a parent. In other situations, you may be a student, or a firefighter, or a friend, or, if you’re playing with my six-year-old, you may be a trampoline to jump on. A friend of mine, Blaine, works as a manager of an industrial hose warehouse. Blaine told his friend Brad that he was just a “hoser,” which disturbed Brad, who thought it belittled Blaine. Perhaps it would be better for Blaine to identify himself as a manager? Although it’s common for us to overattach ourselves and to identify with the jobs we have, in reality, we are just acting in roles, whether that be a writer, a manager, a police officer, a lawyer, or a teacher. These roles quickly change as we change our context.

The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.

No one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role.

- On Psychology

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self .... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself — a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required .... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

The persona can eventually become ourselves, or an aspect of ourselves, to the point where we don't know which is the mask and which is the I.

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action.

Persons are not perceived as superordinated individuals — as agents who stand independent of their actions — but are rather ongoing “events” defined functionally by constitutive roles and relationships as they are performed within the context of their specific families and communities, that is, through the observance of ritual propriety (li

I think that when I play roles I become a completely different person for that time. But of course it is a virtual, an unreal person. Playing those roles gives me great pleasure and enjoyment. I think what happens with the audience is that they themselves identify maybe with one of the characters -- it might be any character in a movie -- and for a time they can enjoy being somebody else and enjoy another life for awhile. It gives them that opportunity.

The self is explored as an ongoing process of construction in time and place. The presence and absence of the body in the work points to the idea that one's identity is not static, and constantly in a state of flux.

For the individual is almost universally unaware that he has learned to confuse himself with a political and legal fiction, a theory of the individual without physical or biological foundation. His identity is thus a construct built up through years of self-dramatization between himself and his associates, that is, a purely artificial status or role. It is this role which he mistakes for his essential self and that he fears to lose in death, And because the role defines him as a separate individual and an independent agent, his identification with it blinds him to his union with the external world.

When an individual appears before others, he wittingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part. When an event occurs which is expressively incompatible with this fostered impression, significant consequences are simultaneously felt in three levels of social reality, each of which involves a different point of reference and a different order of fact.

Besides language, the child has to accept many other forms of
code. For the necessities of living together require agreement as to
codes of law and ethics, of etiquette and art, of weights, measures,
and numbers, and, above all, of role. We have difficulty in
communicating with each other unless we can identify ourselves in
terms of roles–father, teacher, worker, artist, “regular guy,”
gentleman, sportsman, and so forth. To the extent that we identify
ourselves with these stereotypes and the rules of behavior
associated with them, we ourselves feel that we are someone
because our fellows have less difficulty in accepting us-that is, in
identifying us and feeling that we are “under control.” A meeting of
two strangers at a party is always somewhat embarrassing when the
host has not identi.ed their roles in introducing them, for neither
knows what rules of conversation and action should be observed.