Pluto spends a long time in every sign and the sign's 'spirit of the time' will determine how it is emotionally experienced. A Pluto conjunct Ascendant could be in either the 12th or 1st house. The one is a closed door house, the other is an open door house. They will act entirely differently, yet the Ascending sign will personally identify with Pluto's tendencies should they be in the same sign. This doesn't have to be detrimental of nature. It depends upon aspects made to Pluto, especially from Sun and Moon, as well as Pluto's ruling sign, Scorpio.
As an example:
My daughter has Libra Ascendant, with a Mercury-Pluto conjunction and Sun in Libra in the 1st house. Mercury-Pluto is well aspected, so she has a good 'friendly persuasive reasoning ability'.....a necessity to compensate for her 5 foot nothing size .
Her own birth was the easiest and quickest of my children. Maybe because she's the youngest and 'the way was already paved' for her? She should have been born under Scorpio. I've always said that she couldn't wait to get out and enter the world. Minor contractions for most of my pregnancy with her and she was born 2 weeks before expected, whilst her siblings both arrived on time!
Yet her own 3 pregnancies have all been difficult, demanding hospitalisation. We all wondered why she wanted to go through it all when she knew what could happen. That willpower to survive? Tremendous.
On the other hand, she has seen more traumatic cessations of life in (young) friends and family than the rest of the family put together have seen in all of theirs. She once asked if people ever died a natural death in their beds! Her too young brother-in-law that followed her best friend's demise, both of a terminal disease, occured just before her transit Pluto square itself. It was as if these last two were the proverbial straw. Her attitude towards the meaning of life and survival is even stronger than it was: Live for today.
I think Pluto being in her Ascendant has much to do with the influence of a 12th house Moon. If that's esoteric of nature, I couldn''t say.