The Shadow

“Contrary to belief, one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but instead by making the darkness conscious”

(Jung, 1954)

Ever wonder why certain situation or person triggers you in the most peculiar way, that you don’t know where this mixture of powerful feeling is coming from and the how of it? That even when this happens, you either tend to have a very judgmental way of thinking about someone else that did what you condemn so bad. Or either, maybe, the leading character of this drowner experience was you, and in this case, your temptation is to brush it off, saying that this person who just acted the way it did, is not really you, but something surpassing you and your morals? That it’s like something outside of your own personality?

Well, according to Carl Jung, (a swiss famous psychoanalyst, an extremely insightful person and very known for combining psychology with spirituality), this may be the form of your shadow appearing into it. And let me tell you. It is indeed, something that is very inside of you. 

As stated by Jung, your psyche is divided in layers, your Ego (the story you tell about yourself and the notion that you are separated from others), the Persona (the public face that embodies our social role and how we want to be perceived as by the criteria of the community we are inserted to), the Personal Unconscious (desires, memories, ideas, some of them painful) and the Collective Unconscious (the influences of historical and cultural developments). 

While the content of the Personal Unconscious is acquired during the individual’s life, the content of the Collective Unconscious is invariably Archetypes that were present from the early beginning. The Archetypes are those that have the most frequent and disturbing influence on the self, without you realizing it. These are then the Shadow, the Anima and the Animus.

For today, I am only going to focus on one of the archetypes, the Shadow.

The Shadow is like your second personality, or better saying it, the missing piece of your complete whole. This is why it is so important to practice the discover of it and returning it to the surface and deal with it. This is the ultimate self-realization for Carl Jung. 

Pushing the Shadow even harder away to the underground of your soul is only going to make you employ into destructive behaviors and impulses. 

The awareness brings the possibility of acceptance and integration, by supporting your psychological growth and even embrace your imperfections that you so hardly try to repress it. 

The role we play in the society makes us appropriate to ourselves for most of the times, a mask. We behave correctly, when in certain times, that is not how we actually want to behave or act. This way, we repress the Shadow. And we continuously do it every day, with our unconscious feelings and cravings. 

Allan Watts, at the same time, refers that this unconscious thought or feeling may be something that you actually know (even though it’s in the deep roots), but because it is not socially accepted, you won’t admit you have these thoughts and so you won’t admit that this thought is also a part of you. 

But as the study of the Shadow theorizes, this will end up influence your actions and eventually, turning them against you. Even more with over the time that you keep digging your other part of you and tend to lose control of it and emphasizing your negative emotions.

Have you ever felt out of control? I, for sure, have felt many times that I was losing control of my own actions. And by the theory of Jung, that could be, because I was repressing my firm desires and wishes and so I was conducting myself into something I didn’t really wish to be and to do, in addition on being repressed by society or even by me. 

These unconscious thoughts that we push it even more to the unconscious parts, don’t mediate necessarily just mean things or evil. They can be evil and good. Because that is what humans really are, both evil and good.

Jung believed that the Shadow contains mostly astonishing things that would help to vitalize and embellish human existence and that they had their beginning in childish or primitive qualities. 

In repressing the Shadow, we also lose touch with aspects of our creative potential, the positive traits that were placed into the Shadow because they were not acknowledged, either when we were younger or, too, later in life.

Again, the Shadow is not intrinsically evil. What mostly makes it evil is the ego refusing to embrace the Shadow. 

But as I told before, one can only discover the existence of Shadow, when he himself is prepared to see that there is more in each of us than the surface, and that we are more than just our Ego (and our Persona). We are the unconscious also. 

As previously mentioned, either you were the protagonist of some bad, unpleasant situation or you were an observer of something. But this doesn’t have to be neither an extreme example.

It may just be something said or done or a trait of someone that you judge and react so badly. In this case, Carl Jung would call it a projection. Projection is the transfer of one’s own conflict or dark part personalities onto another person. “We banish it from ourselves, from keep seeing it in us.”

And at the same time “The projection is actually an attempt to discover the lost fragments within us, without us realizing.”

So how to take these traits out and embrace them all? Well, even Jung had a bit of a struggle to come with the “plan” of it, for he has also said that the Shadow, paradoxically, may never appear as the whole of it. And even if it indeed appeared, one has to really want. 

Some ideas though for you to keep attention on having a more integrated Self is noticing the times that you react with such great impact on something you perceive as a moral deficiency or inferior or superior quality of someone and then try to understand if it is just a healthy judgement or some aspect that may be within us that we try to refuse to accept into our own selves. And many times it is the second option.

Those type of thoughts can be associated with sexuality, aggression, cowardice, passion, enthusiasm, materialism, sins, dark thoughts, humor moods and so on. Any qualities in fact. 

Although it is something very hard to deal with, this could help you in many ways that right now you may disagree with it but as Jung would say: “This leads to disobedience and self disgust, but also to self- reliance, without which individuation is unthinkable.” 

With this acceptance, Jung believed that the individual doesn’t project the evil onto the others (or at least as much as before), but starts to the see the projection within himself, which is the first step to not only be a great individual, but also one who does something real for the world, diminishes chaos and conflict. 

References

Earl, M. (2001). Shadow and spirituality. International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 6(3), 277-288.

Jung, C. G., & Hull, R. F. C. (1957). The self. CrossCurrents, 7(3), 263-271.

McGuigan, R. (2009). Shadows, conflict, and the mediator. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 26(3), 349-364.   

Ventegodt, S., Andersen, N. J., & Merrick, J. (2003). The life mission theory V. Theory of the anti-self (the shadow) or the evil side of man. The Scientific World Journal, 3, 1302-1313.