Our culture can urge us to exhile
part of our self
ATTEMPT TO REPRESS THE SHADOW
ROBS US OF VALUABLE INSIGHT
"Thought of the Week" for
June 28, 1999
All
literature...can be thought of as creations by the "dark side" to
enable it to rise up from earth and join the sunlit consciousness
again. Many ancient religious, especially those of the matriarchies,
evidentially moved so as to bring the dark side up into the
personality slowly and steadily. The movement started early in a
person's life and, in the Mysteries at least, lasted for twenty to
thirty years. Christianity, as many observers have noticed, has
acted historically to polarize the "dark personality" and the "light
personality." Christian ethics usually involves the suppression of
the dark one. As the consequences
of this suppression become severe, century after century, we reach
at last the state in which the psyche is split, and the two sides
cannot find each other. We have "The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde." ...
How did the two persons get separated?
Evidentially we spend the first twenty or twenty-five years of life
deciding what should be pushed down into the shadow self, and the
next forty years trying to get in touch with that material again.
Cultures vary a lot in what they urge their members to exile. In
general we can say that "the shadow" represents all that is
instinctive in us. Whatever has a tail and lots of hair is in the
shadow. ...
Most of our literature describes efforts the
shadow makes to rise, and efforts that fail.
Ahab
fails; it isn't clear why; he has a strong connection with the "old
ethic" through the rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets. Dimmesdale's
shadow fails. Apparently his fear
of women blocks his own shadow from rising. I prefer to use the term
"shadow," rather than "evil," in talking of literature, because
"evil" permanently places the energy out there, as a part of some
powerful being other than ourselves. "Shadow" is clumsy, but it
makes it clear that these energies are inside of us.
Robert Bly. (1998). The Little Book
on the Human Shadow. New York: HarperOne (pages 63-65)
Comment:
Origins of the Shadow archetype
by Reg Harris
Copyright ©
1999 by Reg Harris. All rights
reserved. Updated October, 2007. All rights
reserved.
Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this
article can be copied or used in any form without written permission
from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.
What Bly is discussing here is Jung's archetype
of the unconscious, the "Shadow." The Shadow, which is created in
our youth, is constituted of those energies, drives, desires and
emotions which, when expressed, bring us pain, embarrassment or
disapproval. As Connie Zweig, Ph.
D. and Steve Wolf, Ph.D. describe in Romancing the Shadow.
Each shadow figure or character...has a story
to tell with a similar plot line: At
a young age, our full range of aliveness, feeling, and dependency
was too much for our caretakers to bear. Unknowingly, they betrayed
our young souls again and again, inflicting the wounds of neglect,
intrusion, cruelty, and shame. To survive this wounding environment,
as children we made a Faustian bargain, concealing the unacceptable
parts of ourselves in the shadow and presenting only the acceptable
parts (or ego) to the world. In an ongoing, subtle series of
feedback loops with parents, teachers, clergy, and friends, we
learned, over and over, how to present ourselves in an attempt to
feel safe, accepted, and loves. In this way, ego and shadow are
inevitably created in tandem within us all. (p. 45-46)
As Bly said,
we form the shadow in our youth and then spend the rest of our lives
trying to reclaim the energies which we have repressed or rejected.
This, I feel, is one of the great Heroic Journeys of adulthood:
reclaiming the rejected parts of our psyche so that we can once
again become a whole person. This struggle is depicted in some way
in virtually all literature and film. Either we see the struggle to
discover the shadow, a process which we can never do "consciously,"
or we see the shadow grow so strong that it overpowers the ego, or
we see the continued repression of the shadow until we kind of
implode.
One need only think of some of the great pieces
of literature to see the metaphorical exploration of the shadow. Bly
mentions one of my personal favorites, Joseph Conrad, as "a great
master of shadow literature." Think, for example, of Heart of
Darkness and Kurtz. Other "shadow literature" could include Death of
a Salesman, The Scarlet Letter, Hemingway short stories, and most of
Shakespeare.
If you would like to learn more about the
shadow, I would suggest the two books I have already mentioned (The
Little book on the Human Shadow and Romancing the Shadow), or read
Jung's own words in a work like The Portable Jung, edited and with
and introduction by Joseph Campbell.
The more one understand Jung's model of the
psyche, the more one realizes that it is an excellent model for the
Heroic Journey.
