Thresholds

Thought of the Week" for January 18, 1999

TWO THOUGHTS ON THE SHADOW ARCHETYPE

Creation of the Shadow

Each of us is like Dorian Gray. We seek to present a beautiful, innocent face to the world; a kind, courteous demeanor; a youthful, intelligent image. And so, unknowingly but inevitably, we push away those qualities that do not fit the image, that do not enhance our self-esteem and make us stand proud but, instead, bring us shame and make us feel small.  We shove into the dark cavern of the unconscious those feelings that make us uneasy--hatred, rage, jealousy, greed, competition, lust, shame--and those behaviors that are deemed wrong by the culture--addiction, laziness, aggression, dependency--thereby creating what could be called shadow content. Like Dorian's painting, these qualities ultimately take on a life of their own, forming an invisible twin that lives just behind our life, or just beside it, but as distinct from the one we know as a stranger.

This stranger, known in psychology as the shadow, is us, yet is not us. Hidden from our awareness, the shadow is not a part of our conscious self-image. So it seems to appear abruptly, out of nowhere, in a range of behaviors from off-color jokes to devastating abuses. When it emerges, it feels like an unwanted visitor, leaving us ashamed, even mortified.

Connie Zweig, Ph.D. and Steve Wolf, Ph. D. Romancing the Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of the Soul 

Affects of the shadow 

Although...the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such [by the subject]...the cause of the emotion [projection of the shadow onto others] appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person...

It is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of the projection is to isolate the subject from his environment [because] instead of a real relationship to it there is not only an illusory one. Projections change the world into a replica of one's own unknown face...they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d'incompleture and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions.

...[the subject of the projections engages] in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Carl Jung, Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. (The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell, p. 146-147)