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The persona is what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world. It is our psychological clothing and it mediates between our true selves and our environment just as our physical clothing presents an image to those we meet. The ego is what we are and know about consciously. The shadow is that part of us we fail to see or know.*
The shadow is that which has not entered adequately into consciousness. It is the despised quarter of our being. It often has an energy potential nearly as great as that of our ego. If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage or some indiscretion that slips past us; or we have a depression or an accident that seems to have its own purpose. The shadow gone autonomous is a terrible monster in our psychic house.
Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy, but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum. Of course you are both; but one does not discover these two elements at the same time.
A terrible law prevails that few people understand and that our culture chooses to ignore almost completely. That is, the seesaw must be balanced if one is to remain in equilibrium. If one indulges characteristics on the right side, they must be balanced by an equal weight on the left side. The reverse is equally true. If this law is broken, then the seesaw flips and we lose our balance. This is how people flip into the opposite of their usual behavior. The alcoholic who suddenly becomes fanatical in his temperance, or the conservative who suddenly throws all caution to the wind, has made such
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Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks the fruit of destruction. Our resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but that is not possible.
The balance of light and dark is ultimately possible—and bearable. All nature lives in polarity—light and dark, creation and destruction, up and down, male and female.* It is not surprising that we find the same basic laws functioning in our psychological structure. In German there is a term, doppelgänger, meaning one’s mirror image, one’s opposite. Goethe was profoundly affected when he approached his home one evening and was met by a vision of his doppelgänger, the other one who lived in his personality. Few of us have so vivid an experience of our shadow, but whether we know it or not our
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The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side.
Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz and Barbara Hannah, who shared a household in Küsnacht, Switzerland, had the custom of requiring whoever had some especially good fortune to carry out the garbage for the week. This is a simple but powerful act. Symbolically speaking, they were playing out the shadow side of something positive. Dr. Jung often greeted a friend by asking, “Had any terrible successes lately?” because he also was aware of the close proximity of light and darkness.
Ritual implications of consciously adopting a “negative for positive, positive for negative” approach to every day “wins” and “detriments”?
Many a woman is burdened by paying out the dark side of a creative man; many a man is drained by carrying the dark side of a woman that is the byproduct of her creativity. Worst of all, children often have to carry the dark side of creative parents. It is proverbial that the minister’s child will be difficult and the wealthy man’s child is in danger of leading a meaningless life.
Researchers estimate that in an average family household, twenty-eight servants would be needed to accomplish only one part of the work that is taken care of by our mechanical aids. What a wonderful age! But its shadow appears, inevitably, as boredom and loneliness—the exact opposites of the efficient society we have made.
How, then, can one produce something of beauty or goodness without doing an equal amount of wreckage? It is possible to live one’s ideals, do one’s best, be courteous, do well at work, and live a decent civilized life if we ritually acknowledge this other dimension of reality. The unconscious cannot tell the difference between a “real” act and a symbolic one. This means that we can aspire to beauty and goodness—and pay out that darkness in a symbolic way.
I have to honor my shadow, for it is an integral part of me; but I don’t have to push it onto someone else. A five-minute ceremony or acknowledgment of my shadow accumulation after my guests depart will have satisfied it and safeguarded my environment from darkness.
Does this mean that I have to be as destructive as I am creative, as dark as I am light? Yes, but I have some control over how or where I will pay the dark price. I can make a ceremony or ritual soon after doing some creative work and restore my balance in that way. This is best done privately and need not injure my environment nor anyone near me. I can write some blood-and-thunder low-grade short story (I won’t have to look far for the characters since the other side of my seesaw has already been set into motion) or do some active imagination,* which will honor the dark side. These symbolic
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Much of religious ceremony is designed to keep the left-hand side of the balance functioning in a compensatory way.
The central symbol of Christianity, the cross, is a double seesaw with the two axis crossing at the center. It provides the framework for balancing the right and left and also the high and the low.
To refuse the dark side of one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents.
The tendency to see one’s shadow “out there” in one’s neighbor or in another race or culture is the most dangerous aspect of the modern psyche.
Unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it.
We are left as less than whole personalities when we invest our own darkness into something outside ourselves.
If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion.
Jung used to say that we can be grateful for our enemies, for their darkness allows us to escape our own.
We are advised to love our enemies, but this is not possible when the inner enemy, our own shadow, is waiting to pounce and make the most of an incendiary situation. If we can learn to love the inner enemy, then there is a chance of loving—and redeeming—the outer one.
Goethe’s Faust, perhaps the greatest example in literature of the meeting of ego and shadow,
Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow; in this case our finest qualities are refused and laid on another.
Today’s hero is tomorrow’s character.
There are, in my view, two “shadows”: (1) the dark side of the ego, which is carefully hidden from itself and which the ego will not acknowledge unless forced to by life’s difficulties, and (2) that which has been repressed in us lest it interfere with our egocentricity and, however devilish it may seem, is basically connected to the Self. In a showdown God (Self] favors the shadow over the ego, for the shadow, with all of its dangerousness, is closer to the center and more genuine.*
If you can touch your shadow—within form—and do something out of your ordinary pattern, a great deal of energy will flow from it.
Ancient China called this the Tao and said the middle way is not a compromise but a creative synthesis.
The early part of adulthood is devoted almost entirely to discipline. One prepares for a profession, learns the social graces, cultivates a marriage, and improves one’s earning capacity—and all of these activities invariably create a large shadow. There are elements we had to leave behind, elements that had to be “unchosen” in order to produce a cultured life. By middle age, the cultural process is mostly complete—and very dry. It is as if we have wrung all the energy out of our character and at this point, the energy of the shadow is very great. We are suddenly subject to explosions that have
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The psyche is unaware of the difference between an outer act and an interior one. Our shadow qualities are lived out equally well—from the viewpoint of Self—either way.
All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering, and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow.
Ceremonies the world over, and from every age, consist mostly of destruction: sacrifice, burning, ritual killing, bloodletting, fasting, and sexual abstention. Why? These are the ritual languages that safeguard the culture by paying out the shadow in a symbolic way.
The shadow is very important in marriage, and we can make or break a relationship depending on how conscious we are of this. We forget that in falling in love, we must also come to terms with what we find annoying and distasteful—even downright intolerable—in the other and also in ourselves. Yet it is precisely this confrontation that leads to our greatest growth.
I recently heard about a couple who had the good sense to call upon the shadow in a prewedding ceremony. The night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their “shadow vows.” The groom said, “I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself.” The bride replied, “I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I will take your money and your house.” They then drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of the marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably
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For some incomprehensible reason we often refuse this paradoxical nature of reality and, in an idiot moment, think we can function outside it. The very moment we do this, we translate paradox into opposition. When leisure is torn loose from work, both are spoiled. Personal suffering begins when we are crucified between these opposites. If we try to embrace one without paying tribute to the other, we degrade paradox into contradiction. Yet both pairs of opposites must be equally honored. To suffer one’s confusion is the first step in healing.*
If I can stay with my conflicting impulses long enough, the two opposing forces will teach each other something and produce an insight that serves them both. This is not compromise but a depth of understanding that puts my life in perspective and allows me to know with certainty what I should do.
Most of the recrimination between quarreling lovers or spouses involves the collision of power and love.
“Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.” The ego is fashioned like the metal between the hammer and the anvil.
Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision.
But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally…the Self manifests.
the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man’s life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self.
When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.*
You can give another person a precious gift if you will allow him to talk without contaminating his speech with your own material.
Whenever you have a clash of opposites in your being and neither will give way to the other (the bush will not be consumed and the fire will not stop), you can be certain that God is present. We dislike this experience intensely and avoid it at any cost; but if we can endure it, the conflict-without-resolution is a direct experience of God.
Where is the inspiration of yesterday that was so thrilling? But if you repeat this often enough it will become the permanent base of your functioning. It can be hoped that by the end of your life the two circles will be entirely overlapped. When one is truly a citizen of both worlds, heaven and earth are no longer antagonistic to each other. Finally one sees that there was only one circle all the time. This is the true fulfillment of the Christian goal, the beatific vision so prized in medieval theology. The two circles were only the optical illusion of our capacity—and need—to see things
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“If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be filled with light” (Matt. 6:22). The right eye sees this, the left eye sees that; but if one comes to the third eye, the single eye, all will be filled with light.
Guilt is also a cheap substitute for paradox. The energy consumed by guilt would be far better invested in the courageous act of looking at two sets of truths that have collided in our personality.
The ancient alchemists understood this process. In alchemy one goes through four stages of development: the nigredo, in which one experiences the darkness and depression of life; the albedo, in which one sees the brightness of things; the rubedo, where one discovers passion; and finally the citrino, where one appreciates the goldenness of life. After all this comes a full-color mandorla. This is the pavanis, the peacock’s tail that contains all the preceding hues. One cannot stop this process until one has brought it to the pavanis, that concert of colors that contains everything.
The mandorla is not the place of neutrality or compromise; it is the place of the peacock’s tail and rainbows.
