Owning Your Own Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Transformative Self-Acceptance, Exploring the Unlit Part of the Ego and Finding Balance Through Spiritual Self-Discovery

by Robert A. Johnson

I have written of the shadow as the dark, unacceptable part of oneself. But I also have noted that it is possible to project from the shadow the very best of oneself onto another person or situation. Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow; in this case our finest qualities are refused and laid on another. It is hard to understand, but we often refuse to bear our noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them. A fourteen-year-old boy hero-worships a sixteen year old and asks him to carry what the fourteen year old is not yet capable of doing; in a few months he has assimilated that capacity and is living what he relegated to shadow only shortly before. Probably an eighteen year old then is his hero that he soon catches up with. Development generally takes this means of introducing the next stage of its progress. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s character. Early in my analysis I had a startling dream in which I ate Albert Schweitzer, a hero of mine at the time. If one can reduce the exaggerated quality of the dream, it was saying that I must accept a Schweitzer-like quality of my own and stop projecting it onto an outer hero. Of course it is a matter of degree, but the dream was correct in saying that I had to become an Albert Schweitzer. All heroes need internalizing. Of course, the childish part of me resisted this development with all its power. At the time I wondered, “How is it possible to live out so many aspects of the human personality?” Schweitzer had doc...