The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

The effort to push away our individual and societal shadows is undertaken in the hope that we might “quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness” and reclaim a sense of normalcy, however vague and distorted. But in reality, Jung warns, “nothing has finally disappeared and nothing has been made good. The evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the obscure misgivings are there before our eyes, if only we would see.” Jung urges us, instead, to recognize the selfsame nature of the other, to declare, “I am guilty with the rest,” to understand that “none of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow,” and ultimately to accept evil as something “lodged in human nature itself . . . as the equal and opposite partner of good.”

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