Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

by Connie Zweig

A major function of the paranoid mind is to escape from guilt and responsibility and affix blame elsewhere. This inversion can go to terrible extremes. Blame produces blame. Hence the paranoid person or nation will create a shared delusional system, a paranoia à deux. The enemy system involves a process of two or more enemies dumping their (unconscious) psychological wastes in each others’ back yards. All we despise in ourselves we attribute to them. And vice versa. Since this process of unconscious projection of the shadow is universal, enemies “need” each other to dispose of their accumulated, disowned, psychological toxins. We form a hate bond, an “adversarial symbiosis,” an integrated system that guarantees that neither of us will be faced with our own shadow.