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

by Connie Zweig

Loving the enemy within ourselves does not eliminate the enemy out there, but it can change our relationship with him. When evil ceases to be demonized, we are forced to deal with it in human terms. This is at once a potentially painful spiritual task and an opportunity for spiritual peace. This is the way it always is with humility.

The heart of darkness is our own heart.

Goodness will reign in the world not when it triumphs over evil, but when our love of goodness ceases to express itself in terms of the triumph over evil. Peace, if it comes, will not be made by people who have rendered themselves into saints, but by people who have humbly accepted their condition as sinners. It was in fact a saint—Saint Theresa of Lisieux—who expressed what it takes to allow the spirit of peace to reside in our hearts. “If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.”

We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of redheaded devils responsible for all the evil on this side of the mountain. C. G. JUNG

An enemy is like a treasure found in my house, won without labor of mine; I must cherish him, for he is a helper in the way to Enlightenment. SANTI-DEVA

When observed through psychological lenses, enemy-making is a transposition of shadow onto others who, for often complicated reasons, fit our images of the inferior. We need only to think of the people whom we judge or dislike or against whom we hold secret prejudices to find ourselves in the grip of our darker nature.

The greatest cruelties in human history have been carried out in the name of righteous causes, when the shadows of entire nations have been projected onto the face of an enemy, and thus an alien group can be made into a foe, a scapegoat, or an infidel.

The world seems to be waiting for a new age of constructive cooperation, a millennial era when we will use the energy of enemy-making for problem solving. The new enemy to engage requires no projection; it may be accessed by simply owning our own collective shadows and taking responsibility, for it is now made manifest in the form of ecological disaster, global warming, the death of countless other species, and the economic deprivation and malnutrition of many people.

SAM KEEN TO CREATE AN ENEMY Start with an empty canvas Sketch in broad outline the forms of men, women, and children. Dip into the unconscious well of your own disowned darkness with a wide brush and stain the strangers with the sinister hue of the shadow. Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed, hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as your own. Obscure the sweet individuality of each face. Erase all hints of the myraid loves, hopes, fears that play through the kaleidoscope of every finite heart. Twist the smile until it forms the downward arc of cruelty. Strip flesh from bone until only the abstract skeleton of death remains. Exaggerate each feature until man is metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect. Fill in the background with malignant figures from ancient nightmares—devils, demons, myrmidons of evil. When your icon of the enemy is complete you will be able to kill without guilt, slaughter without shame. The thing you destroy will have become merely an enemy of God, an impediment to the sacred dialectic of history.

In the beginning we create the enemy.

Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.

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.

What is impossible for the paranoid mind is the very notion of equality. A paranoid must be either sadistically superior and dominate others, or masochistically inferior and feel threatened by them. Adults may be equal to one another, may share responsibility for good and evil, but in the infantile world, the giant—the parent, the enemy—has the power and therefore is morally despicable for not eliminating the pain and evil for which he alone is responsible.

We scapegoat and create absolute enemies, not because we are intrinsically cruel, but because focusing our anger on an outside target, striking at strangers, brings our tribe or nation together and allows us to be a part of a close and loving in-group. We create surplus evil because we need to belong.

If we desire peace, each of us must begin to demythologize the enemy; cease politicizing psychological events; re-own our shadows; make an intricate study of the myriad ways in which we disown, deny, and project our selfishness, cruelty, greed, and so on onto others; be conscious of how we have unconsciously created a warrior psyche and have perpetuated warfare in its many modes.

Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.

Aggression is the ability to dispose of one’s adversary without being troubled by too many scruples.

Jung believed that God, the living God, could be found only where we least want to look, the place we have the most resistance to exploring. This living God is entwined with our own darkness and shadow, woven in our wounds and complexes, laced with pathologies.

We’re really talking about the difference between spirit and soul here. The path of the spirit is straight and upward. The path of the soul is crooked, downward and disturbing. The soul’s road is the road of initiation into manhood as well. Our purpose is not to be “good” but to be real, to know our darkness, the via negativa, not to be naive and innocent. Initiation means knowing what we’re capable of, our limits, our hungers, our desires. That is often painful knowledge to acquire. But we are only capable of responsibility and wise choice when we are aware of those factors.

We are afraid of getting caught, of getting burned (by the oil), of our Wurm-self coming out of hiding, of asking for what the ugliest part of ourselves needs. So most of us pretend to be wholly good. But being good just isn’t good enough.

For non-criminals, putrefactio, noticing our own smell, can mean getting out of the everlasting improvement and perfection trip.

The leakage signifies a lack of integrity and a soulless process incapable of any useful transformation.

This would hold true on a dream perspective as well—if we see the criminal as another part of our own story, needing to get into our private space, needing to carry off things we can live without, needing to create pain and loss in us.

Evil in the human psyche comes from a failure to bring together, to reconcile, the pieces of our experience. When we embrace all that we are, even the evil, the evil in us is transformed.

Loving oneself is no easy matter just because it means loving all of oneself, including the shadow where one is inferior and socially so unacceptable. The care one gives this humiliating part is also the cure.

Thus is cure a paradox requiring two incommensurables: the moral recognition that these parts of me are burdensome and intolerable and must change, and the loving laughing acceptance which takes them just as they are, joyfully, forever. One both tries hard and lets go, both judges harshly and joins gladly. Western moralism and Eastern abandon: each holds only one side of the truth.

No patient in psychotherapy can recover his own beauty and innocence without first facing the ugliness and evil in himself. Jung tells us we have “dealt the devil . . . [no] serious blow by calling him neurosis.”7 The ways in which we live, the experience of our own sinful souls, still is itself our only Hell.

But perhaps the most poetic, symbolic retribution for being manipulative is that it leaves you completely open to the manipulations of others. He who seems to be taken in by your flattery is merely another manipulator rewarding your offerings as a way of controlling your behavior.

The victims of confidence men are always those secret thieves who hope to get something for nothing.

Only the devious manipulator cannot resist the opportunity to believe the illusion that he is in control, that he can get away with it.

And when I try sorting out who is the victim and who the perpetrator of manipulation, I can’t tell the knife from the wound.

When we lay claim to the evil in ourselves, we no longer need fear its occurring outside of our control.

Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted.

Jung points out that “the sick man has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis but how to bear it. For the illness is not a superfluous and senseless burden, it is himself; he himself is that ‘other’ which we were always trying to shut out.”

But even if you should believe that some men are better than others, then I ask you in the name of myself and all of the others who find that we have never had a completely pure motive in our entire lives: “Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?”