THE SHADOW
In taking the word “shadow” to describe a psychological factor Jung has borrowed in term in general use. Obviously when it used psychologically, “shadow” is a metaphor, or possibly even a symbol. In common parlance, in the dictionary meaning of the word, a shadow is “a deficiency of light within an illuminated region; the shaded or dark portion of an object; an object or appearance resembling a physical shadow which constantly accompanies or follows like a shadow, hence ghost, spirit, shade."” Jung does not use the term in this last sense of ghost or shade but, rather, as the relatively dark aspect of the psyche which inevitably accompanies the illumination of another part. The light which illumines the psyche is consciousness. The dim consciousness of the unawakened psyche is gradually brought to a focus in the ego. By this development the conscious side of the psyche is illumined and the other side falls more deeply into shadow.
The psyche is like a vehicle traveling along the road of life, like a car perhaps. The way is dim and obscure, and the driver of the car, the ego, turns on the lights. Immediately the road ahead is illumined; that is consciousness is directed out to the environment and the driver can see what lies about him and can find his way. But meantime the turning on of the lights has thrown the back of the car into obscurity. The passenger in the back seat is no longer seen. His presence may still be known to the driver, or he may be entirely forgotten; he can still participate in the directing of the car after the manner of a back-seat driver, but he remains invisible. In the psychological use of the word shadow sometimes the darkness of the interior of the car is referred to and at others the passenger on the shadowy backseat is meant, for he personifies the unseen part of the car, that is of the psyche. From this analogy it will be clear that when consciousness arises in the psyche and becomes focused under the ego then the shadow also will make its appearance and indeed will increase in density and definiteness as ego consciousness itself is intensified.
But the mere intensification of ego consciousness, and the concern with the outer world which goes with this development, does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. The shadow can well remain obscure and hidden while the individual is absorbed in the pressing task of adapting to the world about him. He develops a persona, a role, by means of which he learns to meet the demands of the world and to satisfy at the same time his own most urgent needs. He discovers away on managing his life which fits in with, is even identical with, that adopted by the greater part of the community in which he lives. He makes a collective adaptation which is collectively valid.
If his consciousness remains at this superficial level it will seem to the Individual himself that he is what he appears to be and nothing else. He will come to feel himself as one with the part he plays in the collective drama. But no one can play a part all the time, or can do so only at the cost of repressing from consciousness some measure of his reactions: for the living being must always be more than a role, which after all is only a way of acting or of functioning. The man who is identical with his role reduces himself to little more than an automaton. When the chosen role is a rather limited one, or is rigid in its requirements, the divergence of the real nature from the persona will be more marked than in those cases where the persona demands are not so strict and where in consequence not too large a part of the personality is repressed. For instance, in rural communities, where the demands of conventional behavior are his own opinions is tolerated and respected even though he does not conform to any general pattern. One of the charms of such rural communities lies just in the many well-marked and diverse types of the men and women encountered there. A small village may seem to be inhabited entirely by “characters” straight out of Dickens. But in an urban population of the same level of culture everyone will at least appear to have been cut after the same pattern. The views which are currently held by the men on social and political matters will be largely dictated by the trade union; the dress and social behavior of the women will be as uniform and stereotyped as the ideas of their menfolk; while the ambitions of both men and women will be chiefly directed to “keeping up with the Joneses.” This difference does not necessarily mean that the townsman is less conscious or less developed than his country cousin. Indeed, his wits have probably been sharpened by the pressure of torn life; he may be much more wide-awake than the countryman. Ego consciousness has increased, but at the same time the proximity of others makes for a collective adaptation which bears hardly on individual differences. It is under such conditions that the greatest repression of the real nature takes place and in consequence it is in just such communities that the repressed desires are liable to break forth in some sort of revulsion against the drab uniformity to which life has been reduced.
For if the mask which a man wears does not correspond to his real nature the human being feels himself oppressed and suffocated. If he has formed the habit of meeting all situations in life by a stereotyped mask, a considerable part of his own individual reaction is held back, or is inadequately expressed; it therefore accumulates within him. The individual may be very well aware of these unexpressed reactions and may brood over them in private, or they may grow into a resentment and disaffection which can breed revolt; in the individual a revolt which may break up his personal adaptation; or, if these repressions are general, they may lead, in a community, to revolutions or other social upheavals. But it is more usual for the individual not to be adequately aware of his unexpressed reactions, for we all like to think the best of ourselves, and tend to identify the “I” with the adapted persona, which is all we show of ourselves to the world. When this is the case, some part of the individual’s reaction drops into the unconscious, where however it does not cease to be, but instead remains dormant. Repressed contents of this sort which are unacceptable or inappropriate, fall into the surface layers of the unconscious together with all those things which have once been conscious and have forgotten. Here, too, impulses which have never been sufficiently energized to reach consciousness but which might just as well have been conscious, remain apparently indefinitely. Under certain conditions, the most minute and detailed memories may return to consciousness, memories of things one would have thought too trivial to remember; for example, it is said that his whole life passes in review before the eyes of a drowning man, or an unimportant incident of years ago may suddenly flash before one, recalled by a smell, or a tune one has not heard since early youth. This region of the psyche constitutes what Jung has called the personal unconscious. Its contents are things which have once been conscious or which might have been conscious; and for the most part, they are things which have been discarded as unsuitable for the taken role. They belong to that other side of the personality which is not quite up to the mark, which may be the entirely familiar companion in our private inner life but which we would not avow in public and which also we serenely believe is unknown to our neighbor, being indeed securely hidden in the secrecy of our private thoughts. But as a matter of fact this shadowy “other” is frequently very well known to all those who come close to us, especially if they see us when off guard. The popular saying that a man is never a hero to his valet recognizes that even the man who appears as a hero to the world, indeed perhaps especially one who plays the hero role, has his other side which is far from heroic. This alter ego is what Jung has called the shadow. It is a personification of the personal unconscious contents, and acts in us almost as if it were another being, another self, who can even carry on a conversation with us, or initiate actions which we ourselves would not perform.
The shadow is, however, quite close to us, almost in consciousness, and as it is a part of the personality it cannot be escaped but must always be somewhere in the immediate environment. Those contents which are deeply unconscious and are still in a latent or inactive condition may be projected far away, into distant lands, perhaps, as for example the Wise Man is sometimes thought of as a remote or almost mythological figure living in inaccessible mountains. One recalls the recurrent story of the Mahatmas living in isolation in Tibet. Or contents which are beginning to stir but are in the depths of the unconscious may be projected even outside the world, and then we hear of cataclysms in the sun or of strange rays which may some day impinge upon the world. But the shadow is part of the personality and is only relatively unconscious. We meet him everywhere.
If an individual is unaware of his shadow and so is entirely convinced of his own rectitude, the elements in his own nature which cannot be accommodated in this shining personality will be projected to someone in the immediate environment, sometimes to the brother or friend, or more often to the bête noire, the associate whom one particularly dislikes, whose faults one cannot avoid seeing and criticizing on every occasion, in season and out. Such a one is surely the mirror opposite of oneself. It reminds one of the story of the little boy who complained bitterly to his mother, “Isn’t Johnny greedy! He’s taken the biggest piece of cake that I wanted!”
Ignorance of the hidden or partially hidden desires which motivate one’s actions is not limited to childhood. An adult, too, may be oblivious of his shadow, but the obscurity which conceals the inner workings of his instincts is usually a little less complete than in the case of the small boy, and so the shadow is not, as a rule, allowed to obtrude itself so naively.
In all those situations where the individual is aware that he has not produced the effect he intended, or where he blundered over some task which he expected himself to be able to perform correctly, the actor, the doer, is not the conscious ego but the shadow. “How silly of me? Why, I never do that,” exclaims such a one. And the strange thing is that he can go on exclaiming, “I never do that,” about all sorts of things without ever stopping to take count of these many exceptions to what he considers to be the invariable rule; namely, that his behavior is always correct. If he did pause to take stock he would probably receive a terrible shock to his self-esteem. But he saves himself from such disturbing disillusionment by remaining unaware of his failure to live up to his own standard. He looks only at that which comes under the light of his conscious intention and does not concern himself with the contents of the shadow. These unrecognized factors fall upon someone in the environment, and there they become glaringly apparent. He has, as we say, projected his shadow.
This brief description of the shadow brings us to the next question: What function does the shadow perform in the hierarchy of the psyche? One cannot but be reminded of Stevenson’s verse:
I’ve got a little shadow goes in and out with me,
But what can be the use of him is more than i can see.
He’s very very like me from his heels up to his head,
And he jumps right in before me when I get into my bed.
What is the use of the shadow? It consists, as we said above, of all those elements of the natural personality which have been discarded as a result of training and in accordance with the demands of society, and these things might well be considered as so much waste material, and indeed society so considers them. But the trouble is that they contain energy of their own and cannot be disposed of merely by repression. Indeed, If we could really dispose of them there would be nothing natural or individual left but only a stereotyped mechanism, a robot, who could do no evil but could only conform, a “yes” man to society’s conventional demands. To lose one’s shadow is a serious psychological mishap. It means that one has no substance, no reality, and therefore that one is unable to make any impression on real objects which have substance. This condition may be encountered in everyday life; it is a not unusual occurrence. When, for instance, an individual has received recognition for some achievement with perhaps a somewhat exaggerated need of praise, it may go to his head, as we say. Seeing only the positive side of the experience, he loses his sense of balance. Immediately all difficulties are going to melt away and he feels “everything’s coming my way!” If, however, his friends take his enthusiasm with a grain of salt and do not show the expected conviction, he begins to exaggerate. He protests with increasing insistence that simply everything is coming his way. But the more he protests, the more skeptical do his auditors become, and the more indifferent, even bored by his protestations. This man has temporarily lost his shadow, he no longer makes an effect as a man of substance and his overemphasis is the evidence of it. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
Sometimes, where an individual is too sophisticated to give himself away quite so obviously as this, his dreams may yet show a very similar condition. For instance, a woman who found herself in a situation which seemed to her to be “simply perfect,” the fulfillment of all her hopes, and over which she had become not a little inflated, had the following dream. She found herself in a large brilliantly lighted cave, a place of unalloyed joy and exaltation. In the dream she was superbly happy, even exultant. But as she looked around her, she became aware that she cast no shadow. At first, this seemed merely strange to her, though perhaps a little uncanny, but she gradually became more and more worried at the unusual phenomenon, and awakened in a state of great anxiety.
Then there is the mediaeval legend of a man to whom the devil came and offered great wealth and his heart’s desire. He was much intrigued by the offer, but being of a cautious disposition he asked the price the devil wanted for his generosity. The devil answered, “A mere nothing, something of no weight or substance, which can surely be of no value to you.” “What can that be?” asked the man and was told, “Just your shadow.” Not realizing at all what he was giving up the man gladly agreed. He received the gift of wealth and went his way minus his shadow. But then his troubles began because nothing he did held any reality or substance, and when people noticed that he cast no shadow they said he could not be a human being but must be an incarnated spirit, with an evil intent, and so they fled from him in fear. At last the man could stand his isolation no longer and went to look for the devil in order to demand back his shadow. But the devil drew his victim’s shadow round himself like a cloak and could not be found, for he always stood just in the shadow. This legend, fantastic though it is on the surface, yet teaches a psychological truth as do so many legends and fairy tales. For if one does give one’s shadow to the Devil, that is, if one allows it to drop into the underworld, or as we say, represses it into the unconscious, all the devilish evil of the nether darkness can find its way into one’s life entirely without arousing awareness or suspicion in oneself, though to others the diabolical effect one produces may be exceedingly obvious. And so in actual life although we subscribe to the general demand that people shall conform to the expected standard, yet if we see no shadow, no hint that there is something else besides the commendable exterior, we begin to feel uncomfortable: this person either is not as good as he appears and is hiding his weaknesses with diabolical cunning, or else he is not quite natural, a little uncanny even, or at least he seems not quite to belong to this wicked world. One of the most bitter complaints which is not infrequently brought against the close companion with whom a difficulty has arisen is that “he is always right”—right, that is, in his own eyes—righteous is perhaps a better word for his attitude. It reminds me of a little incident which happened long ago when I lived in England.
A certain clergyman went to an analyst because of a nervous tic which troubled him. He was apparently the very picture of what a clergyman should be but his analyst began to glimpse lurking behind the suave and exemplary exterior a certain priggishness and even egotism. When this was hinted at—oh very gently—the young man went away puzzled and hurt. But he came to his next hour with a light in his eye saying, “Now I see what you mean when you say I think of myself first. Of course that must not be, so this morning, at breakfast, I gave my wife the larger egg.”
To be always right means to be not quite human and therefore to be terribly exasperating to the housemate or companion. So we see that although we have the convention that everyone ought to be pure white—as if this were a condition perfectly easy to attain—as a matter of fact we suspect anyone who does not show some flaw. There are some people, however, who will not admit that any of this human imperfection can rest with themselves. It is characteristic of such people that they first accept everyone they meet as if they were perfect, every new servant is a paragon, every new acquaintance a marvel—for a short time! It is not long, however, before the angel becomes a devil and then nothing is too bad with which to accuse the erstwhile paragon. In other words, the evil which inevitably arises in any close human contact is not recognized as the shadowy or unconscious aspect of life itself which should be worked on together, the responsibility for it being carried by both parties, but each blames the other for that which is a common problem. For if one of these two considers himself to be entirely white, then any blackness which enters in must be due to the diabolical wickedness of the other. This mechanism is seen perhaps in its most flagrant form in those people who believe that there is no such thing as evil. If, in the philosophy of an individual, evil does not exist, he will not take it into account in his dally life and in his dealing with others. He will make, as it were, no place for it; and so having no place in human consciousness in the reality world, it remains a psychic factor without body, a sort of atmosphere which infects the whole environment of the one who has denied it place.
In their biographies of Mrs. Eddy, both Dittemore and Dakin relate how, in her later years, she was haunted and pursued by evil thoughts which she believed emanated from enemies who were trying to injure her.* Sometimes her suspicions fastened on persons in her immediate environment but more often the evil influences were felt to come from someone at a distance. Practically always the evil was thought to have been initiated by one who had once been a friend and adherent but who had become estranged. Mrs. Eddy’s life-long belief that freedom from evil could be obtained by thinking in the right way, and her denial that evil had any power, or any real existence, resulted not in release from evil, but, if we are to credit the well-documented evidence of her biographers, in the tragic and morbid absorption in the thought of it. The evil, however, was not recognized as coming from within herself, and so it projected; it had become loose in the world and for this reason passed entirely beyond her control. An account of this evil power, under the name of “Malicious Animal Magnetism,” appeared in early editions of Science and Health, but it was subsequently omitted. It is indeed strange that this evil force should have occupied so large a place in the thoughts and conversation of the founder of a religion whose main tenet is that there is no evil.
Those who deny the existence of evil are as a rule cheerful and confident even under adverse conditions, but their good spirits and optimism do not always seem to be warranted by the circumstances. The impression their cheerfulness makes is brittle and over-insistent; it is very different from the repose of one who has faced all sides of a problem and has found a sure footing in the midst of difficulties. One has the feeling that they do not stand on a substantial foundation; consequently their judgment does not inspire confidence, for they do not seem quite real. They are two-dimensional, because they have mislaid, or possibly even lost, their shadows. They never touch the deeper experiences of life but go along on the surface. If some tragic or evil experience comes to such a person, he will either turn his back on it and reinforce himself in his exalted ideas, or he will be precipitated into a very serious conflict. I recall the case of a woman who had lived a long and successful life sustained by her belief in the goodness of God, who she felt had ordained everything for the best. According to her creed no evil existed in the whole universe, which could hurt or even touch the “children of God.” If certain things seemed to be evil that was only because we did not fully understand. God in his inscrutable wisdom had allowed them to happen for a good purpose which we in our blindness could not see. When she reached a ripe old age, however, her health failed and many and various family troubles came to her, one of her children died and another developed an incurable illness, while the marriage of the third gave cause for anxiety. She lost her assurance that everything was good and became overwhelmed with bitterness. The thought of God as a sort of devil who, although he could have prevented it, yet reveled in allowing evil to happen to her, obsessed her mind until she felt herself to be losing her reason. Her condition was indeed pitiable.
To ignore the fact of evil and to attempt to meet the problems of life by jumping over them is not without its risks. The typical dream of a person who is taking such an attitude is that he is flying, possibly in a plane, but more often it is as if he were swimming in the air. In the dream he may be all right so long as he does not have to come down, but he dares not get down to earth because some evil person is awaiting him, or perhaps the ground beneath him is dangerous; in other cases the dreamer may be walking on the clouds unable to see what is going on on the earth. Now such dreams indicate a rather dangerous condition, for if the dreamer cannot get down to earth he will remain suspended in an unreal situation, and indeed will be in constant danger of falling. So we see that the lose of the shadow may lead to most unpleasant consequences.
As a rule however the more serious psychological disturbances arise not from an inadequate philosophy or a false religious opinion which has been consciously adopted, but rather from a psychic split which is brought about by forces of which the individual is totally unaware and which reaches far beyond the realm of the conscious attitudes and opinions. Such a person obviously does not know himself but identifies himself to one side of his personality, in this case to the pure white persona, while the shadow is lost sight of and the very memory of its existence may disappear; thus a condition is produced which may result in a severe neurosis or even in a mental breakdown of the schizophrenic type. In cases of this kind the sick person is childlike and naive. On the surface he is absolutely innocent-seeming, but is troubled with delusions of evil which usually assail him from the environment. The typical delusion is that unknown enemies, usually spoken of as “they,” are pouring evil into him by magnetism or electricity. That is to say: the unaccepted part of the psychic contents has become free in space, as it were, and attacks the personality as waves of invisible psychic force which seem to be like waves of electricity or of magnetism. In other cases, the repressed thoughts and desires are expressed in the voices which talk to the sick person saying over and over those things which have been discarded from consciousness.
So we see that it in very necessary to be aware of the shadow, for we cannot get rid of any part of our psyche by repressing it any more than we can dispose of a part of the body simply by ignoring its existence. But in the process of discipline and training through which we have all had to pass in order to become acceptable members of society, many natural impulses have had to be repressed. These are not only the asocial trends, resulting from unchecked egotism and so forth, but many other impulses also, which are not accepted by the group in which one lives. If we succeed in conforming to the conventional standard, we are received by the group; we have molder ourselves, or our parents have molded us, into a form that is acceptable and one which is readily understood by all who have been similarly brought up. The rewards for this kind of adaptation are many. It is easy to get established in a well-paying job; a so-called good marriage, a home, the praise of one’s fellows, civic honors, all these usually fall to the lot of one who has succeeded in molding himself on the conventional pattern and has remained oblivious of his shadow.
Conventional forms of behavior, however, vary considerably from one group to another even in the same country, and the range of variation is far greater between different nations. Social behavior and manners, as well as matters of much greater importance such as the amount of sexual liberty that is allowed to respectable members of society, very greatly in these different groups. Consequently, the amount of strain that is involved in repressing those elements of the psyche that do not conform to the conventional pattern also varies, not only with the group to which the individual belongs but also with individual differences of temperament. An amount of repression which may be easily carried by one may be stifling to another. Furthermore, the conventional mold may really fit the temperament and capacities of one while the same pattern may disregard elements in the psyche of another which are of great importance. These elements will seek to live in some form or some place, for they are endowed with an energy content of their own which cannot be dissolved.
When these discarded elements are projected to another human being, the individual still has some connection with them, even if it is only a negative one. For at least he can hate or dislike the person who lives these things openly. Indeed he is compelled to concern himself with this person, for it is he who carries the other side of the psyche from which the individual is parted only at the cost of a psychological split such as we have indicated above. Furthermore, this one-sided person is confirmed in the opinion of his own virtue by pointing out the deficiencies of the other who becomes the black sheep whose blackness makes his own whiteness all the more evident. This is the explanation of the anger, even venom, with which the consciously virtuous woman regards the so-called fallen girl. When a woman who prides herself on her virtue and morality is at the same time relentless in pursuing any who do not conform to her standards, we are justified in suspecting that her moral attitude has been achieved at the cost of the repression of her own vagrant sexuality, which she then has to seek out and castigate in others. She is unable to let other women alone because she needs them to personify and carry the unrecognized side of herself which has been relegated to the shadow. In this way she is left free to identify herself with the strictly moral and conventional side of her nature while the besmirched reputation of those who have “fallen” enhances the whiteness of her own life. And indeed all but the most willfully self-deceived are likely to be in need of some such reinforcement of their own good opinion of themselves, for in their moments of privacy most people have, at some time, been aware of doubts of their own immaculate virtue. In this way, when it is projected to others, the shadow acts as a sort of safeguard against the realization of our own all-too-human weakness.
If we could really see our own shadow it would become clear to us that in the depths of our own hearts we are not entirely the exemplary good citizens as we have always liked to believe ourselves. This is a very disturbing thought and for the sake of the solidarity of society many people consider it necessary not to allow themselves to indulge in such subversive ideas. It fa far better, or so society itself believes, to throw a little dust in our own eyes and so maintain our self-respect and good form. The dissenting voice of conscience can usually be silenced by some general form of self-deprecation such as by saying, “Well, of course I am not perfect, no one is.” And for those for whom the conventional forms of religion still hold power there is provided the General Confession, which is so general that particular sins can slip by entirely unnoticed. It is far easier to say, “All we like sheep have gone astray and there is no health in us,” than to admit to our next-door neighbor and good friend that we repeated the malicious piece of gossip we recently heard about her, to her sister-in-law, perhaps, who is already jealous and eager to hear ill of her; or that we did some other underhanded and catty piece of feminine dirty work. It reminds one of the man at the Friday Evening Prayer Meeting whose prayer went something like this: “Oh Lord I confess my sins. I have sinned greatly, I am the greatest of sinners, O Lord. I have been mean in my business dealings, I am a great sinner; I have been angry without cause, for I am a great sinner,” and much more to the same effect. No sooner had he finished than his neighbor began to pray, saying: “Yes, O Lord, what Brother X has just said is quite true, he is mean and cussed.” At which Brother X sprang to his feet shouting, “How dare you say such a thing about me. There isn’t one word of truth in it. You—slanderer …” and so on and so forth. But when we say “we have all gone astray,” we are in perfectly good company and no one has the right to point a finger at anyone else. While if we accept our particular and very personal sin against society’s code then we shall find ourselves threatened with exclusion from the group, for to commit one’s own particular sin means separation from society. It implies accepting all that we are, while our place in the continuity of the social order is only assured to us through accommodating ourselves to the general pattern.
The terror and demoralization which most people experience when they are faced by the realization of their own shadows is evidence enough that the psychic mechanism of the shadow and its projection is a necessary defense against the terror of the unknown. For to recognize the shadow means to feel cast out of society, and for most people the social order is still the all-powerful organization ordained by God himself. And so to accept one’s sins against the conventional code is tantamount to being cast out of society, as Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden Into a wilderness where they had only their own resourcefulness to rely on. This is an experience which brings with it the terror of the unknown. One who has dared it finds himself under the necessity of facing life on his own responsibility, entirely unaided by society, that ancient order which has learnt through the countless experiences of mankind how the problems and dangers of life in the raw may be managed. How can the individual fact that experience alone without the support that numbers give and at the same time face the hate and suspicion that are always incurred by one who goes contrary to the general rule?
This is the cost of taking up the shadow, but if one does not take it up and instead continues to project it, one may find oneself excluded from fellowship with one’s neighbors on account of the negative projections one makes to them. The suspicions then rest in one’s own heart; one is convinced of the wickedness of the neighbor, and suspects him of all sorts of ill-feeling and meanness, and so one feels excluded by the group as if they hated or envied one and one does not realize that this result is due to the evil which one has failed to recognize within oneself.
For the shadow is really and actually a part of the personality; so long as it remains unconscious the human being is not whole and in consequence suffers the pain of disintegration. Individuals vary much in their ability to stand such unwholeness. Some go through life quite oblivious of their one-sidedness while others are much more sensitive to the demands of the repressed factors within them. To these the necessity to deal with their repressions becomes imperative; some, on account of the symptoms of neurosis or other illness which they cause; others, because they suffer from emotional difficulties which are traceable to such repressions; while the urge to become whole takes possession of still others, either because the life that is possible with the conventional attitude is too meager for them, or because the need for wholeness has become a moral task which they cannot avoid.
Not infrequently, consciousness of the shadow side of our own personality is forced upon us when life presents us with some new demand for which we do not feel ourselves entirely adequate. If the new task needs a bigger man than we are, obviously other parts of the psyche beyond the conscious ego will have to be called on to fill out the need. This was the case with the hero of Conrad’s story, “The Secret Sharer.” There, a young man who had so far only acted as first officer was called upon to take over command of a strange ship whose crew were quite unknown and who were rather suspicious of him as a newcomer. The first night on board he decides to take the first watch himself in order to get acquainted with the ship, as he says, but really to try himself out, face to face with his new task. Then, in the darkness, a stranger, a naked man, swims to the side of the ship, and he takes him aboard. The man tells him: that he is an officer from a ship anchored on the other side of the bay, but that he killed a seaman, who had shirked his duty during a storm when the ship was in great danger, and now “they” are after him for murder. The captain lends him a sleeping suit and talks with him in whispers. “The shadowy, dark head, like mine, seemed to nod imperceptibly above the ghostly grey of my sleeping suit. It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror.” He hid him in his cabin and there he stayed until the young captain had put his ship and incidentally himself to the ultimate test and brought her through. Then and then only, the shadow went back to the ocean from which he had so mysteriously come, and we are given to understand that the strange tension which had hung over the whole ship and her untried captain, dissolved and they sailed for home with a fair breeze. This story is well worth study. Conrad’s deep insight into the unknown side of the human being has led him to portray the shadow unerringly, not only in its manifestations but also in its meaning. For this young man lacked that self-confidence which comes only through the experience of life and the knowledge of oneself which that gives.
When the obligation to become whole is laid upon an individual, there arises in him a great need to confess the sins of the shadow in order that the excluded part of the personality may be accepted as part of the whole, for the shadow is felt as a particular blackness, a particular sin even. But the fear of the unknown and the resistance against it may be so great, and so deep-seated and unconscious, that the individual may be unable to recognize what the problem really is and so he suffers from a vague sense of guilt or inadequacy which he may seek to assuage by various forms of self-discipline, even forcing himself still further into the repressive mold of convention. Under these circumstances he will seek for any shortcoming, even an imaginary one, to assuage his overwhelming sense of guilt, and thus the real sin is overlooked. Sometimes repentance of some obvious fault is used as a blind, not consciously, of course, to safeguard one against the realization of the real sin which is often apparently quite trivial in its overt aspect—a childish sexual escapade of no importance at all from the adult point of view; or perhaps a lie told about stolen candy or some other childhood sin—whose confession seems, however, to have power to undermine the adult man or woman completely. As if he realized the abyss which confession would open up, even though he is actually unconscious of the whole affair, the individual going through such an experience may fasten on any handy sin trying to make that carry the burden of the guilt he feels and so he rationalizes about it. In particular, perhaps he accepts the onus for some unadapted act and so succeeds in blinding himself to the underlying motive. It is relatively easy to confess a sin compatible as it were with one’s dignity or ego self-respect, while the real sin lurks unrecognized underneath. It was not this particular childish sexual misdemeanor that is the real crime against society, but the fact of having dared to act on one’s own instinct instead of under authority, and this will remain as a sin on one’s conscience until one has made good one’s escape from the ruling of society or of the parents.
The inner acceptance of these sins, whether they demand outward confession or not, frequently produces an unexpectedly favorable result. For to have committed childish sexual acts, or indeed other “unacceptable” acts, not so childish, means that one has asserted oneself as an individual, one has stolen one’s own individuality. Such an act converts a puppet into an individual. These instinctive stirrings, these deviations from the accepted code, are manifestations of human nature. One discovers that others have had similar experiences and so instead of being an outcast, a black sheep, on account of what seemed one’s own particular wickedness, one finds that one is now for the first time truly one of the flock—as the Harvard song has it:
We are little black sheep, who have gone astray,
Baa baa baa.
We are on our way to eternity,
Bas baa baa.
In dealing with children it is well not to overlook this aspect of the sin against the established order. It is at least possible that the good child who suddenly becomes outrageously naughty is trying to assert himself, really to feel himself as a person. There was the small boy who had flown into a rage with his nurse one day while his mother was out. On her return she took him to task saying, “You know, don’t you, who it is tells you to fight and hit poor Nanny?” And he replied, “Yes, I know, p’raps he did tell me to hit and bite, but the spitting was all my own idea.”
In other cases it is not the particular disobedience against the divine ordinance, nor the particular injury to the neighbor which one has committed, nor indeed this particular blunder of forgetfulness which is the real guilt; it is rather the power attitude underlying the overt act, the inveterate egotism which denies the very existence of others as persons, which make up the blackness of the shadow. But the wrongful attitude can often be recognized most readily in some example which is obviously too small to cause so great a commotion, and so it becomes evident that the real difficulty lies not in the harm done, but in accepting oneself as imperfect; and accepting it in such a way that one will always take that weakness into account for the future. Instead of “I am always right in such matters,” a more modest “I am sometimes mistaken"; instead of the absolute assurance that it is the fault of the other person there will come a recognition that the darkness of one’s own shadow may have caused the difficulty.
To recognize the darkness of one’s own shadow is very valuable in any human situation where one’s real concern is to make a working relationship because the evil that emanates from oneself 1s in some measure under one’s own control—if one recognizes it one can do something about it—while the darkness that comes from the other person’s unconscious evil is not accessible even to one’s best intentioned efforts.
An illustration of the way in which the discomfort and distress resulting from neglect of the shadow can show itself, is given by the case of a man, who at about the age of forty-two or three began to be aware of feelings of guilt in relation to his younger brother, who although younger than he, had always been more successful both at college and in life since they were grown up. The idea that he was in some inexplicable way guilty bothered him and would not let him be. He found himself brooding upon it in the night. At first, he could not think what was back of this feeling but presently remembered that he had once done a commission for his brother and had carelessly pocketed the proceeds and had omitted to make an accounting. The sum involved was only trivial and his brother would probably have said, “Forget it,” but the thought of his dishonesty would not leave him alone and presently he went to his brother and made a clean breast of the whole matter. As he expected his brother treated the whole thing as perfectly unimportant, but he was not relieved, which was hardly to be wondered at, because he had not confessed the real sin; namely, his jealousy of his brother’s success. He still cherished, unknown to himself, the childish illusion that as the eldest he had a right to a similar or even greater success, without ever exerting himself to attain it. His humiliation at his own failure produced the unconscious sense that his brother owed him something, a debt that he bad, again unconsciously, taken steps to settle in pocketing the money for the commission. If he had to confess to his brother his jealousy and resentment he would have been touched to the quick, his self-esteem would have been completely broken up. Furthermore, he obviously could not admit to consciousness any knowledge of his attitude and still continue to go on in the old easy-going way. His expectation that life ought to give him something without effort on his part was the real sin and that he was not prepared to renounce. He still wanted to be the favored eldest son and could by no means face the difficulty and hardship of the world without this support which emanated from the belief that as the parents had favored him so likewise should society. He simply could not face the world alone, supported only by what he could create through his own capacities and effort.
* * * * * *
But the shadow is not necessarily all dark. In addition to those unacceptable elements which have been repressed from consciousness it also carries all those parts of the psyche which do not happen to have been chosen for the conscious adaptation. Our civilization does not require whole personalities but rather one-sided specialists. Consequently, most people possess certain potential Capacities which have never been given a chance to live. These undeveloped parts of our nature seek fulfillment in life; they follow us wherever we go, diverting energy from our conscious life by their plea for attention, even though we may be deaf to their call. This self-mutilation is an almost essential condition of adaptation in the modern world. The man who loves the country and longs to make things grow in a garden or on a farm may find it necessary to live in the city and work in an office. He may discipline himself to forget high interest in the earth: or in other cases the concentrated effort needed for success in his town life may obliterate his other interests, so that he goes on through the years hardly aware of the frustration city life involves for him, but all the same there has been a division of his energies, and until he finds some way of satisfying his need there will be a reinforcement of his shadow personality, which will perhaps show itself in irritability or inertia. In other cases, an artistic talent which has been laid on one side in favor of more remunerative abilities may press for attention, And many women who have chosen a profession instead of marriage have repressed their maternal capacities into the shadow basis. Or a woman who has chosen marriage and children may repress her thinking. If she lets her mind rust, the thoughts she ought to have thought consciously may take to themselves wings and become compulsive and autonomous, like the famous bees which are said to buzz in certain bonnets.
The one-sided development which life demands of us does not always disagree with our own tendency. Everyone has a favored function with which he meets the world. He has a native ability along this line and his abilities in other directions are limited. Consequently a man who has a natural aptitude for thinking tries to meet the whole of life and its problems with his good mind. But there are certain aspects of life which require another approach and which cannot by any means be solved by a thought. They need feeling or intuition, perhaps. When such a man is confronted by a difficult on it. Or a woman who has always adapted herself by means of feeling, if that should happen to be her superior function, is likely to get into trouble when she is obliged to meet a situation requiring thinking. For instance, one who has tried to run her marriage on a one-sided arrangement whereby she functions only on feeling and leaves all matters, which require thinking, such as finance, politics, and an interest in the affairs of the day to her husband, may find that this plan does not work. Perhaps her marriage may become so unsatisfactory that she is obliged to sue for divorce; then her inexperience and lack of judgment are likely to lead her into all sorts of difficulties. If she has never learned how to judge either character or circumstances by the impersonal standards of thought, she can fall an easy prey to specious and even dishonest lawyers; she may thus give her consent to measures which would horrify her if she had understood their import and consequences. As her thinking is in the unconscious, it is not available to guide her and the ready-made opinions which serve instead of thinking can land her in a totally false position.
Obviously these inferior parts of the psyche should not be ignored until one becomes entangled in some such crisis of life, but should rather be given a place side by side with the more developed functions so that the chances of being caught at such a disadvantage may be minimized. But in order to do this the superior functions have to yield something of their dominance and forego some of the time and energy which have been expended on them or the lesser ones will be ruled out of court, or will be so browbeaten and bullied that they dare not show themselves. We have here an example of the way in which we of the Western World lean toward a totalitarian economy in our psychic life. We enthrone one function as superior and relegate the others as far as possible to the underworld of the unconscious. Anyone who has had to allow these infirm and repressed functions to come to the surface and has experienced in himself the revolution which takes place as they battle with the entrenched superior force in order to overthrow its totalitarian rule cannot fail to realize something of the power of the forces which back up any totalitarian dictatorship. We love so ardently to be whole, to be free from conflict, that we have taken a short cut to achieve our end and have repressed the inferior voices and energies within our own psyches. We would gladly accept a one-sided attitude if only the other side could be entirely repressed or eliminated. But this is totalitarianism and sooner or later the repressed elements will assuredly arise, for they also are imbued with a quota of specific energy, that is to say, they contain a certain energy which cannot be tapped by another element, nor can this energy be directed entirely into another channel, either by discipline, exploitation, or sublimation. If the totalitarian dictators realized this simple truth it might give them population up to a certain point, but if their lives are made miserable beyond that point, or if their human needs are denied too far, either they will die or they will rebel; indeed their rebellion owes its force to that very despair which knows that death is preferable to life if life is robbed of every living satisfaction.
This is the lesson that many a one has been faced with when he has lived too exclusively on the side of his superior function. For always the inferior functions represent the point of view which has been overlooked or discarded by the superior function and which lives a precarious life in the shadow. Their recognition means a radical re-evaluation of life itself. For this reason they are looked at askance as being tainted with the stigma of immorality and inferiority. For only that which is generally accepted and already established is moral in the eyes of the collective and nothing is reputable which is not useful to the life of the community.
Indeed, to bring the shadow up to consciousness and to accept the inferior function means to challenge in a fundamental way the conventional assumptions of right and wrong and these we all accept with very little criticism, for it is far easier to accept the code of our group than to think out our own moral standpoint for ourselves. And even if we do think these things out, it is not unusual when the test of our opinions comes, In some situation in life that must be met by overt action, to discover that our feelings have remained as conventional as were those of our grandmother, and indeed that even the details of her code have remained buried in the unconscious, virtually unchanged. In the crisis it is not our enlightened thinking, but this old-fashioned heirloom of a moral code, which too often proves to be the real arbiter of our action.
The shadow should really be a part of the whole personality; it has been split off from consciousness through the process of education and the development of the ego. It is therefore of the same sex as the individual. Consequently, it is projected into a woman by a woman, and into a man by a man. This in one reason why it may be easier to carry on a relation between persons of opposite sex than between two people of the same sex, for the shadow with its inferiorities and blackness remains relatively in abeyance when the relation is between a man and woman. The problems then depend much more on the projection of anima and animus. The tendency of the shadow to be projected to someone of the same sex accounts for the bad opinion that those women, who have not as yet developed considerable self-knowledge, proverbially have for each other. The same mechanism naturally takes place among unconscious men. Not infrequently, the marked difference in the esteem that a man and a woman have for the same person is to be accounted for by the shadow factor as much as by the projection of anima or animus. How often has a man been disgusted to find that his sister has fallen in love with the one man of his acquaintance that he has the least respect for, perhaps even thoroughly dislikes; or the situation may be reversed and a man becomes entranced by the very girl whom his sisters consider the most silly, the most underhanded and scheming of their circle. To them she is an example of the worst type of woman, while to him she may be attractive and desirable. Sometimes the event proves the onlookers to have been right; the girl turns out to be shallow and vain, if not worse. In this case, obviously his sisters saw the shadow qualities which were hidden from masculine eyes; but sometimes it. is the sisters who prove to have been wrong and the girl makes a satisfactory wife. In this case, it is probable that at least a part of the blackness was really due to a projection of their own shadows on to the rival for their brother’s affection, perhaps motivated by unconscious jealousy, which would naturally blind them to her real qualities and so would account for the injustice they unconsciously did to her.
In a relationship between friends of the same sex a rather different effect of the shadow may come to pass. For the friends have by nature the same kind of weakness and when they have established a mutual love and understanding, it becomes possible for them each to accept the weak side of the friend’s character as well as the more desirable parts. And so the love and affection they have for each other results in a willingness to accept the weakness and inferiority of their own shadow which they would be compelled to hide before someone of the opposite sex. In this way a relationship between friends of the same sex may help considerably in the acceptance of the shadow. This is one of the great values of such a friendship, for through this acceptance the integration of the shadow into the conscious personality is made far easier.
Yet this is never an easy task and the stoutest heart may well quail before the necessity of acknowledging the blackness and inadequacy that the shadow represents. But if one has the courage to accept this other side of oneself the result is not always what one had expected, for strangely enough when we take up the shadow side of our own personality, renouncing the silent claim to be entirely white, immaculately moral, the effect we produce on our environment is likely to be the exact opposite of that which we had feared. For when we carry the burden of our human weakness and error, other people are relieved of it. Formerly we cast a shadow dense in proportion to our conscious but unreal rectitude, but when we carry the shadow consciously its blight no longer falls on others and we begin to give the impression of being more complete and therefore wiser than the ordinary run of people.
Until a year or so ago there lived among the Navajo a wise man who had to go on all fours because of a congenital lameness. His people called him “He-who-walks-close-to-his-shadow,” a name that does indeed denote a wise one. We, too, would do well to walk close to our shadow and then it would not cause so many difficulties in our daily path, and we ourselves would not remain at the mercy of collective opinion but would achieve a criterion by which to judge the rightness or wrongness of a situation from a freer and more individual standpoint. By the acceptance of the black substance which adheres to the shadow, the first step in the individuation process, which the alchemists rightly call the Magnum Opus—the Great Work, will have been accomplished.
NOTES
This paper was read at a meeting of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City on October 27, 1944.
* [Ernest Sutherland and John V. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1932); Edwin Franden Dakin, Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930)].
Spring: Contributions to Jungian Thought (1945): 10–27
© Copyright 1945 The Analytical Psychology Club of New York, Inc.