Excerpts from: Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature edited by, Jeremiah Abrams and Connie Zweig. New York: G.P.Putnam's Sons 1991 excerpts selected by Dr. Connie Hood typographical errors by Judson Nichols Edward C. Whitmont, "The Evolution of the Shadow" 13 Let us remember again that a dream always points to an unconscious situation. It is complementary and reveals that which is not sufficiently within the field of our awareness. A dream will not restate a situation which the dreamer already sees adequately and correctly. Where there is doubt in the conscious mind a dream may help to resolve that doubt by reiteration, but whenever a dream repeats something of which we feel utterly convinced, a challenge is thereby raised by the unconscious; our projections are held up to us. D. Patrick Miller, "What the Shadow Knows: An interview with John A. Sanford" 20 Here it's important to understand the crucial difference between the shadow and what's genuinely evil. As Fritz Kunkel once said, the secret is that the ego is the devil--not the shadow. He believed that there is evil beyond the ego--an archetypal evil--but for most people, it's the ego that's really the problem. The Jungian definition of the shadow was put well by Wedward C. Whitmont, a New York analyst, who said that the shadow is "everything that has been rejected during the development of the personality because it did not fit into the ego ideal." If you were raised a Christian with the ego idea of being loving, morally upright, kind, and generous, then you'd have to repress any qualities you found in yourself that were antithetical to the idea: anger, selfishness, crazy sexual fantasies, and so on. All these qualities that you split off would become the secondary personality called the shadow. And if that secondary personality became sufficiently isolated, you would become what's known as a multiple personality. In every multiple personality case, you can always clearly identify the shadow. It's not always evil--it's just different that then ego. Jung said the truth of the matter is that the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. Whatever has been repressed holds a tremendous amount of energy, with a great positive potential. So the shadow, no matter how troublesome it may be, is not intrinsically evil. The ego, in its refusal of insight and its refusal to accept the entire personality, contributes much more to evil than the shadow. 23-24 What helps us tell the difference is what Jung called the feeling function--our inner means of ascertaining the value of something. The feeling function tells us what is desirable and not desirable, but it's not an ego judgment. The ego determines what's good and bad from the point of view of its own concerns: that which tends to support our egocentric defense system is what we deem to be good; that which is antithetical to it, we deem to be evil. When the Puritans infected the Native Americans with diseases that killed them, the Puritans saw it as a good thing, and preached sermons about how God was paving the way for them to settle the land. Of course, the Indians who were dying of smallpox would have had a very different judgment of the good and evil in the situation. The feeling function is free of egocentric contamination. It is a pure feeling evaluation, but it's not always heard. The fact that the American public eventually turned against the Vietnam War was due to the rise of the feeling function--an increasing number of people came to a *feeling* judgment that the way was wrong and terrible, even if it supposedly served our political aims. And of course they were right. The value judgment of the feeling function is a reliable determiner of the good and evil in a situation--provided that it has the right information. If it doesn't have all the information, or sees only a part of the whole situation, the feeling function is perfectly capable of arriving at an erroneous conclusion. .... The Sun: Is it possible to get stuck there? Can we be doomed to one encounter with the shadow after another, with no integration following? Sanford: I don't think so, because a genuine insight into the shadow also calls out what Jung called the Self, the creative center. And then things begin to move, so the depression doesn't become permanent. A million and one changes can occur after that: it's different for every individual. What Kunkel called the "real center" of the personality begins to emerge, and gradually the ego is reoriented to a closer relationship with that real center. Then a person is much less likely to become affiliated with genuine evil, because the integration of the shadow is always concurrent with the dissolution of the false persona. One becomes much more realistic about oneself; seeing the truth about one's own nature always has very salutary effects. Honesty is the great defense against genuine evil. When we stop lying to ourselves, that's the greatest protection we can have against evil. 26 Kunkel made the mysterious statement that "in a showdown, God is always on the side of the shadow, not the ego." For all its difficulties, the shadow is closer to the creative source. .... The ego is not really diminished in the process of integration; it simply becomes less rigid in its boundaries. There's a tremendous difference between a strong ego and an egocentric ego; the latter is always weak. Individuation, the attainment of one's real potential, can't take place without the strong ego. Anthony Stevens, "The Shadow in History and Literature" 35 The shadow does not consist only of omissions. It shows up just as often in an impulsive or inadvertent act. Before one has time to think, the evil remark pops out, the plot is hatched, the wrong decision is made, and one is confronted with results that were never intended or consciously wanted. Furthermore, the shadow is exposed to collective infections to a much greater extent than is the conscious personality. When a man is alone, for instance, he feels relatively all right; but as soon as "the others" do dark, primitive things he begins to fear that if he doesn't join in, he will be considered a fool. Thus he gives way to impulses that do not really belong to him at all. It is particularly in contacts with people of the same sex that one stumbles over both one's own shadow and those of other people. Although we do see the shadow in a person of the opposite sex, we are usually much less annoyed by it and can more easily pardon it. In dreams and myths, therefore, the shadow appears as a person of the same sex as that of the dreamer. Marie-Louise von Franz, "The Realisation of the Shadow in Dreams" 38 Whether the shadow becomes our friend or enemy depends largely upon ourselves. As the dreams of the unexplored house and the French desperado both show, the shadow is not necessarily always an opponent. In fact, he is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love--whatever the situation requires. The shadow becomes hostile only when he is ignored or misunderstood. William A. Miller, "Finding the Shadow in Daily Life" 40-41 We also project our positive shadow qualities onto others: We see in others those positive traits which are our very own, but which, for whatever reason, we refuse to allow entry into our consciousness and are undiscernible to us. .... When one is once "hooked" by a positive quality in another person, one may project all sorts of other positive qualities onto that person. This happen occasionally in personnel interviews and is known as the "halo effect." The interviewee who thus hooks the interviewer can then do no wrong in the eyes of the interviewer. The interviewer's placing of personal positive qualities onto the interviewee may override strong evidence to the contrary. Introduction to "Shadow Making: Forming the Disowned Self in the Family" 48 Jung told me that he once met a distinguished man, a Quaker, who could not imagine that he had ever done anything wrong in his life. "And do you know what happened to his children?" Jung asked. "The son became a thief, and the daughter a prostitute. Because the father would not take on his shadow, his share in the imperfection of human nature, his children were compelled to live out the dark side which he had ignored." Harville Hendrix, "Creating the False Self" Nick's summary of 51: As a child, certain parts of ourselves are rejected and we have to form all sorts of patterns of behavior so that the pain is not as great. We then carry those behaviors into adulthood where they are seen as unhealthy and are also rejected. Often we defend ourselves by saying that these are actually signs of positive virtues but they are seen in a negative light. "In a sense, he is right. His negative traits are not a part of his original nature." So we have three parts to our personality: the lost self, the false self, and the disowned self. The lost self is what is repressed. The false self is what you created. The disowned self is the parts of the false self that "was met with disapproval and were therefore denied." John C. Pierrakos, "Anatomy of Evil" 88-89 When man is in a healthy state, his life is a constant creative process. He is inundated by feelings of love, of oneness with other human beings. The oneness is the awareness that he is not different from others. He wants to help them; he identifies with them; he sense that anything that is happening to them is happening to himself. A healthy person has a positive direction in his life. He wills his life in a positive direction, and he is successful--in business, in his thinking, in his feeling of contentment with himself. In that state there is little or no sickness and no evil. In the diseased state, the first characteristic is that reality is distorted--the reality of the body, the reality of the emotions, and the reality of the true nature of other people and their actions. Evil, then, is a distortion of facts that in themselves are natural. Because the sick person does not perceive his own distortions, he feels that the ills in his life and functioning come from the outside. The sicker he is, the more he feels that his troubles are caused by outside forces. W. Brugh Joy, "A Heretic in a New Age Community" 152 The function of poets is to give voice to the collective. When the content is infantile rage and resentment that has been disowned--and how natural for such to exist in a community that perceives itself only as manifesting love and light -- and object must be found to carry the unconscious forces. Through the mechanism of projection, destructive energies were unleashed that night without the participants' having to accept that the forces of contempt and jealousy were not only within the poet but also within the community itself! 153 Becoming transparent to accusations does not mean parts of oneself do not feel hurt, humiliated, angry, and defensive. It means realizing what is actually transpiring and not going unconscious or falling victim to one's own disowned material! Liz Greene, "The Shadow in Astrology" 156 You see that the issue of the shadow isn't a question of admitting faults. It's a question of being shaken right down to your foundations by realizing that you are not as you appear--not only to others, but also to yourself. The shadow reminds you that what you value the most may be badly shaken if you let it in. ..... The repugnance usually hides a very deep fear, a fear of being annihilated as the person you know yourself to be. Andrew Bard Schmookler, "Acknowledging Our Inner Spirit" 191-192 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 sant -- 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." Jerry Fjerkenstad, "Who are the Criminals?" 229 Developmental psychology, especially as described by Robert Kegan, lays out stages we need to progress through in order to mature as human beings. Most of us get stuck in the early stages because we've never been trained on how to make the sacrifices necessary for the series of deaths and rebirths that are the alchemical process as represented by developmental psychology. As a result, the lesson represented by each stage or operation remains unlearned. Sheldon B. Kopp, "Tale of a Descent into Hell" 247-248 If we flee from the evil in ourselves, we do it at our hazard. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel. Much of the time I believe that we are all about as good and as bad as one another. A greater capacity for good, such as that to be found in the enlightened therapist, is matched by his increased capacity for even greater evil. As for the patient, "At best . . . [he] should come out of the analysis as he actually is, in harmony with himself, neither good nor bad, but as a man truly is, a natural being." Dante has descended into the Abyss of Evil; he has had to spend a season in Hell, before he could rise once more to be illumined by the Divine Light. There is no sin he could not find within himself. He is as good and as bad as the rest of us. 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?" Barbara Hannah, "Learning Active Imagination" 297 There is one very important rule that should always be retained in every technique of our active imagination. In the places where we enter it ourselves, we must give our full, conscious attention to what we say or do, just as much -- or even more -- than we would in an important outer situation. This will prevent it from remaining passive fantasy. But when we have done or said all that we want, we should be able to make our minds a blank, so that we can hear or see what the unconscious wants to say or do. Jeremiah Abrams, "Epilogue" 304 We each contain the potentials to be both destructive and creative. Admitting to the dark enemies within us is really a confessional act, the beginning of psychological change. Nothing about ourselves can change unless we first accept it and grant it reality. Shadow-work is the initiatory phase of making a whole of ourselves. But for all the talk about wholeness, none of us can really contain the whole, at least in a conscious way. We cannot be aware of everything at all times. Fragmentation is built into our way of knowing. ..... Shadow-work is good medicine! It leads to a practice I refer to as *the pursuit of the unhypocritical life*, which some might call living with integrity. -----------