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.
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