Our culture can urge us to exhile part of our self
ATTEMPT TO REPRESS THE SHADOW
ROBS US OF VALUABLE INSIGHT
“Thought of the Week” for June 28, 1999
All literature…can be thought of as creations by the “dark side” to enable it to rise up from earth and join the sunlit consciousness again. Many ancient religious, especially those of the matriarchies, evidentially moved so as to bring the dark side up into the personality slowly and steadily. The movement started early in a person’s life and, in the Mysteries at least, lasted for twenty to thirty years. Christianity, as many observers have noticed, has acted historically to polarize the “dark personality” and the “light personality.” Christian ethics usually involves the suppression of the dark one. As the consequences of this suppression become severe, century after century, we reach at last the state in which the psyche is split, and the two sides cannot find each other. We have “The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” …
How did the two persons get separated? Evidentially we spend the first twenty or twenty-five years of life deciding what should be pushed down into the shadow self, and the next forty years trying to get in touch with that material again. Cultures vary a lot in what they urge their members to exile. In general we can say that “the shadow” represents all that is instinctive in us. Whatever has a tail and lots of hair is in the shadow. …
Most of our literature describes efforts the shadow makes to rise, and efforts that fail. Ahab fails; it isn’t clear why; he has a strong connection with the “old ethic” through the rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets. Dimmesdale’s shadow fails. Apparently his fear of women blocks his own shadow from rising. I prefer to use the term “shadow,” rather than “evil,” in talking of literature, because “evil” permanently places the energy out there, as a part of some powerful being other than ourselves. “Shadow” is clumsy, but it makes it clear that these energies are inside of us.
Robert Bly. (1998). The Little Book on the Human Shadow. New York: HarperOne (pages 63-65)
Comment:
by Reg Harris
Copyright © 1999 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Updated October, 2007. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.
What Bly is discussing here is Jung’s archetype of the unconscious, the “Shadow.” The Shadow, which is created in our youth, is constituted of those energies, drives, desires and emotions which, when expressed, bring us pain, embarrassment or disapproval. As Connie Zweig, Ph. D. and Steve Wolf, Ph.D. describe in Romancing the Shadow.
Each shadow figure or character…has a story to tell with a similar plot line: At a young age, our full range of aliveness, feeling, and dependency was too much for our caretakers to bear. Unknowingly, they betrayed our young souls again and again, inflicting the wounds of neglect, intrusion, cruelty, and shame. To survive this wounding environment, as children we made a Faustian bargain, concealing the unacceptable parts of ourselves in the shadow and presenting only the acceptable parts (or ego) to the world. In an ongoing, subtle series of feedback loops with parents, teachers, clergy, and friends, we learned, over and over, how to present ourselves in an attempt to feel safe, accepted, and loves. In this way, ego and shadow are inevitably created in tandem within us all. (p. 45-46)
As Bly said, we form the shadow in our youth and then spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim the energies which we have repressed or rejected. This, I feel, is one of the great Heroic Journeys of adulthood: reclaiming the rejected parts of our psyche so that we can once again become a whole person. This struggle is depicted in some way in virtually all literature and film. Either we see the struggle to discover the shadow, a process which we can never do “consciously,” or we see the shadow grow so strong that it overpowers the ego, or we see the continued repression of the shadow until we kind of implode.
One need only think of some of the great pieces of literature to see the metaphorical exploration of the shadow. Bly mentions one of my personal favorites, Joseph Conrad, as “a great master of shadow literature.” Think, for example, of Heart of Darkness and Kurtz. Other “shadow literature” could include Death of a Salesman, The Scarlet Letter, Hemingway short stories, and most of Shakespeare.
If you would like to learn more about the shadow, I would suggest the two books I have already mentioned (The Little book on the Human Shadow and Romancing the Shadow), or read Jung’s own words in a work like The Portable Jung, edited and with and introduction by Joseph Campbell.
The more one understand Jung’s model of the psyche, the more one realizes that it is an excellent model for the Heroic Journey.
Origins of the Shadow archetype
Our culture can urge us to exhile part of our self
ATTEMPT TO REPRESS THE SHADOW
ROBS US OF VALUABLE INSIGHT
“Thought of the Week” for June 28, 1999
All literature…can be thought of as creations by the “dark side” to enable it to rise up from earth and join the sunlit consciousness again. Many ancient religious, especially those of the matriarchies, evidentially moved so as to bring the dark side up into the personality slowly and steadily. The movement started early in a person’s life and, in the Mysteries at least, lasted for twenty to thirty years. Christianity, as many observers have noticed, has acted historically to polarize the “dark personality” and the “light personality.” Christian ethics usually involves the suppression of the dark one. As the consequences of this suppression become severe, century after century, we reach at last the state in which the psyche is split, and the two sides cannot find each other. We have “The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” …
How did the two persons get separated? Evidentially we spend the first twenty or twenty-five years of life deciding what should be pushed down into the shadow self, and the next forty years trying to get in touch with that material again. Cultures vary a lot in what they urge their members to exile. In general we can say that “the shadow” represents all that is instinctive in us. Whatever has a tail and lots of hair is in the shadow. …
Most of our literature describes efforts the shadow makes to rise, and efforts that fail. Ahab fails; it isn’t clear why; he has a strong connection with the “old ethic” through the rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets. Dimmesdale’s shadow fails. Apparently his fear of women blocks his own shadow from rising. I prefer to use the term “shadow,” rather than “evil,” in talking of literature, because “evil” permanently places the energy out there, as a part of some powerful being other than ourselves. “Shadow” is clumsy, but it makes it clear that these energies are inside of us.
Robert Bly. (1998). The Little Book on the Human Shadow. New York: HarperOne (pages 63-65)
Comment:
by Reg Harris
Copyright © 1999 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Updated October, 2007. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.
What Bly is discussing here is Jung’s archetype of the unconscious, the “Shadow.” The Shadow, which is created in our youth, is constituted of those energies, drives, desires and emotions which, when expressed, bring us pain, embarrassment or disapproval. As Connie Zweig, Ph. D. and Steve Wolf, Ph.D. describe in Romancing the Shadow.
Each shadow figure or character…has a story to tell with a similar plot line: At a young age, our full range of aliveness, feeling, and dependency was too much for our caretakers to bear. Unknowingly, they betrayed our young souls again and again, inflicting the wounds of neglect, intrusion, cruelty, and shame. To survive this wounding environment, as children we made a Faustian bargain, concealing the unacceptable parts of ourselves in the shadow and presenting only the acceptable parts (or ego) to the world. In an ongoing, subtle series of feedback loops with parents, teachers, clergy, and friends, we learned, over and over, how to present ourselves in an attempt to feel safe, accepted, and loves. In this way, ego and shadow are inevitably created in tandem within us all. (p. 45-46)
As Bly said, we form the shadow in our youth and then spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim the energies which we have repressed or rejected. This, I feel, is one of the great Heroic Journeys of adulthood: reclaiming the rejected parts of our psyche so that we can once again become a whole person. This struggle is depicted in some way in virtually all literature and film. Either we see the struggle to discover the shadow, a process which we can never do “consciously,” or we see the shadow grow so strong that it overpowers the ego, or we see the continued repression of the shadow until we kind of implode.
One need only think of some of the great pieces of literature to see the metaphorical exploration of the shadow. Bly mentions one of my personal favorites, Joseph Conrad, as “a great master of shadow literature.” Think, for example, of Heart of Darkness and Kurtz. Other “shadow literature” could include Death of a Salesman, The Scarlet Letter, Hemingway short stories, and most of Shakespeare.
If you would like to learn more about the shadow, I would suggest the two books I have already mentioned (The Little book on the Human Shadow and Romancing the Shadow), or read Jung’s own words in a work like The Portable Jung, edited and with and introduction by Joseph Campbell.
The more one understand Jung’s model of the psyche, the more one realizes that it is an excellent model for the Heroic Journey.