The Shadow

Carl Jung probably proposed the idea of the shadow after reading Alchemy and Mysticism. He tracked the idea through historical symbolism, part of the myth structure or mythemes.

Jung worked closely with academics to develop a myth and religious structure that matched his attempts to find symbols in the unconscious. There were patterns in the unconscious that repeated in the stories from Greece and Rome and in the myths of Catholicism and Judaism (to branch into oriental speculation, too).

What if our unconscious is not as personal as we tend to think with our modern minds but a collective space that shares some nuclei, some patterns we can see repeating?

One of those patterns is the Shadow. Star Wars follows a typical Hero Myth structure, which Jung proposed concerns our individuation process. Here, the shadow is Darth Vader, the opposite of the light that the Jedi embody.

The Shadow seems to be a repository for what we move away from our identity—the things we hate, repress, hide, or are afraid of.

So, an excellent way to start exploring your Shadow is to track your prejudices, annoyance with other people, and spontaneous judgement when watching TV.

Why would you have a spontaneous hate for some people?

Jung proposes that you embody a part of yourself that you have repressed. As you keep that part out of sight with unconscious hate, you must also hate the outside representations.

As therapists, we sometimes try to be the 'good person' and feel we are doing 'good' by helping others.

This is a good start, but as we go deeper, we cannot avoid hating some of our clients. Winnicott has some papers about hate in countertransference worth reading, and this is an important topic for any therapist.

Hate is necessary for deep love as a relational layer, even if that is counterintuitive.

This is because to be individuated, we need to integrate our opinions. To mature, we must incorporate our 'bad' objects and become someone who can hate inside the love.

This integration transforms this hate. It is not the violent reaction and desire to punch but a subtle tension in our bodies that we express in a kind way, maybe by saying, "I wanted to ask you to pay for the session you forgot".

Hate becomes a healthy boundary setting.

In psychoanalysis, it is the integrations of those sides that allow you to become a Neurotic, which sounds terrible, but it means you are not Psychotic or Borderline.

Developing an 'understanding' is a big part of arriving at a love/hate integration. Sometimes, a client has traits I do not like, but I take the time to talk with them, and I start to understand them. I want to see where they are coming from, and as soon as that happens, I start feeling positive for them, even if they have traits I do not like.

This process of transforming a dislike into an understanding-love moves us closer to our shadow integration. I see it as a deep part of my growth process, and I enjoy it. I like to feel the challenge inside, the difficulty of processing and the expansion it generates in my mental space.

Sometimes, we try to embody the 'good therapist' too hard, which carries negative results. Freud called it the 'furore curandis', a passion for healing others, fuelled by our unconscious pain.

We project our pain onto our clients, and therefore we become a bit too passionate about soothing and healing them, which in turn results in bad timing and enactments.

We need to keep track of those shadow enactments and feelings because they help us heal, grow, and expand. They also help our clients. Most of all, they make our work more engaging, like a personal journey of messing up, repairing, and finding new clues in our creative process.

Here are some Shadow awareness steps: - Judging others as shadow projections is the first step in shadow awareness. Sometimes, this is subtle; others may point it out, giving us insight. - Self-unwanted parts: Recognising what's projected is the second step when we start to own our shadow. We may need a therapist to help us see and navigate the rejected sides. - Anima animus: soul and spirit, art and technique integration. A deeper layer in our unconscious is to recognise the Anima and Animus. Both are often associated with femininity and masculinity, but we have both and need to integrate both. I added soul/spirit and art/technique, as there are other ways of separating them besides gender. - Antagonist: Facing our transitional enemy means we can now face some people we deeply reject and keep ourselves coherent and present. This can happen as we better understand our fears and how they relate to our shadow. - Deep pain: we all have more profound levels of trauma we are not aware of, and those are always present in our little moments of hate and destruction. Integrating them is part of the Shadow work, but uncovering them may take longer. - Deep destructive instinct: a step forward from trauma is to learn to soothe your more animal mind, the one that gets mighty and destructive. You can see it as understanding and integrating your broken and sometimes feral inner child. - Acceptance of death: reflecting on your finitude and accepting your life and its closure is a sign of peace with your shadow. Some meditations can lead you to the sensation of mind, which furthers this step. - Embracing life and death: A consequence of the previous one is accepting our fragility and mistakes as well as those of others. As we go deeper into this, we can start accepting that we may die at any moment; therefore, we try always to be coherent and integrated. This gives us peace and a more profound acceptance. Now, we can have a spontaneous, unconditional positive regard because we are losing the fear of messing up or others doing wrong to us: it is all part of life ('be one with the force').

This description of Shadow Work may sound too much for some, but I think it encapsulates what personal growth means to me. It is not so much about being more intelligent and learning more techniques as it is about understanding and accepting life and its conflicts.

When we emphasise growth into knowledge and technique, it is the temptation of the Dark Side. We aim for power; we strive for control. And I think that is great, only if subordinated to a path of acceptance and integration of our dark side.

The difference between Shadow Work and Going into the Dark Side is that a Sith lord is not thinking about their shadow; they are their shadow. They are feeding from the pain and the anger as fuel for more energy.

So, attempting to be only on the 'good side' always carries a greater risk than integrating the shadow. A non-integrated 'good' will easily step into the darkness without awareness. A 'good' without 'bad' is naive and prone to enactments and manipulations. This leads me to my main critique of the Jedi or any attempt at religious purity: that the good and the bad are constantly kept apart. Consequently, a group like the Jedi is permanently condemned to fail in their good intentions.