Klint’s ‘The Swan’ is a brilliant image for the shadow. I also liked your observation that the people who irritate us most often carry a piece of our own shadow. It reminded me of a wonderfully sharp line from Gore Vidal: “Curious how we always detect (and despise) in others our own faults.”
I think Jung means that it's the suppression that makes the shadow contents dangerous and undermining to the ego-persona, and so prevent the potential full self being developed. rather than the absolute nature of them, eg Frankenstein's monster wanted to love and be loved, he turned murderous because of the rejection, ie being shut in the cellar because of his unacceptable external appearance. Jung wanted to point out these psycholgical formations had real physical effects, could coalesce into a mass movement such as fascism. The Homo Sapiens person could do with a visit to Jung's consulting room!
My question (and what I’ve never figured out) is that if you stop suppressing your shadow, what happens? How can that be done without negative consequences?
My experience is that it weakens the shadow to fully allow it but, crucially, only if we allow the time and space Jung argues for to equally allow the consequent feelings and thoughts. This requires support and I would argue for creative tools that enable us to healthily individuate and integrate. I completely agree that suppression strengthens the shadow—and often wonder what our lives, and our societies, would look like if we integrated this wisdom.
Love this. Ambition integrated becomes drive. Cruelty integrated doesn’t need to become permission to act on it, it just needs to stop being denied as something that exists in you at all.
Thanks for this. I've always found more personal relevance in Jung's version of the self (and its inhabitants, to beat the metaphor one more time). As for the shadow, I very much believe in the collective shadow--what makes nations with the highest ideals suddenly become monstrously inhuman. At times, it may require more than merely acknowledging this collective shadow, it must be confronted.
The last comment about “being brave to find out what else is down there” circles back nicely to Robert Frost and the inspiration behind “The Road Not Taken.” As has been shown (more extensively by biographer Adam Plunkett), the poem was meant as a light joke and critique of the indecisiveness of Frost’s friend Edward Thomas, a fellow poet and English critic who often agonised in his walks with Frost through the woods whether they had taken the right path.
Below is Frost in his owns words, close to 40 years after the poem was first published. Thomas, having taken the decision to flight in WW I against Frost’s encouragement to join him in the US, died at the Battle of Arras on Easter Sunday in 1917:
‘One stanza of “The Road Not Taken” was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England. [It] was as found three or four years later, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it. I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way. And so I . . . sent it to him in France, getting the reply, ’What are you trying to do with me?’”
-Robert Frost (at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1953)
In the end, no one can know where to draw the line, when to confront a shadow and when to leave it alone. But more importantly, we shouldn’t be agonising about the dilemma of choice. Being brave is not about taking life-defining decisions, but about trying things out and accepting that one may return back to a fork and choose the other road.
Thank you for this — the Frost/Thomas backstory is fascinating, I didn't know that context, and it's a lovely way to close the loop on the choice/agonising point.
I look forward to Sunday mornings with your essays…this one is a little diamond…explanations and observations perfectly balanced with images…I have saved it to read agin but these are thoughts that will stay with me. Thank you!
Love this bit, I think it's essential: "But there is a difference between a crisis that happens to you and a descent you choose to make on purpose, however incomplete the map."
From this perspective, I'm wondering why not more people are having this midlife 'crisis'.
Thank you! That's a good question. Maybe it's easier to keep moving than to stop and look at it, though I suspect more people are having it than admit to it.
Yet, again, a wonderful post, as Varsha points out in a comment here, “written with such clarity.”
Personally, I’m very grateful for this as I am writing a memoir (with a Granta memoir workshop) and as part of it I am scanning and rereading about 50 years of correspondence—some of it work but most of it family and friends and in particular an old longtime lover. Doing this is requiring a discipline and courage that is greater than I expected. Visiting the cellar is interesting, instructive and quite daunting at times. Worth the trips down there but I am finding that long daily walks are crucial to get some sense of balance back.
Thank you for this. And yes “The Swan” is perfect here.
Thank you, Ellen. That sounds like genuinely demanding work, in the best and hardest sense. Gpod luck, and I'm glad the walks are helping balance it out!
Thank you for a very interesting piece. I've read a lot of philosophy, but haven't almost studiously (regrettably) avoided Jung and Freud. What's a good book on Jung's work to start a late-in-life rectification of my ignorance? Can be by Jung himself or not.
Thank you! For a starting point, Jung's own Man and His Symbols is I think the best entry. He wrote it for a general audience and it has a range of voices in there too. It was my entry point and I loved it straight away. Anthony Stevens' Jung: A Very Short Introduction is excellent too!
Richard Hames has recently published an essay on this platform about Reality and how it is so much more difficult to establish our sense of reality in this modern world compared to how it used to be. Establishing a sense of our self on all levels, as you describe, must be affected by the context of our perceived reality which, as Hames describes, can be very confusing when having to interpret the infinite streams of 'information' we are now subjected to as opposed to those living in the small, local indigenous communities where immediate surroundings and direct personal experience lay a more correct foundation. It is obvious to me that the majority of our brethren in the West find themselves clinging onto a curated narrative acting as a their perception of a 'reality' which can be easily dismantled once we begin to follow Jung's path you describe and step away from the shadow play.
Your morning essay has become an essential to me since finding this stream. Thank you for using Frost's poem as a grounding for plunging into Jung. I've been enjoying and looking back on this poem for 60+ years and credit it as strong influence on me as I developed my love of literature to propel my imagination to delve to think "what if?"
In the course of recent shadow work, it was pointed out to me, and I believe, that while the contents of "my" shadow seem personal, they are collective. This insight eases the shame and lightens the burden of doing the work.
I enjoyed reminding myself of Jung with your personalised/individuated? reflection - thank you. Gestalt Therapy owes a lot to Jung in my opinion "The paradoxical theory of change is at the core of the Gestalt therapy change theory. The paradox is that the more one tries to be who one is not, the more one stays the same (Beisser, 1970). When people identify with their whole self, when they acknowledge whatever aspect arises at a moment, the conditions for wholeness and growth are created (G Yonteff, p150, Taken from Chapter 5, Gestalt Therapy Theory of Change. (2005). In A. Woldt and S. Toman (Eds.). Gestalt Therapy: History, Theory, and Practice. Pp 81-100. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications).
Klint’s ‘The Swan’ is a brilliant image for the shadow. I also liked your observation that the people who irritate us most often carry a piece of our own shadow. It reminded me of a wonderfully sharp line from Gore Vidal: “Curious how we always detect (and despise) in others our own faults.”
Thanks Michael, that Vidal line is perfect, hadn't come across it before.
I think Jung means that it's the suppression that makes the shadow contents dangerous and undermining to the ego-persona, and so prevent the potential full self being developed. rather than the absolute nature of them, eg Frankenstein's monster wanted to love and be loved, he turned murderous because of the rejection, ie being shut in the cellar because of his unacceptable external appearance. Jung wanted to point out these psycholgical formations had real physical effects, could coalesce into a mass movement such as fascism. The Homo Sapiens person could do with a visit to Jung's consulting room!
My question (and what I’ve never figured out) is that if you stop suppressing your shadow, what happens? How can that be done without negative consequences?
My experience is that it weakens the shadow to fully allow it but, crucially, only if we allow the time and space Jung argues for to equally allow the consequent feelings and thoughts. This requires support and I would argue for creative tools that enable us to healthily individuate and integrate. I completely agree that suppression strengthens the shadow—and often wonder what our lives, and our societies, would look like if we integrated this wisdom.
Really well put, thank you
Great question, and honestly one I don't think has a tidy answer, but Orna's reply below gets at it well
That Frankenstein reading sounds spot on, thank you Alex. You've clarified a point here that needed clarifying!
Love this. Ambition integrated becomes drive. Cruelty integrated doesn’t need to become permission to act on it, it just needs to stop being denied as something that exists in you at all.
That distinction is perfectly put, thank you. amAcknowledging isn't the same as acting on!
Thanks for this. I've always found more personal relevance in Jung's version of the self (and its inhabitants, to beat the metaphor one more time). As for the shadow, I very much believe in the collective shadow--what makes nations with the highest ideals suddenly become monstrously inhuman. At times, it may require more than merely acknowledging this collective shadow, it must be confronted.
Thanks Brooks; the collective shadow point is a really interesting extension
So interesting! Like all your pieces a lovely mixture of fascinating and thought provoking and just written with such clarity! Thank you.
Thank you Varsha. Wonderfully kind, like all your comments
The last comment about “being brave to find out what else is down there” circles back nicely to Robert Frost and the inspiration behind “The Road Not Taken.” As has been shown (more extensively by biographer Adam Plunkett), the poem was meant as a light joke and critique of the indecisiveness of Frost’s friend Edward Thomas, a fellow poet and English critic who often agonised in his walks with Frost through the woods whether they had taken the right path.
Below is Frost in his owns words, close to 40 years after the poem was first published. Thomas, having taken the decision to flight in WW I against Frost’s encouragement to join him in the US, died at the Battle of Arras on Easter Sunday in 1917:
‘One stanza of “The Road Not Taken” was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England. [It] was as found three or four years later, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it. I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way. And so I . . . sent it to him in France, getting the reply, ’What are you trying to do with me?’”
-Robert Frost (at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1953)
In the end, no one can know where to draw the line, when to confront a shadow and when to leave it alone. But more importantly, we shouldn’t be agonising about the dilemma of choice. Being brave is not about taking life-defining decisions, but about trying things out and accepting that one may return back to a fork and choose the other road.
Thank you for this — the Frost/Thomas backstory is fascinating, I didn't know that context, and it's a lovely way to close the loop on the choice/agonising point.
I look forward to Sunday mornings with your essays…this one is a little diamond…explanations and observations perfectly balanced with images…I have saved it to read agin but these are thoughts that will stay with me. Thank you!
Thank you so much, Ann — that really means a lot
Love this bit, I think it's essential: "But there is a difference between a crisis that happens to you and a descent you choose to make on purpose, however incomplete the map."
From this perspective, I'm wondering why not more people are having this midlife 'crisis'.
Thank you! That's a good question. Maybe it's easier to keep moving than to stop and look at it, though I suspect more people are having it than admit to it.
Yet, again, a wonderful post, as Varsha points out in a comment here, “written with such clarity.”
Personally, I’m very grateful for this as I am writing a memoir (with a Granta memoir workshop) and as part of it I am scanning and rereading about 50 years of correspondence—some of it work but most of it family and friends and in particular an old longtime lover. Doing this is requiring a discipline and courage that is greater than I expected. Visiting the cellar is interesting, instructive and quite daunting at times. Worth the trips down there but I am finding that long daily walks are crucial to get some sense of balance back.
Thank you for this. And yes “The Swan” is perfect here.
Thank you, Ellen. That sounds like genuinely demanding work, in the best and hardest sense. Gpod luck, and I'm glad the walks are helping balance it out!
Thank you for a very interesting piece. I've read a lot of philosophy, but haven't almost studiously (regrettably) avoided Jung and Freud. What's a good book on Jung's work to start a late-in-life rectification of my ignorance? Can be by Jung himself or not.
Thank you in advance.
Thank you! For a starting point, Jung's own Man and His Symbols is I think the best entry. He wrote it for a general audience and it has a range of voices in there too. It was my entry point and I loved it straight away. Anthony Stevens' Jung: A Very Short Introduction is excellent too!
Richard Hames has recently published an essay on this platform about Reality and how it is so much more difficult to establish our sense of reality in this modern world compared to how it used to be. Establishing a sense of our self on all levels, as you describe, must be affected by the context of our perceived reality which, as Hames describes, can be very confusing when having to interpret the infinite streams of 'information' we are now subjected to as opposed to those living in the small, local indigenous communities where immediate surroundings and direct personal experience lay a more correct foundation. It is obvious to me that the majority of our brethren in the West find themselves clinging onto a curated narrative acting as a their perception of a 'reality' which can be easily dismantled once we begin to follow Jung's path you describe and step away from the shadow play.
Here is a link
https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/reality-what-a-concept?r=i8hr0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks for this! Sounds like a really relevant piece, look forward to taking a look at it
I also wonder how much energy we spend keeping parts of ourselves locked away.
Thank you.
Your morning essay has become an essential to me since finding this stream. Thank you for using Frost's poem as a grounding for plunging into Jung. I've been enjoying and looking back on this poem for 60+ years and credit it as strong influence on me as I developed my love of literature to propel my imagination to delve to think "what if?"
Thank you, Diane, that's lovely to hear, and 60+ years with that poem is quite a companionship. Glad it made a good doorway into Jung!
In the course of recent shadow work, it was pointed out to me, and I believe, that while the contents of "my" shadow seem personal, they are collective. This insight eases the shame and lightens the burden of doing the work.
Collective rather than personal does take some of the shame out of it! Thank you Daniel
I enjoyed reminding myself of Jung with your personalised/individuated? reflection - thank you. Gestalt Therapy owes a lot to Jung in my opinion "The paradoxical theory of change is at the core of the Gestalt therapy change theory. The paradox is that the more one tries to be who one is not, the more one stays the same (Beisser, 1970). When people identify with their whole self, when they acknowledge whatever aspect arises at a moment, the conditions for wholeness and growth are created (G Yonteff, p150, Taken from Chapter 5, Gestalt Therapy Theory of Change. (2005). In A. Woldt and S. Toman (Eds.). Gestalt Therapy: History, Theory, and Practice. Pp 81-100. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications).
Thanks for this; that Gestalt paradox is a great parallel!