“Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it.” Carl Jung, The Integration of the Personality
The challenge of the shadow awaits each of us. When we ignore it little tricks get played out on us like stubbing our toe as we go to shake the hand of a person we have projected too much importance on. Or those embarrassing slips of the tongue.
The shadow has both a personal and a collective dimension and on the collective scale it extends to the diabolic. Horror films fascinate many of us for this reason: they play out on the screen the shadow imagery that remains buried in the deeper layers of the psyche. Does it need to remain buried or can we begin the process of integration? Can we afford not to?
Jung’s point:
“Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.” CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.140
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- Image by ®DS via Flickr
Everyone knows nowadays that people “have complexes.” What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.” Carl Jung, “A Review of the Complex Theory”, par.200
We know when someone pushes our buttons. They have a certain power to “play” us so that regardless of our best intentions, our response tends to be emotionally exaggerated. Complexes are simply the emotionally charged images or ideas that form the building blocks of the psyche.
Thinking about complexes is another way to approach an understanding of the archetypes.
“Complexes interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb the conscious performance; they produce disturbances of memory and blockages in the flow of associations; they appear and disappear according to their own laws; they can temporarily obsess consciousness, or influence speech and action in an unconscious way. In a word, complexes behave like independent beings.” Jung, “Psychological Factors in Human Behavior”, par 253
An experience of an archetype, not the idea of one, is an experience of a complex. It’s a difficult but essential distinction. The intellectual understanding of archetypal categories is pretty common today. We even see archetypal marketing being touted in many corners. But all that doesn’t bring us one step closer to the living reality of the archetypes within the psyche.
The Unconscious will have its way with us if we do not pay attention to it. Compulsion, fears, a host of destructive behaviors from the instincts run amuck, these are but a few of the tools the Unconscious seems quite content to unleash in the inattentive, or unexamined life, it’s reckless fury. So the challenge is building the bridge, finding ways to build relationship to those parts of ourselves that are not personal, but are powerful.
Active imagination is a technique that Jung taught which could take many shapes. Writing, drawing, movement, sand play all could be vehicles to engage and improvise with these forces which inhabit us.
The task is simple to define, but it can be difficult to encounter: to engage the dream while awake. Jung provides this simple task as a path of entry:
“He should occupy himself intensively with his mood in an uncritical frame of mind, becoming absorbed in it, and noting down on paper a description of the mood and all the fantasies that emerge. In doing so the fantasies will be allowed the widest free-play. Out of this occupation there emerges a more or less complete expression of the mood, which reproduces the contents of the depression as extensively and faithfully as possible. Since the depression was not made by consciousness, but represents an unwelcome intrusion on the part of the unconscious, then the expression of the mood so produced is a picture of the tendencies of the unconscious as a whole, which are contained in the depression.” Carl Jung The Transcendent Function, Pg. 17
Rendering the image of the mood, even depression…give it a try. You might be surprised where this type of play leads you.
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In many ways the news cycle has slowed down.
This past week Bernie Maydoff was sent to prison for what will likely be the rest of his life for the largest Ponzi scheme in history. As my good friend Doug has noted “leveraging down is hell…” What’s so interesting is his smoke and mirrors game was going on for decades.
Let’s not miss this story, that fraud and abuse could be responsible for for a substantial percent of the increases in medicare.
NASA had to rush the crew of the Space Station into the escape pod while a wayward piece of our space garbage spiraled by dangerously close. Audio here. Again, the problem of our space junk has been mounting for…decades.
So today’s end note, thinking of the news from an archetypal perspective, is simple: while its often the case that current events often present the face of a scary dragon, the body of the beast extends back in time decades, and if we can really open our eyes, centuries. What collective attitude would make it acceptable to act in such a way to litter our inner space orbiting zone with 100000 pieces of space junk. Granted, much of it is due to accidents, but not all of it. I’d point out that our sense that we dump what ever is not useful and run to the next thing, collectively, like a child that does not know how to put his or her toys away after playing.
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