Romancing the Shadow

It is impossible to maintain a child’s innocence according to a standard of perfect parenting—that is, the parent cannot meet the child’s longing for love, desire for safety, and needs for mirroring at every given moment. The parent, whose soul has been wounded, is bound to fail. From the point of view of the child’s soul, the betrayal is inevitabl

Romancing the shadow is subversive: The culture teaches us to be extroverted, quick, ambitious, productive. Workaholism is lauded; contemplation is shunned. But shadow-work is slow, cautious; it moves like an animal in the night. It moves us against the collective mandate to think positively, be productive, focus outwardly, and protect our image.

But we do not believe that the dissolution of the family and the concomitant lack of moral order we see around us stem primarily from an absence of moral order imposed from the outside. Instead, we suggest that in many homes the family soul has been sacrificed to maintain the illusion of the family persona. As a result, the family shadow erupts, ri

Family therapist Terence Real has written eloquently of this transmission of family shadow from fathers to sons. He distinguishes between overt male depression, which has debilitating but highly visible effects, and covert male depression, which may be chronic but well hidden by denial in heroic behaviors and addictions. Real points out that an epi

All of these layers of shadow projection might be imagined as nested dolls: The personal shadow is nested within the family shadow, which is nested within the cultural shadow, which is nested within the global shadow. As a result of these interrelated forces, biological factors, and family dynamics, we make our individual version of the Faustian ba

However, its formulaic approach does not account for the power of the unconscious. And at times it becomes so oversimplified that its proponents risk reductionism and the peril of reification—the danger of believing that to name something is to fully understand it (“Oh, you were abused as a child, or you come from an alcoholic family. That explains

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman writes of the link between the characters, which he calls our pathologies, and our compulsions, which he calls Ananke, the goddess of necessity. When we feel as if we are claimed by a foreign power, held hostage by a character that causes us to act in irrational, unfamiliar ways, we are caught in the circle of

For example, when we bury uncomfortable feelings to avoid dealing with them (suppression or repression), we pay the price of our aliveness.

On the other hand, a woman who sacrifices her career opportunities to be a stay-at-home mother may envy her husband’s achievements. In addition, she may succumb to the danger of envying her children’s opportunities as well. If she lives vicariously through her daughter with conscious pride, she also may suffer with unconscious resentment and expres