🌒 shadow

The shadow blurts out in slips of the tongue. When, like the archetypal Fool, we make embarrassing misstatements, the shadow slides past the gates of consciousness momentarily and reveals unintentional feelings or thoughts, such as sexual innuendo, sarcasm, or cruelty. Caught with our masks down, we smile in embarrassment. For instance, in describi

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The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feeli... See more

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

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Karl Jung said this about ‘the Shadow’ in one of his books: ‘It is as evil as we are positive … the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive. … The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and beco

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Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to re

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