Marie-Louise von Franz:The Realization of the Shadow in Dreams
The shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality.
It represents unknown or little-known attributes and qualities of the ego-aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be conscious.
In some aspects, the shadow can also consist of collective factors that stem
from a source outside the individual’s personal life.
When an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often.ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people-such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and
cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions-in short, all the little
sins about which he might previously have told himself:
“That doesn’t matter; nobody will notice it, and in any case other people do it too.”
If you feel an overwhelming rage coming up in you when a friend reproaches you about a fault, you can be fairly sure that at this point you will find a part of your shadow, of which you are unconscious.
It is, of course, natural to become annoyed when others who are “no better” criticize you because of shadow faults.
But what can you say if your own dreams-an inner judge in your own being-reproach you?
That is the moment when the ego gets caught, and the result is usually embarrassed silence.
Afterward the pain and lengthy work of self-education begins-a work, we might say, that is the psychological equivalent of the labors of Hercules.
This unfortunate hero’s first task, you will remember, was to clean up in one day the Augean Stables, in which hundreds of cattle had dropped their dung for many decades-a task so enormous that the ordinary mortal would be overcome by discouragement at the mere thought ofit.
The shadow does not consist only of omissions. It shows upjust as often
in an impulsive or inadvertent act.
Before one has time to think, the evil remark pops out, the plot is hatched, the wrong decision is made, and one is confronted with results that were never intended or consciously wanted.
Furthermore, the shadow is exposed to collective infections to a much greater extent than is the conscious personality.
When a man is alone, for instance, he feels relatively all right; but as soon as “the others” do dark, primitive things he begins to fear that if he doesn’tjoin in, he will be considered a fool.
Thus he gives way to impulses that do not really belong to him at all.
It is particularly in contacts with people of the same sex that one stumbles over both one’s own shadow and those of other people.
Although we do see the shadow in a person of the opposite sex, we are usually much less annoyed by it and can more easily pardon it.
In dreams and myths, therefore, the shadow appears as a person of the
same sex as that of the dreamer.
The following dream may serve as an example.
The dreamer was a man of 48 who tried to live very much for and by himself, working hard and disciplining himself, repressing pleasure and spontaneity to a far greater extent than suited his real nature.
I owned and inhabited a very big house in town, and I didn’t yet know all its different parts.
So I took a walk through it and discovered, mainly in the cellar, several rooms about which I knew nothing and even exits leading into other cellars
or into subterranean streets.
I felt uneasy when I found that several of these exits were not locked and some had no locks at all. Moreover, there were some laborers at work in the neighborhood who could have sneaked in….
When I came back up again to the ground floor, I passed a back yard where
again I discovered different exits into the street or into other houses.
When I tried to investigate them more closely, a man came up to me laughing loudly and calling out that we were old pals from the elementary school.
I remembered him too, and while he was telling me about his life, I walked along with him toward the exit and strolled with him through the streets.
There was a strange chiaroscuro in the air as we walked through an enormous circular street and arrived at a green lawn where three galloping horses suddenly passed us.
They were beautiful, strong animals, wild but well-groomed, and they had no rider with them. (Had they run away from military service?)
The maze of strange passages, chambers, and unlocked exits in the cellar
recalls the old Egyptian representation of the underworld, which is a wellknown symbol of the unconscious with its unknown possibilities.
It also shows how one is “open” to other influences in one’s unconscious shadow side, and how uncanny and alien elements can break in.
The cellar, one can say, is the basement of the dreamer’s psyche. In the back yard of the strange building (which represents the still unperceived psychic scope of the dreamer’s personality) an old school friend suddenly turns up.
This person obviously personifies another aspect of the dreamer himself.-an aspect that had been part of his life as a child but that he had forgotten and lost-It often happens that a person’s childhood qualities (for instance, gaiety, irascibility, or perhaps trustfulness) suddenly disappear, and one does not know where or how they have gone.
It is such a lost characteristic of the dreampr that now returns (from the back yard) and tries to make friends again.
This ‘figure probably-stands for the dreamer’s neglected capacity for enjoying life and for his extroverted shadow side.
But we soon learn why the dreamer feels “uneasy” just before meeting
this seemingly harmless old friend. When he strolls with him in the street, the horses break loose.
The dreamer thinks they may have escaped from military service (that is to say, from the conscious discipline that has hitherto characterized his life).
The fact that the horses have no rider shows that instinctive drives can get away from conscious control. In this old friend, and in the horses, all the positive force reappears that was lacking before and that was badly needed by the dreamer.
This is a problem that often comes up when one meets one’s “other side.”
The shadow usually contains values that are needed by consciousness, but
that exist in a form that makes it difficult to integrate them into one’s life.
The assages and the large house in this dream also show that the dreamer does
not yet know his own psychic dimensions and is not yet able to fill them out.
The shadow in this dream is typical for an introvert (a man who tends to
retire too much from outer life).
In the case of an extrovert, who is turned more toward outer objects and outer life, the shadow would look quite different.
A young man who had a very lively temperament embarked again and again on successful enterprises, while at the same time his dreams insisted that
he should finish off a piece of private creative work he had begun.
The following was one of those dreams:
A man is lying on a couch and has pulled the cover over his face. He is a Frenchman, a desperado who would take on any criminal job.
An official is accompany-ing me downstairs, and I know that a plot has been made against me: namely, that the Frenchman should kill me as if by chance.
(That is how it would look from
the outside.) He actually sneaks up behind me when we approach the exit, but I am on my guard.
A tall, portly man (rather rich and influential) suddenly leans against the wall beside me, feeling ill. I quickly grab the opportunity to kill the
official by stabbing his heart.
“One only notices a bit of moisture”-this is said like a comment.
Now Iam safe, for the Frenchman won’t attack me since the man who gave him his orders is dead. (Probably the official and the successful portly
man are the same person, the latter somehow replacing the former.)
The desperado represents the other side of the dreamer-his introversion-
which has reached a completely destitute state.
He lies on a couch (i.e., he is passive) and pulls the cover over his face because he wants to be left alone.
The official, on the other hand, and the prosperous portly man (who are secretly the same person) personify the dreamer’s successful outer
responsibilities and activities.
The sudden illness of the portly man is connected with the fact that this dreamer had in fact become ill several times when he had allqwed his dynamic energy to explode too forcibly in his external life.
But this successful man has no blood in his veins-only a sort of
moisture-which means that these external ambitious activities of the
dreamer contain no genuine life and no passion, but are bloodless mechanisms.
Thus it would be no real loss if the portly man were killed. At the end
of the dream, the Frenchman is satisfied; he obviously represents a positive
shadow figure who had turned negative and dangerous only because the conscious attitude of the dreamer did not agree with him.
This dream shows us that the shadow can consist of many different
elements-for instance, of unconscious ambition (the successful portly man) and of introversion (the Frenchman).
This particular dreamer’s association to the French, moreover, was that they know how to handle love affairs very well.
Therefore the two shadow figures also represent two well-known drives: power and sex.
The power drive appears momentarily in a double form, both as an official and as a successful man.
The official, or civil servant, personifies collective adaptation, whereas the successful man denotes ambition; but naturally both serve the power drive.
When the dreamer succeeds in stopping this dangerous inner force, the Frenchman is suddenly no longer hostile. In other words, the equally dangerous aspect of the sex drive has also surrendered.
Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays a great role in all political
conflicts.
If the man who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem, he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchman with the “dangerous Communists” of outer life, or the official plus the prosperous
man with the “grasping capitalists.”
In this way he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such warring elements.
If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a “projection.”
Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, just as much as the back-yard gossip of little groups and individuals.
Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships.
And there is an additional disadvantage in projecting our shadow. If we
identify our ownshadow with, say, the Communists or the capitalists, a part
of our own personality remains on the opposing side.
The result is that we shall constantly (though involuntarily) do things behind our own backs that support this other side, and thus we shall unwittingly help our enemy.
If, on the contrary, we realize the projection and can discuss matters without fear or hostility, dealing with the other person sensibly, then there is a chance ofmutual understanding-or at least a truce.
Whether the shadow becomes our friend or enemy depends largely upon
ourselves. As the dreams of the unexplored house and the French desperado
both show, the shadow is not necessarily always an opponent.
In fact, he is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love-whatever the situation requires.
The shadow becomes hostile only when he is ignored or misunderstood. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Meeting the Shadow, The hidden Power ofthe Dark Side ofHuman Nature, Page 34-38
https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/
Carl Jung Depth Psychology on Instagram
