by Connie Zweig
However, for millennia, the sexual archetype has been split: It is worshiped for its powers of creating life, and it is damned for its powers of connecting us to the shadowy realms of the body and instincts. Therefore, sexual shadows pervade our intimacies. Eros, the god of love, opens the floodgates of desire and shuts them just as rapidly. Or he directs them down back streets, through dark alleys, and across unknown byways. One vampy seductress character may act out sexually to hide deep shame about her body; another Don Juan character may seduce a series of women to feel young and powerful and to hide his fears of intimacy and vulnerability. (Each of the following chapters has a section on the sexual shadow.)
In addition, the characters use money as a shield to bolster a weak self-image or to inflate low self-esteem. Like sex, money has archetypal origins, and it is reduced by becoming the ego’s tool. Money carries soul, the projection of divine energies. We long for money as we long for love, even as we long for salvation. We sacrifice for money, our life blood in exchange for coins. We fight for money, even with those we cherish the most. We worship money like a false god.
The word “money” derives from the Roman goddess Moneta, whose temples were mints where the first money, as we know it, was made. Moneta was considered an aspect of Juno, the mother goddess of Rome, who also served as protectress of women, marriage, and childbirth. As a fertility goddess, Juno Moneta acted as the mother of money, from whom plenty issues forth.
Today, as the sole currency of exchange, money is a potent symbol of transformation, of the power to turn one thing into another, like the alchemist’s quest in reverse: turning gold into matter—food, clothing, shelter, pleasure, status, mobility.
But like other archetypes that carry soul, money also carries shadow, hidden meanings, forbidden feelings, unknown forces. In our public seminars on shadow-work, we have found that asking people to tell others how much money they have in the bank provoked more anxiety than the most intimate questions about sex. People who thought they had too much money felt intense guilt; those with too little felt intense shame. Either way, money acted like a dirty secret, containing feelings of “worth.”
So, money is also a split archetype in the culture: It’s the root of all evil; it’s the grail we seek. In some ways, our relationship to money reveals our relationship to our life purpose, even our fate. Depending on which myth we live by, we may spend all our lives ignoring it, or we may spend all our lives pursuing it. Either way, money has a tightfisted grip on us that needs to become conscious. For money lives in the shadows of our lives, in the secret greed of our own Midas-like selves, in the family battles that divide parent from child, in the wrenching divorces that separate lovers, in the lifelong friendships that turn dark after money changes hands. (Each of the following chapters has a section on the money shadow.)
Finally, the characters use addiction as a shield to numb the pain of a rejected character and to escape its dark feelings. Addictions act as camouflage, a way of hiding from and protecting against our real needs, which remain unconscious. But as psychological dependency becomes physiological habituation and then abuse, the user becomes filled with guilt and shame for the self-destructive behavior. So instead of escaping shadowy feelings, addicts find themselves face-to-face with them, believing themselves once more to be bad, unworthy, and unlovable. In this way an addiction creates more shadow content by failing to address the shadow directly, allowing it to erupt indirectly and therefore to remain unconscious.
Once the addiction is in full force, it becomes a glaring symptom, diverting attention from the dark and difficult feelings beneath the behavior. And the struggle with the demon gets all of the attention. The demon addiction is a shape-shifter, taking the form of white cocaine or Russian vodka or sexual obsession. In any case, the user’s life becomes oriented around craving it, scoring it, using it, coming down, and starting all over again. The person is taken over, possessed by the demon, so that the rest of life pales, losing its color and significance.
Addiction camouflages a vast inner emptiness, a gaping hole at the center of the person. But cocaine covers it with a heady rush of power, an inflated sense of potency like a balloon filling with helium. Addiction may conceal a terror of intimacy, a fear of losing oneself in the unknown territory of another person or of being seen as a small, selfish individual who needs love. But sexual obsession wrenches the person’s attention away from these shameful feelings and fixes it on the shining love object, the man or woman who holds the mana to heal the addict, to make her feel safe, to make him feel like a man.
Dionysian intoxication, which appears in most cultures, fills a natural human need. Wine-drinking can be a sacred act; chewing or smoking psychoactive plants can open a doorway to divine reality. But in the West, as the Christian church purged itself of “pagan” rites, becoming increasingly earnest and joyless, it turned the god of wine into the god of darkness, the devil. In so doing, it turned divine intoxication into evil addiction, a possession by the dark side of the neglected archetype. For instance, highly rational, controlling Apollonian women may use alcohol and become vulnerable to sexual shadow attacks by Aphrodite or rage attacks by Kali; highly logical, controlling men may use drugs and become susceptible to invasion by seductive Eros or martial Ares. In this way, some people may use substances to release repressed aspects of themselves, permitting them freedom of expression.
For us, addiction can be seen as a search for an experience of soul that is always sought but never maintained through drugs. For this reason, the user pursues it with ever-larger doses. And an opportunity for rebirth is stillborn. Instead, the addict confronts the inner demons, invoking the agony of Job as he cries out in despair against the divine for its indifference to his affliction.
Thus, as the gods speak to us through power, sex, and money, they also speak to us in our addictions. Or, more accurately, they speak through us. But we do not know how to listen or how to respond because we are caught in an unconscious complex, cut off from the divine archetype.
Besides their personal roots in individual and family psycho-dynamics, each of these defenses and their accompanying shields have deep cultural roots. Personal psychology is a necessary but insufficient explanation for shadow issues.
TRACING THE ROOTS OF THE SHADOW IN CULTURE
The cultural shadow is the larger framework in which the personal shadow develops. It helps to determine on a large scale—via politics, economics, religion, education, the arts, and the media—what is permitted and what is taboo, thereby shaping individual and family personae. In our fast-changing contemporary culture, many images and ideas that could not be spoken about two decades ago have been publicly disclosed: childhood sexual abuse, wife battering, alcoholism, addiction to prescription drugs. In this cultural moment, the shadow is also breaking through in the violent lyrics of rockers and rappers, in a growing number of books on Satan and evil, and in cyberspace, where Internet users take on shadow identities to experiment with their multiple selves.
Although the archetype of the shadow is universal, shadow content is always formed within a cultural context—that is, within the beliefs, values, language, and myths of a given group. Cultural differences in relation to competition and winning, for example, yield different shadow content: Dutch children, who need to be prepared to live in an egalitarian society, are taught that coming in first is not necessarily a virtue; they learn to keep low profiles, thereby banishing their ambition into the shadow. Children in Mediterranean countries, such as Greece and Italy, are taught to feel special and unique, even superior, thereby burying their more communitarian feelings. And British children are taught that it’s acceptable to finish first—but only if they do not appear to work harder to achieve their goals.
Distinctions in moral behavior also reflect different cultural attitudes toward the shadow. In Catholic countries, the world of darkness is starkly set against the world of light, and moral behavior is prescribed according to the Seven Deadly Sins—anger, envy, pride
, avarice, lust, gluttony, sloth. The roads to heaven and hell, then, are clearly paved. But in Hindu Bali, the world of darkness ritually interweaves with the world of light in shadow puppet plays from the Vedic scriptures. The distinctions between gods and devils may blur. And in Buddhist Tibet, the demons have no objective reality but are viewed as misunderstood energies within the human mind. And prescriptions of moral behavior are replaced by contemplative spiritual practices for transforming the five poisons: anger, pride, jealousy, ignorance, greed.
Given these vast differences on “the deadly sins,” it’s imperative to make our cultural frame more conscious and to point out that the view of the shadow in this book stems from an American or Western European, white, post-industrial social context and thus inevitably reflects this time and place. We assume, for instance, a respect for the individual rights of a child and the civil liberties of an adult rather than tribal or communal needs, which might be emphasized in a non-European culture. We assume a respect for social and economic equality among men and women rather than a model of dominance and submission, which might appear in a Middle Eastern society. We assume a respect for multicultural views and a tolerance for diversity rather than a monolithic view of religious or ethnic values, which might be advocated in a single-minded religious community. Our perspective on the shadow cannot escape our own cultural frame; our attitudes toward power, sex, money, and addiction, for example, are formed within this mind-set.
Furthermore, even our language reflects this problematic issue in the use of the words “shadow” and “dark side,” which unfortunately have racial overtones and imply the superiority of whiteness. James Hillman has pointed out that, etymologically, whiteness is associated with heaven, purity, innocence, and lightening up, whereas blackness is associated with hell, pollution, evil, and drawing down. In psychological terms, white is consciousness, which is cast as positive; black is unconsciousness, which is cast as negative, dirty, perverse, forbidden. But this kind of splitting, or linguistic apartheid, does not reflect psychological reality, in which light side and dark side are intimately intermingled.
Our cultural shadow projection—we are light, they are dark—falls upon different groups at different historical moments. In the name of the one right way, whole populations cast their darkness onto others with holy zeal, reenacting the ancient tribal heritage of Isaac and Ishmael. During the Holocaust, the Nazis advocated the ethnic cleansing of those who did not belong to “the Aryan race.” More recently in Bosnia-Herzegovina, more than a quarter of a million people died, caught in a web of ethnic hatred.
American soil also is poisoned—with the genocide of Native Americans, the slavery of African Americans, and the slaughter of the Salem witch-hunts. And today, gays and lesbians, especially those infected with the HIV virus, have been turned into the Other and forced to hide their sexual orientation or, instead, to flaunt it in an effort to end feelings of self-betrayal. In addition, we attempt to turn a blind eye to homeless people, who form a kind of untouchable caste that carries shadow projection. And illegal immigrants, who appear to threaten security by transgressing our borders and consuming our resources, have been officially deemed the new enemy.
Like our culture, our nature contributes to shadow formation. In myths and fairy tales throughout time, the human shadow has been imagined as a brutal Beast, an unruly savage whose tireless aggression and bottomless appetites stem from his animal origins. Animals themselves have been demonized to stand in for the Other: the predatory wolf, the restless jaguar, the crafty fox, the devouring hunter in search of its prey. The shadow, like the animal, cannot be controlled; it lives under a law of its own. As culture rejects biology and our animal nature is exiled for the aims of civilization, the biological shadow is formed: Our creatureliness is banished for higher purposes, and we are taught to identify with mind over body and to honor spirit over flesh.
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 bargain, and the shadow robs the riches of the soul. We lose the range of our original energy or aliveness and the connection to our authenticity. But the lost riches return when the banished shadow character, like an outsider trying to make a place for itself in the kingdom, appears at the boundaries of awareness at the most unexpected moment. And, once again, we meet the dark side.
THE SHADOW AS REDEEMER: FINDING GOLD IN THE DARK SIDE
Toward the end of Goethe’s tale, Faust owns all the land the eye can see except for one small parcel with a chapel, which is owned by an elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon. Swallowed up by his own greed, Faust orders Mephisto to take the land by force. Acting autonomously, Mephisto kills Philemon and Baucis and burns their land.
Jung studied Goethe’s work intently and extended it into the psychology of the shadow after having a dream while reading Faust. According to some sources, Jung may have been Goethe’s great-grandson, but, in any case, the psychologist continued the literary genius’s tradition when he named his own inner guide Philemon, perhaps to repent for the sacrifice required by Faust’s ego. As described in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung discovered the reality of the psyche through the wise figure of Philemon.
In Jung’s story we can see that shadow-work may be a multi-generational process; certainly, it is a lifelong one, a metamorphic struggle that portends renewal in arid times. To Jung, Mephisto carries not only Faust’s dark side but also the scholar’s energy, vitality, and imagination. Without him, Faust is dry, wooden, lifeless. Yet by wrestling with him, Faust is resurrected. So, although Mephisto appears to be a Judas, in the end he is a savior.
Each of us wrestles with the dark giant in our own way. For some, doing shadow-work may mean sacrificing niceness for honesty; it clearly means sacrificing ego appearances for the authenticity of the Self. For others, it may mean sacrificing grandiosity for humility; it clearly means sacrificing naïve innocence for the promise of mature wisdom.
As each layer of shadow is mined from the darkness, as each fear is faced and each projection reclaimed, the gold shines through. And we begin to realize that the task is ongoing: The mine has no bottom floor. Yet, somehow, in a compassionate embrace of the dark side of reality, we become, like Lucifer, bearers of the light. We open to the Other—the strange, the weak, the rejected, the unloved—and simply through including it, we transmute it. In so doing, we awaken to the larger life. We sense patterns within patterns. We begin to hear the call of the Self. We no longer simply believe in magic, we rely on it.
CHAPTER 2
THE FAMILY SHADOW: CRADLE OF THE BEST AND THE WORST
Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
Shadow-making happens in families and makes us who we are. It leads to shadow-work, which makes us who we can become.
Families are our origin and, for many of us, our destination. We are born into families, contained in families, nourished by families, and cherished by families. At the same time, we are neglected by families, betrayed by families, and witness violence in families. In the end, we die among family.
The family holds mythic power—the source of all good, the defense against evil. It’s exalted as a sacred ideal, which promises roots, blood relations, future generations. It ties each individual life to its fate, imprinting it genetically, biochemically, and psychologically with blessings and curses. To imagine life without family is to imagine life in free fall, without a container,
without a ground on which to stand.
In the last thirty years, as a society, we have come to realize that our image of the family is just that, an image. But it’s not just an image. It’s a fantasy that drives us because the archetype of the family is at the center of this image. And it compels us to follow it, to bond, to love, to re-create ourselves, thereby forming family. So, we long for a vessel of blood relations; we yearn for a community of kin that understands us implicitly, that offers safety and acceptance. And, wherever we find family, we find home: More than a place, home is a dwelling for the soul.
Recently, as family secrets such as childhood abuse, wife battering, and epidemic addictions have emerged from the cultural shadow, our fantasies of the perfect family, à la Norman Rockwell paintings, have been shattered. In fact, many families appear to deliver us into the very kinds of suffering from which they promised to protect us. If we open our eyes and look closely, instead of averting our gaze, we will see that, everywhere, love and violence, promises and betrayals go hand in hand. Home is also a dwelling for the shadow.
In addition, many forms of family that have been tainted with darkness in earlier generations today have become the norm. Single-parent households, blended stepfamilies, multicultural relationships, and gay marriages have changed forever the face of the American family, exposing previous taboos to the light of day.
As a result, many people lament the breakdown of the traditional family structure and blame it for a larger cultural malaise that includes the rise of drug addiction, teen pregnancy and suicide, and gang violence. Grieving the loss of traditional values, some long for a return to the old image of a stable, patriarchal, nuclear family, reminding us of another time, another place. For them, this image is like a finger pointing upward toward the heavens, toward the promise of a better life.