Jung

by Phil Goss

  She carried on working hard and putting her ‘all’ into her teaching and involvement in the school community. She did not have much else in her life (she lived alone and her original family lived a few hundred miles away, so she only saw them three or four times a year). She did not mind, though. School life provided a sense of belonging and purpose; there was always something going on after school and trips to help organize. She had belonged to a choir elsewhere in the town but had dropped that when asked to run the school choir.

  Then she met up with an old friend who said she remembered Lisa playing the guitar and ‘singing her head off’ when they were both about ten years old. Lisa said she couldn’t remember ‘being that wild’, and gave her friend her ‘warmest teacher smile’. Her friend had seemed to wince, and Lisa felt sadness flow around her body. She could not seem to find the natural warmth and excitement her friend had described.

  As this case study illustrates, if our persona seems particularly reliable or successful to us, it can become our default way of being in life. This poses a risk that is thrown into stark relief when the role is no longer available (for example, when we retire from a job), and we can feel lost or even become ill without it. Another risk is that ‘worlds can collide’; for example, we can be at a party and, if two people are there who recognize us as different personas from the context they know us in, which persona do we adopt? Do we choose, say, the ‘serious student’ one or the ‘wacky friend’ one?

  Spotlight: Reflection on this case study

  1 What does Lisa’s story suggest to you? Does it bring up any thoughts or feelings? If so, jot these down.

  2 What do you think it might be like for Lisa when she retires?

  3 Have you ever become over-identified with a job or a role you have performed at work, college, school, etc.? What happened and how did you realize this was happening?

  4 How many personas do you have and in what contexts do they appear?

  5 Have you ever been in a situation with people you know from different contexts who know you as differing personas (‘where worlds collide’)? What was that like?

  Overall, the persona performs an important function in enabling us to operate effectively in the world. Sometimes there is a danger that a persona we adopt might actually inhibit our development or even undermine the cohesiveness of our identity, an idea which parallels Donald Winnicott’s ‘false self’ (Jacobs, 1995). His concept suggests the presence of a deep psychological wound from early life, whereby the infant is not unconditionally accepted for who they really are and learns to behave and present themselves in ways which are ‘acceptable’ to others, but at great cost to themselves.

  The idea of persona also has some echoes in Carl Rogers’ person-centred concept of conditions of worth (Wilkins, 2003) – imposed expectations of how we need to behave as children in order to gain our parents’ or carers’ love. Jung had picked up on the importance of personality adaptation in order to be able to survive, and even flourish, among the challenges and uncertainties of the world we live in. The ego needs to be able to rely on its personas to be credible, but not too rigid to enable this.

  Shadow: a moral problem

  In Jung’s view, shadow carries weaker, hidden and less pleasant aspects of our personality, which have the capacity to undermine us if we do not face, and own up, to them. In relation to ego, shadow therefore has the capacity to destabilize its healthy functioning (Casement, 2006). One example of this, linked to the discussion in the previous chapter on how ego and self relate to one another, is where an aspect of ourselves which is strongly charged instinctually or emotionally keeps impacting on our relationships – for example, in the form of inappropriately aggressive responses. Here, the ego has a problem because shadow aspects are literally currently outside its control, even if ego has some awareness of them (for example, remembering the last time they suddenly found themselves swearing repeatedly at someone they were annoyed with). These aspects can therefore be difficult to stop from bubbling up again at the next provocation.

  You may have noticed some similarity here with Freud’s concept of repression – the defence designed to stop powerful instincts and drives from overwhelming us. Where this cannot hold, sexual or aggressive instincts burst through in ordinary life in ways that can be disturbing, even dangerous. Clearly, Jung’s way of describing these processes owes something to Freud’s original formulation. A key distinction comes in, however, when we consider more fully what Jung regards as the nature and function of shadow. This quote from Jung sets out his position well:

  ‘The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapeutic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extended over a long period.’

  Jung, 1968, para. 14

  Substantial knowledge of who we really are (what makes me ‘me’) involves a big struggle to face aspects of ourselves we would rather not look at, let alone acknowledge being part of us. Hence the image of shadow as what is ‘behind us’, or ‘at our back’ (sometimes portrayed as a bag full of stuff we carry over our shoulder) and which is therefore hard to see without considerable effort (symbolically, being prepared to turn right round to see, or using a mirror). Shadow is generally not a comfortable thing to engage with, and therefore the default position we may often adopt is one of avoidance. In turn, this can give shadow enormous power, turning it into a shadow complex that unconsciously dominates our psyche. This can be seen in the following case study.

  Case study

  Jerome was a student who found it difficult to face reality beyond his studies. He tended to get very good marks for his assignments and was confident in his ability to talk and write about his subject. He had a number of good friends and was active in student life, having done a stint as the president of the students’ union. However, as he came closer to the completion of his degree course, he took a different approach to the future compared to most of his friends. He decided that, rather than thinking about, and planning for, life after university, he would deliberately not look for a job or further studies. He told his friends he would rather not think about it ‘until I have to’. It was not so much that he wanted to have a ‘gap year’ where he could perhaps travel or take time out because he needed to (he had done this already before he started his degree). It seemed to be more a kind of ‘head-in-the-sand’ approach to things.

  Then he had a dream which made a strong impression on him. In this dream he was walking down a long road which seemed to go off into the distance, with no end in sight. Jerome thought he was on his own, but then he heard footsteps behind him. He wanted to turn around but he could not turn his head, nor stop himself walking forward. The footsteps got closer and closer and he was getting anxious, panicky even. The last moment in the dream came when he could feel the breath of the person on the back of his neck, and then felt a tap on his shoulder which jolted him awake. He woke up sweating with anxiety.

  Although Jerome was not sure what the dream was about, he knew it related to the current situation and his choice to ignore the fast-approaching end of his time at university. Jerome recognized that time, like the hidden walker in the dream, was catching up with him and he needed to face the situation: the road (university) he was on would not last for ever. He needed to turn and deal with the harsh reality of its end and the need to prepare properly for the next stage in his life.

  What he had avoided – his need to take responsibility for his future – had become bottled up in his psyche, and a shadow complex had taken hold, which related to previous difficulties in taking responsibility. With this dream, his unconscious (through a mobilization of the self, alerting the ego to the problem) had woken him up
to the urgency of the situation and the need to confront, and work with, this shadow aspect of himself. He began to start thinking about ‘what next’. It was not an easy thing, as part of him seemed to go to any lengths to get him to avoid doing so; but little by little he began to plan.

  The case study above demonstrates how working with shadow is often literally just that, hard work. There is often a strong magnetic pull dragging us back to the path of least resistance where it is easiest for us to remain stuck, avoidant, addicted or whatever other strategy we have established to not have to face our shadow. Another such strategy, principally unconscious but one which can still plague us even when we are conscious of it, is shadow projection.

  SHADOW PROJECTION

  Jung realized, through his work with patients, that it is a common human tendency to see in other people our faults and unhealthy ways of relating to self and others, when really they belong to us. As he put it:

  ‘While some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one’s own personal qualities, in this case both insight and good will are unavailing because the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possible doubt, in the other person. No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projection, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself. He must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally toned projections from their object.’

  Jung, 1968, para. 16

  A useful way of noticing when we are projecting our shadow is to notice the strength of feeling (or ‘emotional tone’, as Jung puts it here) we experience when we find ourselves criticizing someone else. For example, when someone we work with has made a mistake, if we notice that we feel a little irritated with them because it creates more work for us, but otherwise accept that we are all human and make mistakes, that is not projection. If, on the other hand, we find ourselves filled with self-righteous anger because we ‘would never make such a mistake – what is the matter with them?’, then we are clearly investing a lot of energy in that response, and it suggests we are projecting our own shadow fear of getting things wrong on to them.

  Spotlight: Your shadow checklist

  Have you ever done any of the following, and if so what does this tell you about your shadow?

  ✽ Found yourself avoiding a pressing issue or task (like Jerome in the case study above)?

  ✽ Been intensely critical of another person, whether to their face, or to others or yourself?

  ✽ Gone to considerable lengths to cover up an activity you feel guilty about?

  ✽ Found yourself getting very angry or dismissive of a fictional character in a story, play or film?

  ✽ Convinced yourself that a trait you don’t like in yourself does not really matter, or has somehow been eradicated?

  Make some notes about times and situations where these might have cropped up and then reflect on what you might be able to do to own these shadow aspects of yourself. A book that gives further help on working with this area is Was that Really Me? How Everyday Stress Brings Out Our Hidden Personality by Naomi Quenk (2002), who also links our hidden characteristics to Jung’s work on personality types (see Chapter 9).

  Shadow as a resource

  Despite the ways itemized in which shadow can be seen as a problem, its presence also provides us with opportunities to face aspects of who we are which may be under-developed and flawed. This often becomes a key part of Jungian analysis, because shadow inevitably shows itself as the client comes to trust the therapist and lets their mask (persona) slip. The analyst’s role is to respectfully notice and challenge the analysand’s presentation of shadow and help them to notice, acknowledge and eventually own this.

  In this respect, working with shadow can be a good way to help deflate ego when it becomes over-inflated and identifies with the self, as described in Chapter 5. Where ego gets to see itself as ‘knowing everything’, then shadow will intrude somehow, through some obvious mistake or indiscretion the person finds themselves falling into which embarrasses them. Jung goes further than this and argues that our shadow gives us substance. In other words, without a shadow, we would all be fairly one-dimensional, boring, people. In analysis, helping someone to recognize what they are missing by being too ‘pure’ or ‘spiritual’, and so helping them accept their bodily and instinctual desires in healthy ways, is one example of the value of embracing shadow, while not denying its potentially undermining and destructive aspects. Also, by facing up to a trait, a person can discover something of value hiding behind it.

  Spotlight: The golden shadow

  Robert Johnson (1991) describes the challenge presented by the so-called ‘golden shadow’. He says this is where aspects of ourselves exist but have not come into our conscious awareness yet (and may never do so). If we can uncover these aspects while confronting the more difficult aspects of our shadow, we have a chance of finding strengths and creative capacities that we can, after all, live out before it is too late. The golden shadow is therefore often associated with the second half of life, once our earlier personas have fallen away.

  Key terms

  Extraverted: The way we relate outwards to the world and the people around us.

  Introverted: The way we relate inwards to ourselves and our inner world.

  Persona: The way we present ourselves to the world; the masks we wear to represent our identity in differing contexts; the outward face of ego.

  Shadow: What we would rather not be, but are; the hidden, repressed and under-developed aspects of ourselves; the hidden, inward-facing aspect of ego.

  Dig deeper

  Casement, A., ‘The Shadow’, in Papadopoulos, R. (ed.), The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications (Hove: Routledge, 2006), Ch. 4.

  Jacobs, M., Winnicott (London: Sage, 1995)

  Johnson, R., Transformation: Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness (San Francisco: Harper, 1991)

  Jung, C. G., Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW7 (London: Routledge, 1953)

  Jung, C. G., ‘The Shadow’ in Aion, CW9ii (London: Routledge, 1968)

  Lucas, G. (director), Star Wars (film: Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1977)

  Quenk, N., Was That Really Me? How Everyday Stress Brings Out Our Hidden Personality (Mountain View, CA: Davies-Black, 2002)

  Stevenson, R. L. (1886), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Ware: Clays Ltd, Wordsworth Classics, 1999)

  Wilkins, P., Person-centred therapy in focus (London: Sage, 2003)

  Fact-check (answers at the back)

  1 How may Jung’s distinction of persona as outward facing and shadow as inward (and hidden) relate to his childhood?

  a He was very introverted and did not want to face the world

  b He thought, when he stepped ‘out of a mist’ to be himself, this mist was his shadow

  c He thought he had two personalities, one outward facing and the other inward

  d He identified his persona with his mother and his shadow with his father

  2 What is the main purpose of the persona?

  a To give a person a sense of identity

  b To enable a person to adapt the way they present themselves to different contexts

  c To help people develop role-playing skills

  d To allow us to be who we want to be in different contexts

  3 What happens to shadow when we are actively in a persona way of relating?

  a It becomes hidden

  b It goes to sleep

  c It disappears

  d It retreats behind the self

  4 What is the risk involved in being too reliant on a persona?

  a If we forget to use it, it can be embarrassing

  b We might impose it on other people

  c We might get over-identified with it and forget who we really are

  d We might borrow a persona from someone else which does not fit

  5 According
to Jung, what is contained in our shadow?

  a Potential personas and ego states

  b Dark matter from behind the moon

  c Aspects of the self that have got lost in childhood

  d Aspects that are unpleasant, weak or that we don’t like

  6 How is Jung’s shadow similar to Freud’s concept of ‘repression’?

  a Both involve pushing powerful or difficult aspects of ourselves out of conscious awareness

  b Both involve us not relating to others healthily

  c Both require us to withdraw from social contact

  d Both involve staying in the dark so we don’t cause harm to anyone else

  7 What does Jung mean when he says shadow is ‘a moral problem’?

  a Others will make moral judgements about our shadow if we cannot hide it

  b We will make moral judgements about other people’s shadow if they cannot hide it

  c It takes considerable moral effort to face our shadow and acknowledge it

  d It takes considerable moral effort to keep our darker side within shadow