A Little Book on the Human Shadow

by Robert Bly

  When I read her book I fell into depression for three weeks. With so much gone, what can we do? We can construct a personality more acceptable to our parents. Alice Miller agrees that we have betrayed ourselves, but she says, “Don’t blame yourself for that. There’s nothing else you could have done.” Children in ancient times who opposed their parents probably were set out to die. We did, as children, the only sensible thing under the circumstances. The proper attitude toward that, she says, is mourning.

  Let’s talk now about the different sorts of bags. When we have put a lot in our private bag, we often have as a result little energy. The bigger the bag, the less the energy. Some people have by nature more energy than others, but we all have more than we can possibly use. Where did it go? If we put our sexuality into the bag as a child, obviously we lose with it a lot of energy. When a woman puts her masculinity into the bag, or rolls it up and puts it into the can, she loses energy with it. So we can think of our personal bag as containing energy now unavailable to us. If we identify ourselves as uncreative, it means we took our creativity and put it into the bag. What do you mean, “I am not creative”? “Let experts do it”—isn’t that what such a person is saying? That’s damn well what such people are saying. The audience wants a poet, a hired gun, to come in from out of town. Everybody in this audience should be writing their own poems.

  We have talked of our personal bag, but each town or community also seems to have a bag. I lived for years near a small Minnesota farm town. Everyone in the town was expected to have the same objects in the bag; a small Greek town clearly would have different objects in the bag. It’s as if the town, by collective psychic decision, puts certain energies in the bag, and tries to prevent anyone from getting them out. Towns interfere with our private process in this matter, so it’s more dangerous to live in them than in nature. On the other hand, certain ferocious hatreds that one feels in a small town help one sometimes to see where the projections have gone. And the Jungian community, like the town, has its bag, and usually recommends that Jungians keep their vulgarity and love of money in the bag; and the Freudian community usually demands that Freudians keep their religious life in the bag.

  There is also a national bag, and ours is quite long. Russia and China have noticeable faults, but if an American citizen is curious to know what is in our national bag at the moment, he can listen closely when a State Department official criticizes Russia. As Reagan says, we are noble; other nations have empires. Other nations endure stagnated leadership, treat minorities brutally, brainwash their youth, and break treaties. A Russian can find out about his bag by reading a Pravda article on the United States. We’re dealing with a network of shadows, a pattern of shadows projected by both sides, all meeting somewhere out in the air. I’m not saying anything new with this metaphor, but I do want to make the distinction clear between the personal shadow, the town shadow, and the national shadow.

  I have used three metaphors here: the bag, the film can, and projection. Since the can or bag is closed and its images remain in the dark, we can only see the contents of our own bag by throwing them innocently, as we say, out into the world. Spiders then become evil, snakes cunning, goats oversexed; men become linear, women become weak, the Russians become unprincipled, and Chinese all look alike. Yet it is precisely through this expensive, damaging, wasteful, inaccurate form of mud-slinging that we eventually come in touch with the mud that the crow found on the bottom of his feet.

  PART 3

  Five Stages in Exiling, Hunting, and Retrieving the Shadow

  3

  Five Stages in Exiling, Hunting, and Retrieving the Shadow

  When one “projects,” one is really giving away an energy or power that rightfully belongs to one’s own treasury. A man may give his “feeling side” or “relationship mode” away to his wife. Then he is rid of it, and when a feeling problem with the children comes up, he naturally lets her handle the problem.

  What other qualities or powers does a man project onto a woman? He may project animal sexuality onto her, in which case she may feel wicked and overly animal; he may project spirituality onto her, in which case she will feel unduly elevated; he may give her his power of weakness, or his insanity. Some men project their competence in the world onto a woman. And many men give their witch to a woman, or to several women.

  As for a woman, she may project her interior hero onto her husband, in which case he will feel overly noble and responsible; she may project her Saturn onto a man, so that she may remain playful and whimsical, but he will grow more and more rigid; she may give him her internal tyrant, or her spirituality; she may project her hatred of relationship onto him, so that he feels excessively cold and unrelated; and many women give their giant to a man, or to several men.

  We all know a lot about giving away our power, but in this talk we will discuss ways of getting those given-away powers back. We will follow the adventures of a man who has given his witch away, and a woman who has given her giant or tyrant away. But the process of giving and reabsorbing projected substances is similar for all the qualities we have scattered out into the world, whether projected on people of the other sex, on children, on parents, on teachers, on races, or on nations.

  I’ll suggest, then, five stages, beginning with the stage in which the psyche has sent the unwelcome power out and it is successfully projected. When the uncomfortable talent is well exiled, all that is left inside is a thin, gray, wispy substance, hardly noticeable in daylight.

  The male child begins projecting his interior witch early, perhaps at two or three months, the mother being a good hook. Some observers believe that the baby, when he or she experiences for the first time the mother’s refusal of the breast, or some other setback, sees, his perceptions powered by enormous rage, fangs actually come out of her mouth, and skulls appear around her neck. Children feel grateful when a grownup reads witch stories to them because it proves to them that they are not insane. The child, male or female, lives with this secret, that the mother whom everyone declares to be supportive and caring has a witch face at times, and the child knows he is too small to do anything about it.

  Some men let their mother carry their witch for the rest of their lives, but most men, when they marry, transfer their witch, or most of it, over to their new bride. While the bride and groom stand in front of the minister exchanging rings, another important exchange takes place in the basement. During a separate meeting, the mother passes over the son’s witch, which she has been carrying, to the bride. An hour after the ceremony the witch is firmly in place inside the bride, though it will take a while for it to show up, because neither the bride, nor the mother, nor the groom knows about this second ceremony. But after a few arguments, a few obstinacies, and a few money fights, it occurs to the groom one day that there is something witch-like in his bride that he hadn’t noticed before. It sometimes occurs to her too that something bizarre has happened. During an argument she feels herself more greedy, or more witchy. One woman said to me, “Robert, before I was married I was quite a nice person. But now I’ve been married for three years, and you know, I’m getting bitchier and bitchier. How can this be?” I said, “Well, you’ve been eating for two.” The husband meanwhile gets sweeter and sweeter, and this enrages his wife still more, and tends to bring out more of her witch side. She is now carrying witchiness—that is, impulsive irritability, abrupt greediness, unfairness, unexplainable hostility, an underground current of rage—for both of them. He feels quite calm, and looks with wonder and pity on her behavior.

  During the marriage service a similar exchange takes place between the groom and the bride’s father. Perhaps their spirits meet in the garage—their actual bodies being in church—and the bride’s father passes over to the groom as much as he can find of the giant or the tyrant that he has been carrying for his daughter. The bride’s father leaves the church door lighter, the groom heavier. The groom receives from the father many other transferred projections as well: he may have to carry he
r spiritual guide, and perhaps her interior bluebeard, some brutal side of the feminine. Besides his childhood witch, the bride receives from the mother of the groom his helplessness, his deviousness, perhaps his Kali-like rage. The bride goes home from the wedding considerably heavier.

  We’ll call the first stage of projection then the state of mind in which shadow material, well handled by trained conspirators, comes to rest outside the owner’s psyche, and seems likely to remain out there somewhere. The bride and groom may remain in this first stage for years. Some things, like the wedding silver, last a long time.

  But sooner or later one of the projections starts to rattle, in the lovely word Marie Louise von Franz uses. Something doesn’t quite fit any more, and we hear a rattle. We’ll call this rattling the second stage. The man’s wife acts witchy at times and not at other times, and no matter how much the husband squints at her through half closed eyes, she definitely is acting generously and not witchily. That is confusing for the man. He may begin, unconsciously of course, coming home late for dinner without telling her, or forgetting birthdays and anniversaries. Hopefully she’ll take those rudenesses personally, and the mask will fit again.

  It is threatening when the projection starts to rattle. Let’s suppose a woman has put a giant’s mask firmly on her husband’s face, and feels it as a painful relief—at least she gets it out of her psyche. But what if her husband fails one day to be a negative patriarch? What to do then? Trouble. She might, unconsciously of course, overdraw her checking account, lose bills, dent the fender, feel victimized, act like a little girl. That may turn him into a tyrant again. Or she may go to a feminist meeting to be revved up. Hopefully someone there will explain that even men’s kindnesses are a subtle part of their oppression. When she gets home he has the patriarch mask on again.

  Archibald Cox described participating in a discussion of Russian-American relations with right wing fundamentalists in Orange County: they seemed convinced that the Russians broke every treaty, and he guessed that they expected him, as a former CIA man, to support their belief. When he reported in detail about a number of treaties the Russians had followed meticulously, the Orange County people got very upset, more upset than if he had told them the Russians intended to invade next month.

  Many young American men and women in the last twenty years have projected their spiritual guide onto an Asian guru; that projection lasts a while, and then starts to rattle. Perhaps a student hears that his or her guru is sleeping with young girls, or buying Rolls-Royces by the dozen. An ashram of disciples may live for years in the anguish of the second stage.

  What is the second stage like in our projections onto our children? A sort of history of child-rearing in Germany in the nineteenth century came out recently called For Your Own Good, written by Alice Miller. She notes that around 1850 the bad word in such circles was “exuberance.” Some child-rearing books spoke of exuberance as if it were negative and potentially evil. The books would say, “Now when your child gets to be two or two and a half years old, you’ll notice a lot of exuberance appearing. This is your test as a parent. If you fail this test the child will end in prison or drug addiction.” Not all child psychologists of the time thought in this way, but many did, and their thought affected the lives of millions of children. One way of curing exuberance, they said, was to keep the severity of punishments unrelated to the offense. If the child spills milk, don’t speak to the child for three days. (Ashley Montague, as you know, maintains that aggressive instincts belong to the human genetic inheritance, but that violence is learned, and learned in the family.)

  So nineteenth-century Germans considered exuberance to be a form of wickedness, and that was a wickedness that they had already put into their bag, along with weakness, the desire to cry, the longing to get excited. It seems, then, that what women and men project onto children is wicked weakness. We believe secretly that our weakness as children was wicked. We should have been stronger; our pliability was evil. Our weakness was wicked. Children were considered evil in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s important to have these two concepts, weakness and wickedness, together. We believe that it was wicked weakness that we had.

  What then? We get angry at our children, especially those of our own sex. My oldest children were daughters, and I didn’t feel that too much anger went toward them. Every parent knows the situation—more anger flies out of us than is justified by anything the child has done. Do you know that situation? Perhaps the child fails to finish his chores, or breaks a glass, and the parent goes wild. And what can the child do?—feel fear. I’ve seen it in my children’s eyes, and I felt horror at that.

  So when we can consider our children weak, wickedly weak, we have gotten rid of something else that’s in our bag. What a relief it is to be strong! But when it occurs to me that my children are not actually wicked, then I’ve got a problem, because I’ve passed into the second stage, and the substance is threatening to come back. This is a dangerous moment. We can become violent when there is a threat that we may have to take it back.

  I’ve described the second stage as the state of mind in which there is some rattling, some troublesome inconsistency. A man’s wife is carrying his witch, but she doesn’t look or act like a witch all the time; the woman’s husband is carrying her negative patriarch, but he doesn’t look or act like a patriarch all the time; and we know dozens of other examples. China may act honorably; a right-winger may be compassionate, a leftist disciplined. This is distressing. In this stage one begins to get nervous, and anything can happen. All traces of exuberance, life-force, inconsistency, spontaneity become threatening.

  I’ll call the third stage that state of mind in which the distressed person calls on the moral intelligence to repair the rattle. The idea is scary because we need the moral intelligence, yet here it becomes a tool for continued unconsciousness. People with moral intelligence are often very dangerous types, because the moment the mask is about to fall off, they step forward on request to put it back. Walt Whitman Rostow was, during the Vietnam War, an example of such a person, as were the Alsop brothers. Lyndon Johnson felt that the Asians were ignoble, and we were noble. When our saturation bombing from high altitudes, use of napalm on civilians, and policy of village massacre began to cast doubt on that, Johnson began to compare himself to Lincoln, and Rostow spoke of moral fiber, duties of the peace-giving nation, etc. In child abuse the rule is: every act of cruelty, conscious or unconscious, that our parents take, we interpret as an act of love. So the moral intelligence redefines gross human abuse as an act of love.

  And the anti-war protesters fell into the third stage also. When it appeared that not all policemen were pigs, that Ho Chi Minh wasn’t precisely Albert Schweitzer, that Hubert Humphrey had some honor even if he remained Vice President, then the moral intelligence rose to replace all masks, reject Humphrey, and effectively elect Nixon. Many leftists kept shouting, “America is spelled with a ’k’!” The left has a long bag, and can call on awesome moral intelligence to keep the projection going, to the enormous damage of both sides. The mask is put back on, for the best reasons, “for your own good.” It is easy to fall into the third stage. Many times I heard policemen called pigs and didn’t say a thing at the time.

  Let’s turn now to what we project onto children. When a child exhibits some wicked weakness, and yet we notice that our anger is far in excess of any appropriate response, then what? I found that a voice inside me would say: “Never mind. You’re here to give discipline to this child! If you don’t he’ll be lazy and irresponsible.”

  Similarly students in the ashram who have become upset over the guru’s behavior will soon begin justifying it. They have recourse to the wonderful resources of the moral intelligence. They’ll tell you that he is exhibiting “crazy wisdom,” or that he is doing what he’s doing to challenge the “Western ego.”

  Let’s recapitulate the stages I’ve suggested briefly. To start with, the man’s witch and the woman’s giant are out there, and that feels
fine. Many qualities are projected. Nora gave her hero to Torvald, and he gave his childishness to her. Then the machine started to wobble a little, and Nora found out that sometimes Torvald was a hero and sometimes he wasn’t. Nora then planned with her moral intelligence a crisis for Torvald in which he would prove triumphantly to be a magnificent hero. It didn’t work. So the desperate effort in the third stage to refit the hero mask, search the memory for witch dangers, fight with all women against negative patriarchs, achieves its aim only for a short time.

  What is the fourth stage? Suppose that one day, exhausted, one gives up for a moment the struggle to make the mask hang onto the other person. At that moment the eyes break contact; we suddenly look into ourselves and see our own diminishment. We recognize how diminished we have been for years. I would call the fourth stage the state of mind in which we feel the sensation of diminishment. If a boy has given his witch to his mother, and then, when older, has given it to his wife or lover, one day, perhaps at the age of thirty-five or forty, he will feel soft and diminished, precisely because his witch is out there. We can say that the witch corresponds to a force in us that wants to block our growth, yet we must say that the witch presents a very positive force also. Her value lies in the fact that she knows what she wants. “I want you to separate these seeds by sunset, and I’m going to eat you up if you don’t.” The witch doesn’t say, “Well, let’s just check the I Ching to see if you should separate these seeds.” I’ve noticed recently that more and more agreeable men or “soft males” are turning up in the United States. I respect these men, because they have often developed their feminine selves in brave and original ways. Many American men have moved to do that, in ways hardly guessed at by French men or German men. And yet the fault of the soft male lies in what we could call the absence of the witch. If you ask such a man what he wants to do, he may say, “Well, I don’t know, what would you like to do?” “I’ll do what the others do.” “I’ll ask my girl friend.” When the soft male loses a relationship, it is usually broken by the woman. At Lama Commune a man told me that every serious relationship there broken off in the last three years was broken by the woman. The soft male often doesn’t have enough of the witch left to say, “Enough!” When the witch reenters we could say a certain crispness enters into the man. A man then who has projected his witch out eventually feels diminished; and it’s very important that he feel that pain deeply, hold to it, keep the pain of it. He may notice that what `he is best at is empathy, listening to others’ pain, going with the flow; and he may be capable only of that, but the power the witch has to want what she wants, he doesn’t possess.