“Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically. All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing.”
Robert A. Johnson | Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
There is no shortage of violence in the world, no shortage of delusional thinking, no shortage of conspiracy theories, no shortage of hatred; this is the stage upon which we build our lives today.
I can’t imagine what life would be like without knowing one’s own shadow. But how simple really is this? We can’t know what we don’t know.
Robert Johnson was a patient of Carl Jung’s, who later became an analyst himself and walks us through the steps toward shadow integration. He helps us understand the shadow through story.
Johnson points out that not only is there darkness in the shadow, but there is the golden or the white light which resides there as well.
One of my favorite stories is the one about Marie Antoinette who became bored with her palatial surroundings and her ostentatious lifestyle so she ordered barns to be built and dairy cows be brought from Switzerland for the purpose of milking. Marie Antoinette wanted to try her hand at being a dairy maid. The story goes that she struggled with the three legged stool causing her to give up too quickly, according to Johnson. Had she been able to join these two opposite places within her psyche, who knows, perhaps history would have been kinder to her. Instead, she was beheaded.
We are on a dark page in history, making others bear our own shadow. And the projection is getting worse. In a nation that cannot accept its own shadow, it foists its own fears and demons upon its opponent. According to Johnson, whole businesses are devoted to containing our shadows for us. “The movie industry, fashion designs, and novels provide us with easy places to invest our shadow while newspapers offer us a daily allotment of disasters, crimes and horrors to feed our shadow nature outwardly when it should be incorporated into each of us as an integral part of his own personality.”
The book is a Jungian classic. Written in an easy, approachable style. One of the best anecdotes is listed in the Introduction: Dr. Jung’s favorite story about the water of life.
OWNING YOUR OWN SHADOW
Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
by Robert A. Johnson