Owning Your Own Shadow

OWNING YOUR OWN SHADOW: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche by Robert A. Johnson

“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.”

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...
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