Shadow

Looking to deeply will break the average person.

Most “spiritual” people are wretched; their “spirituality” is merely an excuse to not look into their heart, which rots away as they preach of peace and love.
They will defile children telling themselves they are “healing” them. Their sexual urges ooze through the pores of their “body of light”.

Most therapists are simply projecting their own shadow onto their patients.
Ive visited around… Id say 6 therapists in my life, all but one for very short periods because they were completely useless and obscenely vain. The least bad of them was simply salivating over my stories and said to me that he’d never had such interesting casework. He did nothing whatsoever to help me with any of it and still took my money.

Ive had one good therapist though and I stayed with him for a year. He was able to identify a very important thing.
Even still he had all kinds of opinions about the human species and politics he was fond of sharing with me in the time I was paying for. But at least he wasn’t projecting. I dare say this guy is pretty wise. He’s also the only one of them that refused insurance coverage as it would compel him to share his diagnoses with the State.

a very simple concept that has been turned into nonsense on stilts by an eccentric pseudo-scientific psychologist/mystic who needed to write some books to make some money?

this ‘shadow’ is nothing but that anachronistic and relatively unevolved part of the neurological and hormonal foundation of the psyche that was suddenly put into conflict with the ‘higher brain’ when modern societies came into existence and demanded moral restraint from the individual. freud covered all this in his psychic apparatus theory and remained mostly reductionist about it… something jung didn’t do, hence, one of the reasons why freud ended his relationship with him. it’s not ironic that freud once said of jung something along the lines of; he’s not aware that his theories are symptoms of his own neurosis.

but basically what’s been done is a kind of clinical vilification of natural drives and desires that come into conflict in a society that, because of how it is arranged, greatly amplifies and augments the circumstances that generate these conflicts. it’s the battle between the id and the super-ego, more or less. in restraining the more anachronistic side of the individual, the individual undergoes a frustrating psychic split as he’s forced to conform to the rules of society.

next comes the systematic distortion of the conscience by wind-bags like peterson and other modern psychologists who’s intention is to vilify and ‘make sick’ those individuals who naturally resist the forces of civil domestication and conformity in modern society. now, the non-aggressive individual who is fully compliant to the sweeping changes and demands made by a modern society responsible for creating social relations jam-packed with new conflicts, is the healthy one.

but this is not to say that all ‘shadows’ are instances of some stronger side of man being hidden away and repressed for the purposes of social conformity. some ‘shadows’ are based in inferiority and ressentiment and can be counted as a manifestation of some kind of vengeful cruelty that’s subconsciously harbored by the individual. take the ‘rapist’ example in peterson’s video. he unequivocally characterizes all rapists as ‘weak’. but while very many (and probably most) modern rapists are expressing a desire to control and hold power over the victim (this to compensate for their feelings of inferiority), some rapists simply just want to get laid and have no desire to humiliate their victims. they aren’t on a quest for power and in no way feel inferior… nor do they secretly despise women.

the shadow of the former type is developed from within an environment that facilitates the production of males who’s natural, anachronistic drive for sex is complicated further… i could even say complimented… by conflicts that constantly impede on his ability to satisfy those drives. while the shadow of the latter type exists independently and free of any sublimated conditioning that’s involved in the creation of the vengeful cruelty that forms the basis of the inferior guy’s ‘shadow’.

this latter type wouldn’t be ‘weak’ as peterson claims, because his id is not ‘broken’ by some super-ego that brings to bear an awareness of inferiority.

such an example could be used to analyze any particular instance of a ‘shadow’ and whether or not it is a center of psychic sickness or health. whether or not it is a product of a natural, anachronistic will unaffected by modern society’s pressure to passively adapt to all the conflicts it creates, or a product of a poisoned conscience that forces frustrated and/or inferior people to endure their psychic split and keep the ‘other’ side hidden… in which case it inevitably finds a way out in expressions of ressentiment and revenge.

some shadows are great, others not so much. to make/keep the shadow - which is really only the ‘id’ - healthy and strong, quite a bit of intellect is needed to sort through the incriminating nonsense that modern psychology has made out of it and refuse to drink the kool-aid they try to sell you.

one very obvious fact is that in an environment where there are multifarious forms of competition… more cases of the ‘sick’ shadow are made possible, because there will be more cases of losers… and losers resent. not to say that these competitions aren’t ‘natural’, of course. only to say that with them come certain kinds of consequences that might not exist in other environments in which no such competition exists.

The unconscious psyche makes itself known only indirectly via images. These arise spontaneously as dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, daydreams, slips of the tongue, earworms, etc. One can become more aware of the images by attending to them. According to my experience, the psyche is a wise and subtle trickster who knows more about me than I do consciously.

Peterson said an opposite kind of thing in the video I posted. He says that if you don’t have capacity to be cruel, and don’t express that in some way, you’re nothing, useless. He expressed great disgust.
Now he does use mild examples of expressing it. Still, though either you misrepresent him or he says opposed stuff in different videos.

But I disagree with Peterson in his video as to what the Shadow is. Could be he just identifies his shadow.

What Ive gathered now: the shadow is not identical to the Id. As you said before, Shadow is more of a philosophical concept than the Id. It can mean more than just repressed animal drives. It is not merely sex and violence, at all. It pertains to more, it is more of a challenge to identify it and seems to be more personal, different persons seem to have very different types of shadow, whereas the Id is always kind of the same sort of thing.

I definitely share that last part with you.

But the Shadow is more than the Unconscious. Or, less. It is more specific. It is not everything we are unconscious of. It is something that is not merely absent, but actually lacking in our awareness. Something which should be there. Hence the moral struggle, I think. Something which, due to being missed, is present ever more potently, but uncontrolled. It thus manifests a hell of a lot less subtly than in Freudian slips and such - which I think mostly concern repressed sexuality. And how deep can one really repress sex? Everyone is always aware its really there for everyone. But the Shadow consists of things which we are really not aware of - in part because it is very particular to each person.

De-repressing sexuality is not a moral struggle. But bringing to light the shadow does actually involve overcoming great moral paradoxes.
I think thats the key. Paradox.
Jung was on to something very deep.

Counter intelligence services do in part serve this purpose, even by virtue of them existing for the purpose of managing the state’s clandestine interests and thus representing a clear and present danger to the “legitimate” order at all times. Deep State.

There is no thinkable world without clandestine services even merely because of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. They simply need to be managed.
The services existed aeons before the nuclear weapon, but only since its advent did they become absolutely necessary. There is a nice… well maybe not very nice but good metaphor in this regarding the human psyche and its own deep state.

And this points to the Shadow, and how it is different for different types and classes of people. Some people’s shadow is less dangerous than other people’s.
This is what troubles me about Freud - his concepts are very specific and yet are supposed to apply to everyone.
Jungs concept is less specific and allows for very different forms of it to apply to different people.

The shadow consists of everything about ourselves we are unaware of because such things conflict with our idealized self-image. Most people walk around thinking that they are basically good. To them evil belongs to other people not themselves. But by paying attention to the spontaneous images produced by one’s unconscious psyche the dark side of one’s personality may be revealed. That’s what Jung referred to as the shadow.

Then the question becomes: how do I integrate the shadow? And I have to say I think the Jungian approach is too heady. You gotta really get in there and express that shadow. I don’t mean run around with a machet in a supermarket. But the emotions and attitude cannot just be journaled or drawn or contemplated. You have to hand your body/voice/face over to them for a time, and then realize what you did by shoving natural and positive feelings/attitudes/emotions down. When you shoved them down, they got twisted. But you can’t just realize this in your head, because you won’t really know what those things are unless they can express themselves as you.

End up in patterns where something you can’t stand is expressed by lovers, bosses, people on the street, whomever…? Well, that’s the shadow having to move outside your body and come at you to get your attention…or

it’s something that will trigger your shadow to such a degree you have to express it

or both.

It seems to me that you make the process sound arduous and mechanical. You skip ahead to integration. That would be the last phase in the process if indeed it is achieved at all. Archetypal psychology is primarily about knowing oneself. What’s the alternative? Remaining naive about what and who you are?

The process of becoming aware of the Shadow as with all archetypal material from the unconscious is primarily phenomenological: becoming aware of fantasy images as they come into consciousness or working with the images as recalled through the process of active imagination. Short of integration which results in wholeness, the mere entertaining of archetypal images like the Shadow which is outside the narrow sphere of the ego can result in greater creativity, spontaneity, richer emotions and deeper insights. It’s not as if the ego must give way totally to express an inner monster bodily. The rational ego can still mediate and dialogue with the images.In fact, it seems to me, that interaction is central to the integration process. Anyway, the animal in us only becomes more vicious when repressed.

I had gathered that you had been through something of this sort. Welcome back!

Yes… but perhaps for future reference, on matters of self-preservation, in the likelihood that something similar may happen again. Though no-body wants such a thing to happen to them again, to go back into those dark days.

DJ Shadow said it best

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SC2Tvm14ts[/youtube]

I am not sure I would use the word ‘arduous’ but it ain’t easy noticing, feeling and expressing the Shadow. ‘Mechanical’ does not fit at all. It is an extremely human, organic, expressive process that actually reduces mechanical aspect of living, habitual repression and suppression, mechanical responses, general stiffness in expression and the body. You don’t know where you are going, it is exploratory, it is individual. IOW you cannot be mechanical about it. I summed it up very quickly, so I suppose it could seem like that, but my experience is that the process varies wildly, there is tremendous intuition involved regarding when and how much and in what way. Feeling your way forward.

You can’t skip the process of becoming aware. I was saying what I want to do at a certain point, which is go deeper than what I experience Jungian therapists, books and processes as doing.

Yes, I was describing the later processes that I want in addition to what Jungians seems to do. I don’t have a huge amount of experience of Jungian processes, therapy, etc. But quite a bit. Not enough to be certain, but my sense was they were not going as deep as I want and not aiming for the integration I watn.

That’s certainly not anything I am advocating for.

Sure, and I think all that is great. It’s just not enough for me. I don’t think active imagination does that much intregration.

Well, it depends on what this means. I did say that I don’t want to run around with a machete. It is not killing the ego and it is not a sudden thing. But over time actually letting that monster, as you call it, control how the body moves - in the safety of the home or therapist’s office or the like - to make the sounds it wants to make, to express the emotions it wants to make. Only then can one actually know, slowly over time, what it’s role actually is. BEcause if it is held outside of emotional and physical expression one cannot be aware of it. Then you are aware of it mainly in the twisted and judged state it is in. If you judge rage, for example, and we all do. This creates a monster in the cellar. If we let it express, we are much more likely to understand how we have judged utterly healthy portions of the self. I think Jungian therapy can lead to some acceptance and integration and I do things that parallel or are like that, but I don’t think it doesn’t go deep enough for me.

Having that dialogue is not mutually exclusive with giving the monster voice. One can do both. But you haven’t really met the monster, I experience, until you let it express more physically and emotionally, as me, because it is me, or better said, a facet of me.

No argument with that from me.

I could have personalized my first take more, and worded as my personal preference. At the same time I would like to be a bit provocative. I think there may be others who would want to go deeper than the Jungian approach does. But I do realize that individual goals may not match mine nor individual needs. And it is a process one needs to take careful steps in over a long period of time.

It is crazy to me that we use “animal” to represent the shadow, especially if it is supposed to be “evil”. That, alone, speaks to how much in the shadow our own nature is.

Do animals build concentration camps? Do they industrially slaughter trillions of other animals? Okay, certain insects do that kind of thing. Is the shadow our insect-nature?
It might be the case. Like us, the crueler insects have societies, on whose behalf they kill and destroy like automatons.

I agree with Karpel that imagination and images do no suffice to bring the shadow to consciousness. It is, as Jung says, an arduous moral struggle. It lasts a lifetime, I think Jung would say the enlightened life is that moral struggle.

Yes, the emotions and passions often get blamed for violence and evil, but emotions and passions alone might lead to single acts of violence, but only detached and diseased tip top of the cortex can come up with cold holocausts and exterminations of the serfs, for examples. And the ones who carry that stuff out have long, dark shadows, because so much is suppressed and denied.

I don’t think 99% of people’s shadows are really very important, on an individual basis. There’s no point romanticising it, or blaming it, or believing it gives you super powers. It’s a ‘talent’ - a subset of abilities and psychological drivers used in extremis. And we all have one, but nor do I think there is much value either way whether people accept or deny it is a part of of them.

What matters is how it manifests, which is something we can control, and under what circumstances it becomes manifest which is largely something we cannot.

I’ve read a few books on behaviour. One covered mob psychology. What turns a bunch of peaceful protesters into molotov cocktail throwing, window-smashing looters…? It’s nothing much. Everybody has a threshold for violence. Some lower than others. Think of them as empty glasses that fill, and errupt into violence when they overflow. Listening to a speech will fill them a little. What fills them the most is seeing other people become violent, especially if a context exists where that violence is even remotely justified. It’s dominoes. A protester with a low threshold tips, charges the police shields - if this was shopping he or she would be termed an ‘early adopter’. This is enough to tip a whole secondry tier of people into violent action. The actions of those will tip almost everyone else. It works with bees too. :smiley:

We are basically lazy, some more than others, some less so. But we all see the logic of working just hard enough to achieve a given reward. Going against ingrained habits of thoughtfulness and non-violence is difficult. So we tend to count that into our subconscious formula of cost/gain - which is why we don’t usually let the shadow out very often. Cognitive dissonance - roughly equivalent to ‘acting out of character’ - kinda hurts.

There is 1% that does matter though. Psychopaths. People with very low thresholds, or no thresholds, for letting their shadows out. These people are almost always the early adopters of ‘evil’, whether physical, corporate, or institutional. 7.7 billion people last time I checked. That’s a whole lot of people with psychopathic tendencies. When a psychopath does a cost/gain analysis regarding a goal, they don’t have to figure in the cognitive dissonance of bad behaviour, to them instinctively, going to the shop and buying a chocolate bar is exactly the same as punching a kid in the face and taking theirs. The end is the same. They may learn not to eventually. In the same way someone dyslexic can learn to read. Difficult though.

But these guys, if they are in positions of power, can and will draw out other people’s shadows through (bad) example. Which is why you sometimes end up with your otherwise spectacularly normal Mum working at Auschwitz, planing to spend next month’s wages on kitchen appliances.

Research on psychopathy, and mandatory programs of early detection both wannabe parants and infants/children, would go a long way to solving some of our problems.

It was Jung himself writing in 1918 at the end of World War 1 who observed that the “ animal in us only becomes more beast-like” when it is repressed. He went on to say “ that is no doubt the reason why no religion is so defiled with the spilling of innocent blood as Christianity and why the world has never seen a bloodier war than that of the Christian nations” (Vol. 10, p.22)

It will be ironic indeed if this thread becomes a virtue signalling competition. But, yeah, yeah as the famous misanthropist Mark Twain wrote ‘Man’ is the lowest form of animal. cusd80.com/cms/lib/AZ010011 … 0Twain.pdf

And it may be the very split of the split of consciousness into light and shadow, and the repression of the latter that results in the projection that makes us the lowest. Jung thought if only he could get the practice of uncovering the Shadow to the masses he could save the world from self-destruction. But, how to do that?

Jung knew the process involved risks. As he said quoting Holderin, "Where danger is there is salvation also”. Still “ In so far as analytical treatment makes the “shadow” consciousness it causes a cleavage and a tension of opposites which in their turn seek compensation in unity.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p335)

Re. Repression → Beast-like.

I think if you repress your innate will to violence you are necessarily utterly inexperienced in its use, and therefore find that when circumstance does conspire to summon forth that violence, you have zero control - neither over your own fear at that moment, nor the amount of violence or agression required to achieve your goal. So, driven back into a wholly animalistic, instinctive state, you lash out and only come back to yourself when everyone’s down and/or dead.

Everyone should do some full-contact self-defence at some point perhaps.

Re. Christians and bloody wars.

Well duh. Christianity is a psychological battle program for societies. It does its job well. So perhaps it’s not a surprise that it’s helped generate the worst wars. It’s like accusing ferraris of causing speeding…

Donald Trump–America’s shadow.

And he does an impression, sometimes, of The ID. But the neo-cons, who had at best mixed feelings about him, they got long dark shadows, and Clinton was right in there.

Certainly repressing anger can lead to violence when is comes screaming out. But think more violence is caused by repressed fear. Battering husbands are moving towards yang and aggression, because to go into their fear - that they are not lovable, that they are not in control, that they are not adequate, is too much for them. So, they flip to fear, because there anger has no fear to allow for a more nuanced reaction to when they feel disrespected, for example.

So, we get a leap from clenched anger expression with words to violence. This is a leap.

There is a huge space there in between verbal anger and violence,w hich would be to express both the fear and the rage in sound. To really show all that to yourself and the other person. But that feels dangerous, because the other will see your vulnerability. So they make the leap. Women obviously can do this also, though the tendency is not so strong.