Frequently Asked Questions
Tell us a little bit about yourself
I'm an extremely fortunate person: a healthy, somewhat-beyond-middle-aged woman with a large and loving family, dear friends, and a Welsh Corgi named Groucho. My handsome husband and I live in a quirky little house we rebuilt with our own hands, which sits on 3 acres of wooded hillside we obsessively garden. And—most important for the creation of this book—I’m a scholarly person by nature, a hermit and a forest dweller, who’s had the opportunity to study whatever she wanted to study for the last fifteen years.
Why did you write this book?
Because I had to. I really was hooked by the shadow’s first cast. Absolutely fascinated the first time I heard of it, amazed I’d never heard of it before, and eager to learn more. I’m naturally attracted to the big questions, the ones with no definite answers. I thrive on paradox. Plus, a subject as vast and complex as the human shadow has a life and a will of its own. It’s probably just as accurate to say the shadow chose me for an author as it is to say that I chose the shadow for a subject. The time is right for this knowledge to be brought forward. Our zeitgeist demands it. The shadow needed an author, and I happened to be available. (See what others are saying about the book)
Why is the subject important?
It would be one thing—and bad enough—if “the pot calling the kettle black” only happened at a personal level. But it doesn’t. Pots and kettles regularly blacken themselves at national levels. Particularly at national levels. It’s us versus them, you know. The perpetual War on Something. Human beings seem to have taken an awkward turn, to be de-volving. Rather than using our intelligence to correct whatever it is we don’t like about ourselves, we use our intelligence to project whatever we don’t like about ourselves onto other people. And the year is 2008. We’ve become so good at this—projecting blame, waging warfare, producing deadly weapons—that when one country points an accusing finger at another country all countries need to take cover.
What is the Human Shadow?
It’s part of the unconscious mind. Here’s a quote from Beauty and her Beast: the shadow contains “the parts of a human being that the person doesn’t want to, or can’t, think about or acknowledge. It refers to the repressed, unlived side of your normal daytime personality—the stuff you don’t like about yourself, the stuff you don’t want anyone to know about you. “Thus your shadow contains negative qualities, such as envy or prejudice or insecurity. Or it could even contain positive qualities, such as compassion or artistic ability. But the qualities, whatever they are, stay in your shadow because you don’t like to—in fact most of the time you simply can’t—admit you possess them. Some parts of ourselves we like to show off to others—put out into the light—and some parts of ourselves we like to hide—keep in the shadows.”
So, what if these qualities do stay in my shadow?
Problem is, they don’t. They get projected out onto other people. You can’t avoid running into parts of your own psyche. Since the things in your shadow are a part of your own psychological make-up they have to, they will, show up somewhere in your own life. In other words, if you just can’t stand to face some of your own stuff, you will end up seeing your own stuff on someone else’s face. The word projection is very apt. We’re all familiar with movie projectors. We all know how those work and what those look like. With unacknowledged shadow material you’re the projector. You’re that little machine in the back creating the image. The image is coming from you. But the only place where you can see the image is on the screen in front of you. You can only see it in another person, or group of people. Causes a lot of heartache in the world.
What do you hope this book will accomplish?
I hope to slow the de-volution a bit. To start a dialogue in people’s hearts and heads about this vast, complicated, and hitherto hidden subject. To promote questioning attitudes, noses that can sniff out “shadow material,” ears that can detect “doublethink” and “newspeak.” I hope to promote a better understanding of the human shadow. And why? Because we all know something is seriously amiss in our country. In the world. And glossing it over, or calling it the devil, or blaming it on another group of people, or simply ignoring it while we go shopping or watch the next program, is not going to fix it. We’ve reached the stage of development where only self-inspection will do. Where only an honest attempt to take responsibility for all of our actions, both positive and negative, will make a lasting difference. As Jared Diamond says in Collapse, societies succeed or fail as a direct result of the choices they make. The USA simply cannot afford to make any more crazy choices. We have to start using our hearts and our heads, not just our bottom lines.
What in your personal life lead you down this path?
My husband and I each went through rough divorces in our 40s, and our remarriage put six children—three from each family—together under one roof. That took a bit of counseling! And at one of those family counseling sessions a very wise woman, Joanne Helterline, gave us a copy of Robert Bly’s seminal lecture on The Human Shadow. So you could say our family found out about the shadow because we were willing to seek answers. Because we were willing to admit we didn’t know it all and to ask for help sorting things out. You could also say, as someone who’s known me since 7th grade does, that uncovering and facing the human shadow has been my life’s work. That Beauty’s story is my story. I was born in 1951 and grew up in a Southern, fundamentalist, Christian environment. Things were really black and white back then. No paradox allowed. The questions raised by that upbringing, by the world view of “us and them,” “saved and lost,” haunted me from childhood. I just could not accept such rigid divisions, and thankfully I was bookish enough to read beyond them. I ended up making a very painful break—no doubt overly melodramatic, as the young are wont to do—from my family at a very young age—now mostly healed, thank goodness—and have been on my own voyage of personal discovery ever since. Or, you could cut through all that stuff above and just say I’ve used a personal tendency toward scholarship to explore the issues that meant the most to me.
What's next?
Selling. Marketing. Unfortunately, books do no good unless readers know they’re out there. Once we get going I’ll probably spend a fair amount of time blogging about the human shadow with interested parties, and an even fairer amount of time scheduling and traveling to promotional events. We’ll post upcoming events here on the website as they come up. My dream promotional event would be a short lecture followed by an open-mike discussion. So if you have such a forum, let me know and we’ll set something up. As Bly says, “There’s a lot of juice in the shadow.” Once people understand the concept, and know they’re safe talking about it, discussions get pretty interesting.