What is the Human Shadow
Carl Gustav Jung, one of the ‘big three’ fathers of modern psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung, Adler) first coined the term “human shadow.”
He used the word “shadow” to describe 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 to others—put out into the light—and some parts of ourselves we like to hide—keep in the shadows.
The word ‘shadow’ was a stroke of genius. It gives us a mythological way of looking at a common psychological problem, and symbolically it is a very good fit. Your shadow can’t be smelled or tasted or touched or felt, yet it is actually hooked to you, attached to the creases and crevices and neurons of your daylight mind. And while other people can see your shadow without too much trouble, you usually have to turn your head around to see it.
There’s also a nifty paradox built into both meanings of the term: whether it’s a shadow cast by light in the natural world, or a shadow cast by your mind, the brighter the light shines, the darker the shadow it creates. The vilest acts in history have been done—and are still being done right this minute—in the name of God, which is the brightest light imaginable.
The enchantments and bewitchments which occur in fairy tales are reminders. Warnings. Because most of us fall into an enchantment at one time or another. We misunderstand the stories. We think we need to be Beauty, or be a hero, so we stick ourselves into that role and try not to be anything else.
We just get stuck. In the process of trying to fit into our role—as athlete or honor student or devoted disciple or skinny woman or powerful businessman or respectable wage earner or laidback dude or hardened gang member—we deny the very existence of any part of ourselves that doesn’t fit neatly into that role. We deny we have any desire to skip class or eat the whole bag of cookies or blow off work today or hop into bed with a total stranger.
And we usually can manage to cram all those contrary desires way down into our shadows. “What contrary desires? I don’t see any.” That is, until we wake up one day and find ourselves doing something really stupid and totally “out of character.” Out of character… out of the role we’ve chosen—or were assigned—to play. Which was probably a fairy tale character’s role, from a fairy tale family, in a fairy tale setting, and not humanly possible in the first place. It’s poignant—and poisonous and highly paradoxical—that despite the evil increasing exponentially around the world, most of us are trying so hard to be good.