Shadow | Full Circle POV

Archive for the tag “Shadow”

08 Nov 2014

The Art of Making a Living

So much rides on our ability to create and maintain our personal and professional Persona. To swim with the big fish, in whatever pond we’re in, we have to jump in and start swimming, like the others, like right now. Unfortunately, that focus on swimming can become the end in itself; we can’t stop swimming, too much to lose. Polarities are manifested, sides are picked.

In the process, we lose track of the gold we let fall into the shadows, that we can reclaim, rather than defend against. There are life-enriching, life-expanding potentials, in our individual and organizational Shadows, that become adversarial because of inattention, neglect or abuse. They turn on us. The things that go bump in the night, and day, that, actually, can be helpful. And, are meant to be helpful.

I like the way Laurence G. Boldt, in Zen and the Art of Making a Living, captures how parts of us, sometimes the best of our potentials, become split off and lost, and are seen as contrary or other as we shape and maintain our individual and collective Personas. [My interjections in red].

It’s time to get a job. Time to forget all that stuff about choices. Don’t think about visions or values. Don’t concern yourself with whys. Just be responsible [sic] and concentrate on how you can get the “best” job. Suppress your awareness of yourself as an observer and creator of social reality and plunge into playing the game as it is already defined, with your eyes closed. We have seen other ways. We are aware of choice, and yet if we are to be “responsible” citizens, we must try to forget. Be a good kid, now, and get yourself heavily involved in the game of winning social approval [power, network, income, job]–anything else and you risk ostracism [loss of same]. That’s enough to keep most of us in line for a long time. We still think about these things–now and then. We may talk about it some weekend, late at night, over a few beers or glasses of wine. As we grow older, we may bore our children with repeated tellings of stories about the good old days of our freedom (of choice). What was questing, searching, evaluating now gets stuffed, shelved, and compartmentalized. But make no mistake; it is not dead. It is only sleeping. (2009, p. 87)

[For full citation go to Bookshelf]

Posted in Jungian, Organization Development, Persona, Personal Development, polarities, Professional Development, Psyche, Psychology, Shadow and tagged Jungian, organizational development, persona, personal development, professional development, psychology, Shadow | Leave a comment

13 Oct 2014

Jung’s Map of the Psyche

Posted in Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, Jungian, Persona, Psyche, Psychology, Shadow, Unconscious and tagged Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, Ego, persona, Psyche, psychology, Shadow | Leave a comment

13 Oct 2014

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Full Circle POV Lexicon: Shadow

Daily, we see figures moving at the edge of consciousness that are a bit disconcerting. They are the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, potentialities, desires, and dreams that are unacceptable or that we might characterize as not me: aspects of the personality that have been pushed down for years. This is the Shadow, a term that most people have probably heard more and more in daily conversation.

Shadow, initially, is the entire unconscious psyche. Like looking out from the close proximity of the campfire into the inky darkness, we know the dangers that exist out there, or in there, that will potentially, or likely, do us harm. We remain close to the light or we take a bit of light with us, a flashlight.

The Shadow is mostly unconscious and is both personal and collective. Psychologically, we avoid the shadow side of our personality as threatening and distasteful. These elements threaten the sense of identity held onto tightly by the Ego/Persona. Rather than interact readily with these elements, we ignore them or erect defenses against them. Robert Bly, the poet, describes the Shadow as the bag that we drag behind us, into which we throw all difficult truths or possibilities that we cannot face about ourselves. We naturally ignore/repress the shadow aspects of our personality with the mistaken belief that we have them under control. They will have their say however, forcing themselves into our conscious awareness, if not now, then at some point in the future.

We receive loud hints of the Shadow’s presence daily, most frequently through the phenomenon of projection whereby we experience the repressed material as if it were exclusively true of an object in the environment. A sure indicator that our Shadow is involved in our reaction toward someone else, known or unknown, is the level of intensity of affect, of emotion. The more intense our emotional reaction or mental energy, the more we are experiencing our own Shadow, even when we have a legitimate complaint about that person or situation. After all, a projection cannot occur unless there is something on which it can hang.

Others see our Shadow much more readily than we ever will. That’s because we are oblivious to our unconsciousness and see the cause for our emotions and behaviors as externally caused.

Molly Tuby, a British psychoanalyst, suggested some typical ways all of us receive hints of our own shadow side:

In the content of our humor
In our exaggerated feelings about others (positive and negative)
In negative feedback from others who serve as our mirrors
In those interactions in which we continually have the same troubling effect on several different people
In our impulsive and inadvertent acts
In situations in which we are humiliated
In our exaggerated anger about other people’s faults

I would add: “In those things that we have done and that we have left undone” that leave us or others around us perplexed.

Jung again:

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.

Here is the split within the personality: the Ego/Persona instinctively seeks to defend its dominant position often feeling the struggle with the Shadow to be one of survival itself. The Ego/Persona will perceive the Shadow as inferior and contaminating, the enemy threatening to bring down everything that the Ego/Persona has striven to develop. The Shadow compensates keeping pace with the Ego/Persona in its continuing attempts to reach conscious integration. The struggle escalates proportionate to the level of repression or suppression by the Ego/Persona, as described in A Principle of Opposites.

The Self, the fuller personality, seeking the integration of the whole person, will speak through the Shadow and will be heard even if the consciousness of the individual needs to be thrown into chaos or possessed outright by the shadow quality.

Posted in Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, Ego, Jungian, Lexicon, Persona, Psyche, Psychology, Shadow, Unconscious and tagged C. G. Jung, Ego, persona, Persona/Ego, projection, psychology, repression, Shadow, Unconscious

11 Oct 2014

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A Principle of Opposites

Two souls, alas! reside within my breast
and each is eager for a separation:
in throes of coarse desire, one grips
the earth with all its senses;
the other struggles from the dust
to rise to high ancestral spheres.

Goethe, Faust, Part I (Trans. Atkins, p.30)

Jung was very aware of the tendency of human consciousness to perceive in terms of polarities, paired opposites, and how preferences of consciousness (Ego/Persona) have a determining role in the ways in which people perceive the world, interpret what they perceive, and take action. To further understand the dynamics of polarities within the conscious and unconscious it is necessary to introduce a principle of opposites that is key to Jung’s thinking on the psyche.

Shapiro and Alexander (1975) describe it well in these excerpts specifically related to their research on Extraversion and Introversion, but applicable to any polarity:

The principle of opposites states that the two attitudes are polar opposites found in each individual. One pole is located in consciousness, the second in the unconscious. The relation between the two poles, it is postulated, in [sic] a function of the degree of “dominance” of the conscious pole. Dominance means a one-sided employment of the conscious attitude, which prevents the expression of the opposite unconscious attitude in consciousness. With minimal dominance, when the unconscious attitude occasionally expresses itself, it does so in a compensatory or complementary way. It adds to or rounds out the conscious attitude in the latter’s service. With increasing one-sidedness of the conscious attitude, however, the suppressed unconscious pole has a more opposing and destructive relation to its conscious opposite. It then “irrupts” or intrudes in an “archaic,” infantile, and inappropriate manner. This suppression of the other side and its subsequent uncontrollable release is the heart of Jung’s conception of neuroticism. (p. 38), and

…”opposite” in the principle of opposites is in the sense of opposition….There are different states of tension between them resulting in varying “working” relations from complementarity or servitude to open combat…. [The “opposites”] run counter to each other. Each has its own independent mode of operation, and the relationship between the two can be variable. (p. 39)

Jung was grounded in a both/and perspective born of his extensive clinical experience and research. For him, both sides of any polarity exist as dynamic potentials within the psyche. Unfortunately, as the principle of opposites explains, there is a universal, natural, and very problematic tendency to split opposites that leads to the over-emphasis of one in the conscious Ego/Persona and the neglect of the other which falls into the shadow.

See full citations in the Bookshelf

Posted in Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, Conscious, Persona, polarities, Psyche, Psychology, Shadow, Unconscious and tagged Ego, Opposites, persona, Principle of Opposites, Psyche, psychology, Shadow

08 Oct 2014

Full Circle POV Lexicon: The Unconscious

A circle is defined as much by what is outside of the line as what’s within. The line and the area within are positive space, outside of that is negative space. With people and organizations that’s our Unconscious. Revisiting R. D. Laing,

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice
there is little we can do to change
until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

The Unconscious is both personal (Shadow) and collective (Collective Unconscious). Psychologically, it’s vast, mysterious and often unsettling, even dangerous. At the least, it’s what rests (or is quite active) in the darkness – what we don’t know, haven’t come to know (and would rather not know), and all the archetypal dynamics (much more on that later) that all humans share (Collective Unconscious).

M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, The Village, captures the feel.