Assimilation of The Shadow
Enantiodromia launches 'a different perspective. We begin to travel through the healing spirals...straight up'. Here the struggle is to retain awareness of the shadow, but not identification with it. 'Non-identification demands considerable moral effort...prevents a descent into that darkness'; but though 'the conscious mind is liable to be submerged at any moment in the unconscious... understanding acts like a life-saver. It integrates the unconscious' - reincorporates the shadow into the personality, producing a stronger, wider consciousness than before. 'Assimilation of the shadow gives a man body, so to speak', and provides thereby a launching-pad for further individuation. 'The integration of the shadow, or the realisation of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage of the analytic process...without it a recognition of anima and animus is impossible'. Conversely 'to the degree to which the shadow is recognised and integrated, the problem of the anima, i.e., of relationship, is constellated', and becomes the centre of the individuation quest.
Neveretheless Jungians warn that 'acknowledgement of the shadow must be a continuous process throughout one's life'; and even after the focus of individuation has moved on to the animus/anima, 'the later stages of shadow integration' will continue to take place - the grim 'process of washing one's dirty linen in private', accepting one's shadow.
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Famous quotes containing the word shadow:
“Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of—even—the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness-what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent—these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)