Shadow (psychology) - Encounter With The Shadow

Encounter With The Shadow

The encounter with the shadow plays a central part in the process of individuation. Jung considered that 'the course of individuation...exhibits a certain formal regularity. Its signposts and milestones are various archetypal symbols' marking its stages; and of these 'the first stage leads to the experience of the SHADOW'. If 'the breakdown of the persona constitutes the typical Jungian moment both in therapy and in development', it is this which opens the road to the shadow within, coming about when 'Beneath the surface a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty ... as if the initial encounter with the Self casts a dark shadow ahead of time'. Jung considered as a perennial danger in life that 'the more consciousness gains in clarity, the more monarchic becomes its content...the king constantly needs the renewal that begins with a descent into his own darkness' — his shadow - which the 'dissolution of the persona' sets in motion.

"The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself" and represents "a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well". If and when 'an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others — such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions — ... painful and lengthy work of self-education".

The dissolution of the persona and the launch of the individuation process also brings with it 'the danger of falling victim to the shadow ... the black shadow which everybody carries with him, the inferior and therefore hidden aspect of the personality' — of a merger with the shadow.