!

The Shadow: Quotes and Passages !

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
The Beast Within!
!
“There is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type
of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless.” (Plato, Republic)!

“We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires
and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach
ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal
with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it
is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can
live together.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“I could sense then why some people went mad…And I knew why Goethe said
that he had never heard of a crime of which he did not believe himself capable.I
was capable of anything.” (Meeting the Shadow, Connie Zweig)!

“I remembered a story I had read somewhere in which a judge looks into a

murderer's eyes and recognizes the killing impulse in his own soul. In the next
moment he shifts back to his proper self, to be a judge, and condemns the
murderer to death.” (Meeting the Shadow, Connie Zweig)!

“Each of us contains both a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde, a more pleasant persona
for everyday wear and a hiding, nighttime self that remains hushed up much of
the time. Negative emotions and behaviors—rage, jealousy, shame, lying,
resentment, lust, greed, suicidal and murderous tendencies lie concealed just
beneath the surface, masked by our more proper selves. Known together in
psychology as the personal shadow, it remains untamed, unexplored territory to
most of us.” (Meeting the Shadow, Connie Zweig)!

“It is no accident that sexuality and anger are the most problematic of shadow
encounters, for they are experienced by the ego world, and the collective, as
anarchic, disruptive to social order, outside of one's control. But as existential
"constriction" is unavoidable, so anger is inescapable. All of us have pockets of
anger floating about in our psyche, just as we have pockets of sadness and fear.
Since many of us were enjoined against the honest expression of emotion, most
notably anger and sexuality, we carry these split-off emotions unconsciously.
Sometimes they remain repressed as a long-term, low-grade depression;
sometimes they lie very close to the surface and erupt with damaging effect to
oneself and others. Sometimes one has suffered a wounding of such magnitude
as to remain dominated by anger.” (Swamplands of the Soul, James Hollis)!
!
!
The Development of the Shadow and the
Persona!
!
“All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the
collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion, in fact – now
come together to form the shadow, that dark region of the personality which is
unknown and unrecognized by the ego. The endless series of shadow and
doppelgänger figures in mythology, fairy tales and literature ranges from Cain
and Edom, by way of Judas and Hagen, to Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde in the ugliest
man of Nietzsche; again and again such figures have appeared and made their
bow before human consciousness, but the psychological meaning of this
archetype of the adversary has not yet dawned upon mankind.” (Depth
Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“Personas are not inherently bad; they are very important, and necessary for us
to function in the world, to work, to play, and to interact with others. People
without enough persona are deficient in their ability to deal with the real
world.” (War of the Gods in Addiction, David Schoen)!
!
“Our personal shadow is the “hidden unconscious aspects of [ourselves], both
good and bad, which the ego has either repressed or never recognized.” It is all
of the incompatible thoughts, feelings, desires, fantasies, and actions that we
have suppressed and repressed into the personal unconscious, along with our
more primitive, undifferentiated impulses and instincts. In the Freudian view of
the psyche, it is what Freud identifies as the whole of the “unconscious.” It is
what I like to describe as the personal psychological garbage can of our
psyches.” (War of the Gods in Addiction, David Schoen)!
!
“The ego will receive the reward of moral recognition by the collective to the
exact extent to which it succeeds in identifying with the persona, the collectivized
façade personality – the simple reason being that this façade personality is the
visible sign of agreement with the values of the collective.” (Depth Psychology
and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“The development of the shadow runs parallel to that of the ego; qualities which
the ego does not need or cannot make use of are set-aside or repressed, and
thus they play little or no part in the conscious life of the individual. Accordingly, a
child has no real shadow, but his shadow becomes more pronounced as his ego
gains in stability and range. And because in the course of our lives we are
constantly having to inhibit or repress one quality or another, the shadow can
never be fully raised to consciousness. Nevertheless it is important that at least
its most salient traits should be made conscious and correlated with the ego,
which thereby gains in strength and vigour and comes to feel more firmly
anchored in our nature.” (The Psychology of C.G. Jung, Jolande Jacobi)!
!
“The persona is the mask we wear in relation to the world and others. It is
created through a combination of socialization, societal expectations, one’s
experience of the world, and the natural attributes and tendencies of the
individual. It combines elements of how we want to see ourselves, ideally, and
how we want the world to see us, as well as how the world does see us and
wants us to be. Our persona defines our social identity; it is constructed in
relation to the roles we play in our lives and in our world, how we want to look
and be seen. It is the face we wear to be presentable and acceptable to our
society. It is not necessarily who we really are, but who we want and pretend to
be to others and, many times, to ourselves.” (War of the Gods in Addiction, David
Schoen)!
!
“A child's reaction to society's edicts goes through a number of predictable
stages. Typically, the first response is to hide forbidden behaviors from the
parents. The child thinks angry thoughts but doesn't speak them out loud. He
explores his body in the privacy of his room. He teases his younger sibling when
his parents are away. Eventually the child comes to the conclusion that some
thoughts and feelings are so unacceptable that they should be eliminated, so he
constructs an imaginary parent in his head to police his thoughts and activities, a
part of the mind that psychologists call the "superego." Now, whenever the child
has a forbidden thought or indulges in an "unacceptable" behavior, he
experiences a self-administered jolt of anxiety. This is so un- pleasant that the
child puts to sleep some of those forbidden parts of himself—in Freudian terms,
he represses them. The ultimate price of his obedience is a loss of
wholeness.” (Meeting the Shadow, Connie Zweig)!

“The formation of the persona is, in fact, as necessary as it is universal. The

persona, the mask, what one passes for and what one appears to be, in contrast
to one’s real individual nature, corresponds to one’s adaptation to the
requirements of the age, of one’s personal environment, and of the community.
The persona is the cloak and the shell, the armour and the uniform, behind which
and within which the individual conceals himself – from himself, often enough, as
well as from the world. It is the self-control which hides what is uncontrolled and
uncontrollable, the acceptable façade behind which the dark and strange,
eccentric, secret and uncanny side of our nature remains invisible.” (Depth
Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“The shadow is the other side. It is the expression of our own imperfection and
earthliness, the negative which is incompatible with the absolute values; it is our
inferior corporeality in contradistinction to the absoluteness and eternity of a soul
which “does not belong to this world”. But it can also appear in the opposite
capacity as “spirit”, for instance when the conscious mind only recognizes the
material values of this life. The shadow represents the uniqueness and
transitoriness of our nature; it is our own state of limitation and subjection to the
conditions of space and time. At the same time, however, it forms a part of the
nuclear structure of our individuality.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich
Neumann)!
!
“The shadow goes by many familiar names: the disowned self, the lower self, the
dark twin or brother in bible and myth, the double, repressed self, alter ego, id.
When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe
these shadow encounters: meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, descent
to the underworld, dark night of the soul, midlife crisis.” (Meeting the Shadow,
Connie Zweig)!
!
“We must, however, acknowledge…that man with all his noble qualities, with
sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not
only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect
which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—
with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible
stamp of his lowly origin.” (Charles Darwin)!
!
“This ‘inferior’ personality is made up of everything that will not fit in with, and
adapt to, the laws and regulations of conscious life. It is compounded of
“disobedience” and is therefore rejected not on moral grounds alone, but also for
reasons of expediency.” (A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,
Carl Jung)!
!
!
Repression of the Shadow and Overidentification
with the Persona!
“Repression of the shadow and identification with the positive values [i.e.,
persona] are two sides of one and the same process. It is the identification of the
ego with the façade personality which makes this repression possible, and the
repression in its turn is the basis of the ego’s identification with the collective
values by means of the persona.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich
Neumann)!
!
“The great danger of an ego overidentification with the persona is that we begin
to believe that we are our well-constructed, overly idealized mask, and not who
and what we really are, warts and all.” (War of the Gods in Addiction, David
Schoen)!
!
Repression, on the other hand, simply looks the other way. When persisted in,
repression always leads to psychopathology, but it is also indispensable to the
first ego formation. This means that we all carry the germs of psychopathology
within us. In this sense potential psychopathology is an integral part of our
human structure. (Meeting the Shadow, Connie Zweig)!
!
“The greater the incongruity between our persona and who we really are, the
greater the energy required to defend and maintain the system.” (War of the
Gods in Addiction, David Schoen)!
!
“The enlargement of the light side of consciousness has the necessary
consequence that the part of the psyche which is less light and less capable of
consciousness is thrown into darkness to such an extent that sooner or later a rift
occurs in the psychic system. At first, this is not recognized as such and is
therefore projected – i.e. it appears as a religious projection, in the form of a split
between the powers of Light and Darkness.” (The Symbolism of the Spirit, Carl
Jung).!
!
“What makes this inflation so disastrous, however, is not some intrinsic danger to
be found in the nature of the values themselves; it is rather that, by identifying his
personal ego with the transpersonal in the shape of the collective values, the
limited individual loses contact with his own limitations and becomes
inhuman.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“In repression, the excluded contents and components of the personality which
run counter to the dominant ethical value lose their connection with the conscious
system and become unconscious or forgotten – that is to say, the ego is entirely
unaware of their existence. Repressed contents, unlike of those suppressed, are
withdrawn from the control of consciousness and function independently of it; in
fact, as depth psychology has shown, they lead an active underground life of
their own with disastrous results for both the individual and collective.” (Depth
Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“The situation which is more common and more familiar to the average man is
that in which the ego identifies itself with the ethical values. The identification
takes place by means of an identification of the ego with the persona. The ego
confuses itself with the façade personality (which is of course in reality only that
part of the personality that is tailored to fit the collective), and forgets that it
possesses aspects which run counter to the persona. This means that the ego
has repressed the shadow side and lost touch with the dark contents, which are
negative and for this reason split off from the conscious sector.” (A Psychological
Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity, Carl Jung)!
!
!
The Negative Effects of Shadow Repression!
!
“There is an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably influences
consciousness and its contents. All this is known, but no practical conclusions
have been drawn from this fact. We still go on thinking and acting as before, as if
we were simplex and not duplex. Accordingly, we imagine ourselves innocuous,
reasonable and humane. We do not think distrusting our motives or asking
ourselves how the inner man feels about things we do in the outside world. But
actually it is frivolous, superficial and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically
unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the
unconscious.” (Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung)!
!
“It is a matter of common experience (which we cannot discuss in detail now) that
contents which are capable of becoming conscious but whose access to
consciousness has been blocked become evil and destructive. We know from
daily life that the inability or unwillingness to admit the existence of a fact or
content or to “abreact” something, as it is called, often makes a mountain – or
rather an earthquake – out of a harmless molehill. The content which has been
split off from consciousness becomes regressive and contaminated with other
primitive, negative contents in the unconscious, with the result that, in an
unstable personality, a minor irritation denied access to consciousness is not
infrequently blown up into an access of fury or a serious depression. In quite
general terms, it can be stated that forces excluded from the conscious mind
accumulate and build up attention in the unconscious, and that this tension is
quite definitely destructive.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich
Neumann)!
!
“Every ego has a shadow. This is unavoidable. In adapting to and coping with the
world, the ego, quite unwittingly, employs the shadow to carry out unsavory
operations that it could not perform without falling into a moral conflict. Without
the ego’s knowledge, these protective and self-serving activities are carried out in
the dark. The shadow operates much like a nation’s secret espionage system—
without the explicit knowledge of the head of state, who is therefore allowed to
deny culpability. Although introspection can to some extent bring these shadowy
ego operations to consciousness, the ego’s own defenses against shadow
awareness are usually so effective that little can penetrate them.” (Jung’s Map of
the Soul, Murray Stein)!
!
“That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.” (Carl
Jung)!
!
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's
conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious
snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” (Carl Jung)!
Forces and contents which are completely repressed and have no means of
access to consciousness do not remain unaltered in the unconscious or retain
their original character: they change. (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich
Neumann)!
!
!
Shadow-Possession and Addiction!
!
“Closer examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities
constituting the shadow – reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of
autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality.” (Carl
Jung)!
!
“The problem in individuals who develop an addiction is usually not one of little or
no persona, but too much—too thick, too heavy a persona.” (War of the Gods in
Addiction, David Schoen)!
!
“The Jungian analyst Linda Leonard, in her wonderful book Witness to the Fire:
Creativity and the Veil of Addiction argues strongly that the personal shadow is
looking for any way it can find to express itself, and often the addictive behavior
is the first chance in many years the shadow has had to get out of the closet, the
attic, or the basement, and it takes full advantage of its opportunity to take all it
can get, oftentimes with a vengeance. This often manifests as the wild,
dangerous, risk-taking, embarrassing, out-of-control behavior of people when
they are drinking or using, which is usually so different from their normal way of
acting.” (War of the Gods in Addiction, David Schoen)!
!
“Man has to realize that he possesses a shadow which is the dark side of his
own personality; he is being compelled to recognize his “inferior function”, if only
for the reason that he is so often overwhelmed by it, with the result that the light
world of his conscious mind and his ethical values succumbs to an invasion by
the dark side. The whole suffering brought upon man by his experience of the
inherent evil in his own nature – the whole immeasurable problem of "original
sin", in fact – threatens to annihilate the individual in a welter of anxiety and
feelings of guilt.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“In these ways, the personal shadow reinforces, encourages, and becomes
dependent upon the addictive behavior to express itself, to have any existence in
the light outside of the closet, the attic, and the basement where it has been
locked up and hidden for so long. Often the addictive behavior allows the
personal shadow the only opportunities to live and to be. The more cut off and
unconscious we are of our personal shadows, the more vulnerable we are to
having those shadows break out and be set free for a time by addictive
behaviors.” (War of the Gods in Addiction, David Schoen)!
!
“I believe that initially what happens is that the ego overidentifies with the
persona, the false self or fabricated image of oneself. As the addiction process
progresses, the personal shadow gets involved, and then the potentially addictive
behavior comes into play to alleviate the stress, tension, and conflict in the
psychic system.” (War of the Gods in Addiction, David Schoen)!
!
!
Shadow Projection and the Scapegoat!
!
“Indeed, the external object has the function of a scapegoat, and to single it out
as the origin of one's misfortunes frees the individual from the unpleasant task of
facing up to oneself.” (Vertical Labyrinth, Aldo Carotenuto)!
!
“And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of his shadow side, so the normal
individual, like the neurotic, sees his shadow in his neighbour or in the man
beyond the great divide.”  (Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung)!
!
“Although, with insight and good will, the shadow can to some extent be
assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are
certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and
prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up
with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a
moral achievement beyond the ordinary.” (Aion, Carl Jung)!
!
“Jung defined projection as an unconscious, that is unperceived and
unintentional, transfer of subjective psychic elements onto an outer
object.” (Marie Louise von Franz)!
!
“[We] still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do
not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him,
when all that has happened is that an inferior "soul" has emigrated from one
person to another. The world is still full of bites noires and scapegoats, just as it
formerly teemed with witches and werewolves.” (Carl Jung)!

“The individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not
know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody
else.” (Carl Jung)!

“It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not
just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The
individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible
that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these
harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each
individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he
must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost.
Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the
shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of
original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the
conflict of which he is so painfully aware.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values, cannot be
accepted as a negative part of one’s own psyche and is therefore projected –
that is, it is transferred to the outside world and experienced as an outside object.
It is combated, punished, and exterminated as “the alien out there” instead of
being dealt with as “one’s own inner problem”.” (Depth Psychology and a New
Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“For this reason, we see the shadow mostly indirectly, in the distasteful traits and
actions of other people,out there where it is safer to observe it. When we react
intensely to a quality in an individual or group—such as laziness or stupidity,
sensuality, or spirituality—and our reaction overtakes us with great loathing or
admiration, this may be our own shadow showing. We project by attributing this
quality to the other person in an unconscious effort to banish it from ourselves, to
keep ourselves from seeing it within.” (Meeting the Shadow, Connie Zweig)!

“The way in which the old ethic provides for the elimination of these feelings of
guilt and the discharge of the excluded negative forces is in fact one of the
greatest perils confronting mankind. What we have in mind here is that classic
psychological expedient – the institution of a scapegoat. The technique for
attempting a solution of the problem is to be found wherever human society
exists. It is, however, best known as a ritual in Judaism. Here the purification of
the collective was carried out by solemnly heaping all impurity and evil upon the
head of the scapegoat, which was then sent away and exile in the wilderness –
to Azazel.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“The shadow is the archetypal experience of the "other fellow," who in his
strangeness is always suspect. It is the archetypal urge for a scapegoat, for
someone to blame and attack in order to vindicate oneself and bejustified; it is
the archetypal experience of the enemy, the experience of blameworthiness
which always adheres to the other fellow, since we are under the illusion of
knowing ourselves and of having already dealt adequately with our own
problems. In other words, to the extent that I have to be right and good, he, she,
or they become the carriers of all the evil which I fail to acknowledge within
myself.” (Edward Whitmont)!

“No one likes to admit his own darkness. People who believe their ego
represents the wholly of their psyche, who neither know nor want to know all the
other qualities that belong it it, are wont to project their unknown ‘soul parts’ into
the surrounding world.” (The Psychology of C.G. Jung, Jolande Jacobi)!
!
“For primitive man – and the mass man in every nation reacts, as we know, like a
primitive man – evil cannot be acknowledged as “his own evil” at all, since
consciousness is still too weakly developed to be able to deal with the resulting
conflict. It is for this reason that evil is invariably experienced by mass man as
something alien, and the victims of shadow projection are therefore, always and
everywhere, the aliens.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“In the economy of the psyche, the outcast role of the alien is immensely
important as an object for the projection of the shadow. The shadow – that part of
our personality which is “alien” to the ego, our own unconscious counter position,
which is subversive of our conscious attitude and security – can be exteriorized
and subsequently destroyed. The fight against heretics, political opponents and
national enemies is actually the fight against our own religious doubts, the
insecurity of our own political position, and the one sidedness of our own national
viewpoint.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“No war can be waged unless the enemy can be converted into the carrier of the
shadow projection; and the lust and joy of warlike conflict, without which no
human being can be induced actually to fight in a war, is derived from the
satisfaction of the unconscious shadow side.” (Depth Psychology and a New
Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“In the darkness of anything external to me, I find…an interior psychic life that is
my own.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections,
then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man
has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious
problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are
wrong, and they must be fought against…!
Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he
only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the
world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the
gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.” (Psychology and Religion, Carl
Jung)!
!
!
Integrating the Shadow!
!
“This one-sided development must inevitably lead to a reaction, since the
suppressed inferior functions cannot be indefinitely excluded from participating in
our life and development. The time will come when the division in the inner man
must be abolished, in order that the undeveloped may be granted an opportunity
to live.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“Our earthbound quality does not mean that we cannot grow; on the contrary, it is
even the conditio sine qua non of growth. No lofty, well grown tree ever disowned
its dark roots. In fact, it grows not only upward, but downward as
well.” (Integration of the Personality, Carl Jung)!
!
Yet, where peril lies,!
Grows the remedy, too.”!
(Holderlin)!
!
“We have in all naivete forgotten that beneath our world of reason another lies
buried. I do not know what humanity will still have to undergo before it dares to
admit this.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” (William Shakespeare)!
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would
be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they
were not cherished by our virtues.” (William Shakespeare)!

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making
the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and
therefore not popular.” (Carl Jung)!

“One would never discover the limits of psyche, should one traverse every road -
so deep a logos does it possess.” (Heraclitus)!
!
“This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to
frighten off most people, for the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more
unpleasant things that can be avoided so long as we can project everything
negative into the environment. But if we are able to see our own shadow and can
bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved:
we have at least brought up the personal unconscious. The shadow is a living
part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot
be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness. This problem is
exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds
him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality.” (Carl Jung)!

“The problem of integrating the shadow is a moral and psychological problem of

the most thorny sort. If a person completely shuns the shadow, life is proper but it
is terribly incomplete. By opening up to shadow experience, however, a person
becomes tainted with immorality but attains a greater degree of wholeness. This
is truly a devil’s bargain.” (Jung’s Map of the Soul, Murray Stein)!
!
“The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The
shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is
spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in
order to know who one is.” (Carl Jung)!

“The shadow is indispensable for making the whole of a personality; nobody is

whole without negative qualities. This is lightly said, but in reality it is an
enormous problem, looked at from an ethical point of view. It is so difficult that
one knows no other solution practically than to shut one's eyes; if one doesn't
look at it, one can live. But the moment one sees it, it is almost impossible, an
insupportable conflict. If one takes the moral conflict seriously, it becomes
insoluble. Therefore, people choose the way of the church or something like that,
in order to escape the terrible responsibility. There the church steps in with her
means of grace, or with the conviction that somebody has dealt with the problem
of our sin, or is going to deal with it, so we are relieved of that awful
problem.” (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Carl Jung)!

“…this integration [of the shadow] cannot take place and be put to a useful
purpose unless one can admit the tendencies bound up with the shadow and
allow them some measure of realization – tempered, of course, with the
necessary criticism. This leads to disobedience and self disgust, but also to self-
reliance, without which individuation is unthinkable.” (A Psychological Approach
to the Dogma of the Trinity, Carl Jung)!
!
“The Greeks would, as it were, devote festivals to all their passions and evil
natural inclinations… they took these human, all too human aspects of
themselves to be unavoidable and, instead of reviling them, preferred to accord
them a sort of right of the second rank by integrating them into the customs of
society… Rather than repudiating the natural drive that expresses itself in nasty
qualities, they regulate it and restrict it to certain cults and days, after having
discovered sufficient precautionary measures to be able to grant those wild
waters as harmless an outflow as possible.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)!
!
“Contemporary therapists focus closely on the goal of helping patients reintegrate
previously split-off parts of themselves. In a research project that I described in
chapter 6, successful patients were asked to rank-order sixty factors in therapy
according to degree of helpfulness. The single most frequently chosen item by
far was “discovering and accepting previously unknown or unacceptable parts of
myself.” To make oneself whole again is the goal of most psychotherapies.” (Irvin
Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy)!
!
“There is no generally effective technique for assimilating the shadow. It is more
like diplomacy or statesmanship and it is always an individual matter. First one
has to accept and take seriously the existence of the shadow. Second, one has
to become aware of its qualities and intentions. This happens through
conscientious attention to moods, fantasies and impulses. Third, a long process
of negotiation is unavoidable.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“What is necessary beforehand. – A man who is not willing to become master
over his wrath, his gall and a vengefulness, and his lust, and who tries to become
master in anything else, is as stupid as the farmer who lays out his field beside a
torrential stream without protecting himself from it.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)!
!
“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for
no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.
To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the
personality as present and real.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“In order to protect its own control and sovereignty the ego instinctively puts up a
great resistance to the confrontation with the shadow; when it catches a glimpse
of the shadow the ego most often reacts with an attempt to eliminate it. Our will is
mobilized and we decide. "I just won't be that way any more!" Then comes the
final shattering shock, when we discover that, in part at least, this is impossible
no matter how we try. For the shadow represents energically charged
autonomous patterns of feeling and behavior. Their energy cannot simply be
stopped by an act of will. What is needed is rechanneling or transformation.
However, this task requires both an awareness and an acceptance of the shadow
as something which cannot simply be gotten rid of.” (Meeting the Shadow,
Connie Zweig)!

“This most shortsighted and pernicious way of thinking wants to make the great
sources of energy, those wild torrents of the soul that often stream forth so
dangerously and overwhelmingly, dry up altogether, instead of taking their power
into service and economizing it.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)!
“For instance, you dream of somebody who seems to be far below your level, a
person, say, who is despicable, simply impossible, a person entirely different
from your tastes, and you cannot see how you are that person. But if you
meditate long enough about the dream, you discover the secret doors leading to
yourself, where you can see the spot in which you are identical with him. Then
you can integrate the figure; then you arrive at the subjective stage of your
interpretation. Formerly the devil was outside. If anyone did something bad it was
because a devil had tempted him. Or a spirit had possessed him and forced him.
Nobody was responsible: there was no moral responsibility. But now nobody can
use that excuse. Now he has to say: I am the devil, I am the sinner. (Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra, Carl Jung)!
!
“It is only when he is compelled by sickness and extremities to come to terms
with his own nature that the opportunity may arise for him gradually to experience
the sombre power of the shadow as a messenger from the creative potential
which lives in his own psyche. It is part of the destiny of modern man that his way
should first lead him “down to the depths”, not “up to the heights”; is it then
surprising that the guide who meets him as he sets out on his journey should turn
out to be no shining angel of light but the dark shadow figure of his own
evil?” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“It is the same with the human being as with the tree. The higher they climb into
the height and light, the more strongly their roots strive earthward, downward,
into the dark, the depths – and evil.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)!
!
“Recognition of the shadow, on the other hand, leads to the modesty we need in
order to acknowledge imperfection. And it is just this conscious recognition and
consideration that are needed whenever a human relationship is to be
established. A human relationship is not based on differentiation and perfection,
for these only emphasize the differences or call forth the exact opposite; it is
based, rather, on imperfection, on what is weak, helpless and in need of support -
the very ground for dependence. The perfect have no need of others, but
weakness has, for it seeks support and does not confront its partner with
anything that might force him into an inferior position and even humiliate him.
This humiliation may happen only too easily when high idealism plays too
prominent a role.” (Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung)!
!
“The psychological analysis of any normal development will make it clear that, if
he is to grow up, it is not merely unavoidable but actually essential that the
individual should do and assimilate a certain amount of evil, and that he should
be able to overcome the conflicts involved in this process. The achievement of
independence involves the capacity of the ego not only to adopt the values of the
collective but often also to secure the fulfilment of those needs of the individual
which run counter to collective values – and this entails doing evil.” (Depth
Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“…evil, the serpent, is a necessary part of the process of growth. The dark part
must be brought completely above the horizon, so that life can go on; and the
serpent raised to the sky illustrates this truth.” (Integration of the Personality, Carl
Jung)!
!
“A process in which the ego is compelled to recognize that it is evil and sick in
mind, antisocial, and a prey to neurotic suffering, ugly and narrowminded – an
analytical technique which punctures the inflation of the ego and obliges it to
experience exactly how and where it is limited and one sided, conditioned by its
type, prejudiced and unfair – all this represents such a bitter form of self
encounter that one can readily understand the resistance that it arouses.” (Depth
Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“To be obliged to admit that one is infantile and maladjusted, miserable and ugly,
a human animal related to the monkeys, a sexual beast and a creature of the
herd is in itself a shattering experience for any ego that has identified itself with
the collective values. But the roots of the shadow problem go deeper still, and it
becomes a matter of deadly earnest when the probe reaches right down to the
sources of evil itself, where the personality experiences its relationship with the
enemy of mankind, the drive to aggression and destruction, in the structure of its
own being.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
“The acceptance of the shadow involves a growth in depth into the ground of
one’s own being, and with the loss of the airy illusion of an ego ideal, a new
depth and rootedness and stability is born.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic,
Erich Neumann)!
!
“Surprisingly enough, the analysis of individuals also reveals that the encounter
and reconciliation with the shadow is in very many cases a sin qua non for the
birth of a genuinely tolerant attitude towards other people, other groups and other
forms of and levels of culture.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich
Neumann)!
!
“But we assiduously avoid investigating whether in this very power of evil God
might have placed some special purpose which it is most important for us to
know. One often feels driven to some such a view when, like the psychotherapist,
one has to deal with people who are confronted with their blackest shadow. At
any rate, the doctor cannot afford to point, with a gesture of facile moral
superiority, to the tablets of the law and say, “thou shalt not”. He has to examine
things objectively and weigh up the possibilities, for he knows, less from religious
training and education than from instinct and experience, that there is something
very like a felix culpa [happy fault]. He knows that one can miss not only one’s
happiness but also one’s final guilt, without which a man will never reach his
wholeness.” (Psychology and Alchemy, Carl Jung)!
!
“The acceptance of the problem of the shadow is the first part of the process of
transformation in the personality which, whatever else it may include, always
involves an enlargement of consciousness. This does not, however, by any
means imply an irresponsible surrender to the shadow, which would result in a
fatal loss of consciousness. The change of attitude towards the shadow which is
essential for the healing of the sick person, who is the representative of modern
man in all his splitness and disintegration, has nothing in common with any
megalomaniac condition of being “beyond good and evil”. On the contrary, the
acceptance of oneself as including a dark aspect and a shadow actually springs
from a deep and humble recognition of the invincible creatureliness of man,
which is a part of the purpose of his creation. Unlike the old unconscious
dilemma – either surrender to the shadow and be overwhelmed, or else project it
and lose it all together – “acceptance of the shadow” is a solution which brings
unconsciousness of the problem to an end. And that is in fact the point of the
process.” (Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, Erich Neumann)!
!
!
Positive Shadow: Discovering Sources of
Renewal!
“The shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward;
not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a
way vitalize and embellish human existence, but – convention
forbids!” (Psychology and Religion, Carl Jung)!
!
“If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil,
it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that
is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but
also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate
reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc’’ (Carl Jung)!
!
“By hiding the personality traits that were considered objectionable, we lost out
on our chance to rework and move through them. Instead, they simply went
underground. Qualities that required only some sanding and polishing were
confined to the cellar, our unconscious, as useless or even dangerous. This was
perhaps the fate of much potential for creative transformation. Given the chance,
an ugly aggressiveness might have been trimmed to assertiveness, unwelcome
controlling ways might have been spruced up into efficient leadership, fear might
even have become love.” (Shadow Dance, David Rico)!
!
“This substitution of pseudo acts for original acts of thinking, feeling, and willing,
leads eventually to the replacement of the original self by a pseudo self. The
original self is the self which is the originator of mental activities. The pseudo self
is only an agent who actually represents the role a person is supposed to play
but who does so under the name of the self. It is true that a person can play
many roles and subjectively be convinced that he is "he" in each role. Actually he
is in all these roles what he believes he is expected to be, and for many people, if
not most, the original self is completely suffocated by the pseudo self.
Sometimes in a dream, in fantasies, or when a person is drunk, some of the
original self may appear, feelings and thoughts which the person has not
experienced for years. Often they are bad ones which he has repressed because
he is afraid or ashamed of them. Sometimes, however, they are the very best
things in him, which he has repressed because of his fear of being ridiculed or
attacked for having such feelings.” (Erich Fromm)!

“The paradoxical remark of Thales, that only the rust gives its true value to the
coin, is a kind of alchemistic paraphrase, and simply means that there is no light
without shadow and no psychic completeness without imperfection. To round
itself out, life calls, not for perfection, but for completeness. For this “the barb in
the flesh” is needed, the suffering of imperfection without which there is no
forward or upward.” (Integration of the Personality, Carl Jung)!
!
“The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal; the new and
productive impulse cannot come from established values of the ego. When there
is an impasse, and sterile time in our lives—despite an adequate ego
development—we must look to the dark, hitherto unacceptable side which has
been at our conscious disposal.” (Edward Whitmont)!

“What our age thinks of as the “shadow” and inferior part of the psyche contains
more than something merely negative. The very fact that through self-knowledge,
i.e., by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their world of
imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of
which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well. They are potentialities of
the greatest dynamism, and it depends entirely on the preparedness and attitude
of the conscious mind whether the irruption of these forces and the images and
ideas associated with them will tend towards construction or
catastrophe.” (Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung)!
!
“At the same time, some of the great assets or talents of our personality might
also have been threatening to our parents and others in our life, and then they
too had to be sequestered.” (Shadow Dance, David Rico)!
!
!
Conclusion!
!
“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and
calm that is not easily disturbed” (Carl Jung)!

“In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is
devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no
hero who never met the dragon, or who, if once he saw it, declared afterwards
that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon
and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain”. He alone
has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his
self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives some faith and trust,
the pistis in the ability of the self to sustain him, for everything that menaced him
from inside he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will
be able to overcome all future threats by the same means. He has arrived at an
inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance.” (Carl Jung)!
!
“For I am every dead thing In whom love wrought new alchemy. For his art did
express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations and lean
emptiness: He ruined me and I am rebegot Of absence, darkness, death, things
which are not.” (John Donne)!
!
““Yes," says Dionysus, “that I might make man stronger, more evil and deeper
than he is.” “Stronger, more evil and deeper?” I asked, shocked. “Yes,” he said
once more, “stronger, more evil, deeper, and also more beautiful”… and saying
this, he smiled his Halcyon smile, this Tempter-God.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)!
!