The Shadow Of The Human Psyche Pt. 1 - What It Is and How It Works

By Colin E. Davis 

www.shadowtechalchemy.com  
12/14/23
Revised introduction 12/15/23

Like an infectious disease, our unrealized personal darkness reaches out and harms everyone around us.  I often describe how our rapidly degrading society is directly related to our failure to process our own shadows, but I now realize that people will not engage in difficult healing work on themselves for social reasons.  They will only do it when they must do it for personal health and sanity reasons.  

This article is therefore targeted at people who intuitively know they need to do shadow work and those who are already doing some form of it in their lives.  This paper very briefly describes Jung’s shadow from most of the angles from which he approached it to contextualize and map this difficult area of study. What is contained in here is not what I have directly copied and pasted from books, but what I have read about and then checked against my own experience over the last decade.  I hope this basic outline of the shadow helps you to gain clarity on this difficult subject.

The Unconscious Shadow

Let’s start by describing the inbuilt split between our CONSCIOUS minds (also called the EGO or ego consciousness) and our UNCONSCIOUS minds which are separated by a semi-permeable boundary field that keeps most unconscious material unconscious, while allowing what we need to consciously process to come up into our awareness.  

All that we know about ourselves, our memories and our continuous waking state of awareness that we call “I” or “me” is within the field of ego consciousness.  At the same time, our conscious ego is only 5% of the totality of the mind, which is also called the PSYCHE.  Most of the material in the psyche is unconscious.  

A common image that has been used to show this situation is an iceberg in the ocean where only the tip of the iceberg is above water.  The tip represents ego consciousness while the majority of the ice is below the ocean’s surface, unconscious and unknown to the ego.  This is the basic dual natured model of the human psyche.  From here we can subdivide the conscious and unconscious minds into parts, but for our introductory purposes here we will keep it simple and only introduce the parts needed for our analysis of the shadow. 

Our psyche has developed over millions of years to reliably transport information in the unconscious psyche to the conscious ego as needed.  When we think, talk, imagine or dream, we don’t consciously ask for the information to come up, it does so automatically and it just appears in our awareness.  When we need to remember something, it just shows up.  When we need intuitive information about an important choice or when we need to express empathy for a friend’s loss, the psychic material we need just shows up and it does so on its own without the ego, “I” or “me”, commanding it.   So all is well.  

But then we have a special category of unconscious material that Carl Jung called the SHADOW.  We will leave the history of this invention to the side for now.  The shadow is unconscious  psychic material that is trying to come up and be INTEGRATED into the ego for our consideration and use, but it can’t come up because it’s blocked by one’s particular ego patterning or SELF IMAGE that isn’t compatible with this shadowy material.  The reason why is because our shadow thoughts, feelings and impulses go against the way we think we ought to be and the way our parents, family and society have conditioned us to be.  Additionally, when this material has to do with old wounds, we reject it because to touch it would be too painful.  

Contents of the Shadow

The contents of the shadow are usually considered to be the dark stuff like raw aggression or rage, sexual drives, selfishness and narcissism, feelings of inferiority, fears, guilt, grief, and the feeling-state left overs of childhood trauma and the difficulties of growing up.  It can also be destructive patterning that we inherited from our parents and ancestors.  The shadow is the deep seated feelings and impulses that drive destructive behavior and manifests into cyclical “complexes” that cause chronic symptoms, relational conflicts, compulsions, addictions and disease. 

Notably, there is also the category of the GOLDEN SHADOW, which is the stuff of our genius, our creative talents and our highest capacities as human beings which also can’t make it into consciousness because we were conditioned by family or society to reject these aspects of ourselves.  Coming to terms with our unique genius or “soul path” can be just as difficult as coming to terms with our rage, fear or buried grief. 

Jung believed that the equal opposite of the shadow, or its primary energetic source, is the PERSONA which is the part of our ego that contains the aspects of our self image that we show to others (developed from Freud’s super-ego).  The persona is the mask we present to the world to represent who we are.  It’s not who we are at a deep level, but it’s our public IDENTITY.  Many of the things that we have the hardest time dealing with are those things that would disturb our position in society.  

And while this may be true, it might also be said that in our day, where social conservatism is relaxed, one big reason why a shadow forms in us is because it’s storing the leftovers of our childhood trauma and the wounding that comes from growing up in an atomized, materialistic, distracted society.  Also importantly, the shadow contains dark primal animalistic drives that no society would be capable of dealing with, so the shadow is actually a negative by-product of the fact that we live in organized societies that just cannot give way to every base instinct that we have, so this energy has to go somewhere. 

As we mentioned, most unconscious material does not need to come into ego consciousness and it presents no problem to the ego by being held back. We would not want to be inundated by most of what’s in the unconscious.  When that happens we call it psychosis or schizophrenia.  But the category of the shadow is only the psychic material which “should” or even “must” come forth to be used in some healthy way, but it cannot because it’s too energetic and caustic for the ego to handle, so it grows in power and it requires periodic release. There are several ways that the psyche deals with this problem. 

How We Displace Our Shadow Material

Basic unconscious and automatic repression of our shadow material works for a while, but as we grow older it presents an increasing problem to our healthy development as it becomes more toxic and needs to be integrated or released.  It’s well known that the first time an individual may seriously consider working on their repressed darkness is when they have a major life crisis or what has sometimes been called the “dark night of the soul”.  It’s often when we’re down and out that we gain enough humility and enough of a reason to actually go into our unconscious garbage.  

So we repress it for a while but then our shadow material starts to leak.  It comes up when we least expect it and surprises us.  Many have heard of the so-called “Freudian slip” where we accidentally say something embarrassing that reveals something dark we had unconsciously been holding back.  We end up running into our shadows in all kinds of ways that seem to be random but this is actually the unconscious mind seeking a way to find resolution for this material.  Your shadow tends to come back to bite you when you refuse to face it.  “Karma’s a bitch”.

Our shadow material also leaks out into all kinds of small acts of rudeness, selfishness, aggression or sexual promiscuity that we engage in unconsciously.  As we can all see, many westerners and modern people are now leaking shadow material out into the public at tremendous levels.  In the extreme, people may actually positively identify with their own shadows and enjoy acting criminally.  This behavior is currently happening at very high levels, and speaking of high levels, we are seeing a great shadow epidemic in the so-called “elite” segments of society.  We might say that this is due to the fact that these people have often been recruited into power precisely because they have “skeletons in the closet” but I would say that they are a reflection of the total shadow of the entire body politic. 

Although we have not yet as a society come to realize that our repressed shadows are also responsible for most of our chronic disease and health issues, this will eventually become more known.  I will discuss how the shadow manifests holistically in mind, culture, body and civilization itself in later articles and videos.  

Projection

With the above said, the most subtle and socially destructive way we displace the energy of our shadows is by PROJECTING them onto other people and then following up with with toxic behavior.  The way this works is that our psyche protects our conscious egos from our toxic shadow material by projecting what we are repressing onto another person or group.  When we project our shadows, we see in other people the exact same dark traits that we are repressing in ourselves!  We cannot see this material in ourselves because it’s held in COGNITIVE DISSONANCE below the threshold of awareness, but then when the opportunity arises, we project it onto others in the outside world.  

When we project, we see others as narcissistic and vain, ugly or immature or corrupt, for example.  And while they may have some of these shadow traits in them as well, what really TRIGGERS us is the fact that the problems we perceive in them are also our own issues that we have not yet worked out.  We might recall the biblical quote where Jesus tells his followers to remove the log from their own eye before they attempt to remove the speck from another’s eye.  This is actually an ancient command to rescind one’s shadow projections from the world.  In other words, don’t be a hypocrite!  But you can’t stop being a hypocrite if you cannot see your own hypocrisy.  Recently I have heard people in the red-pilled political sphere using the term “confession by projection”, to describe activists, politicians and pundits who are unknowingly revealing their own corruption through the accusations they project onto their political enemies that they themselves are guilty of.   

Whenever someone or some thing about another person emotionally triggers us, it’s actually because they are acting as a “hook”, in Jung’s words,  to hang our own shadows onto.  We then amplify this negative trait that we see in them to larger proportions and a field of conflict is created between us and the other.  We all walk around in life to some degree or another projecting our own faults and insecurities onto other people, whom we see as evil, nasty, ugly or in some way bad so as to protect our own self images.  We DEMONIZE other people when we project our own shadows onto them and they do it back to us.  In this way we all together create a theater of conflict which is in fact a projected, fake, psychic, movie-like horror show caused by our own inability to metabolize our shadow material! This is not to say that those we accuse of evil deeds are always totally innocent.  But it is to say that those who most obsessively throw aspersions are likely to be carrying something dark within themselves that they are projecting as a self defense mechanism.  

But projection is just the first step because after we project demon onto another person or group, we now have the moral standing to take physical action to stop them.  Now we are righteously empowered and our lives take on a sense of purpose.  We think we are stopping evil in the world but if we were to objectively become aware of how we are projecting, much of our energy for “social justice” would deflate.  Then we would be left having to work on our own darkness which was one of the unconscious reasons we were projecting in the first place - to avoid the important inner work that needs to be done with our own shadow material.  

I don’t mean to say that when an individual or group is clearly pathological that we don’t take protective action.  I am saying that effective social action that does not simply stir the pot and increase the destructive energy requires a deep self-reflective capacity that limits one’s actions to measured productive behavior free of shadow infused demonization.   Perhaps something half way between Yahweh’s punitive overkill and Jesus’ “turn the other cheek”! 

The Collective Shadow 

But this phenomenon gets worse. When we IDENTIFY with a group of any kind, the potential for damage grows because we then form a much larger energetic circuit.   Together as a MASS we target another group with our projections to SCAPEGOAT our own shadows onto them and in this way, we end up with very destructive movements and even genocides.  The most famous political atrocities were acts of collective shadow projection.  The so-called “cancel culture” or “culture wars” of today are new forms of collective projection.  Jung pointed out that when we identify with a group, we become unconscious cells of the group body and our own level of consciousness is degraded down to a more primal level.  Then our most depraved animalistic drives can be acted out and we can rely on the group for protection. 

Jung classified the most energetic and universal shadow material that gets summoned when we group together in a mass as the collective or ARCHETYPAL SHADOW.  The archetypal shadow is said to be the dark side of the SELF, Jung’s term that relates to the God image within us all.  Although our Christian theology has split good and evil into a dualistic God and Satan model, he believed that we all possess this dark side of Deity in our genetics that we mythologize as Lucifer, Satan or mythic characters that represent our darkest potential.  

So when we project at the most extreme level, we project not just our own personal darkness onto others, but we channel the archetypal shadow and throw that onto our enemies who we perceive as demonic or as Satan incarnate.  I recently heard psychologist Sam Vaknin explain very well how war creates dichotomous splitting in the psyche where each group sees themselves as righteous and godly while at the same time seeing the other group as demonic and lower than human.  So through group projection we create a theater of war to play the game of good vs evil.  And it’s all happening unconsciously.  We don’t know that we’re doing it.  So in this way, Satan’s work is actually done!  

Passive Shadow Displacement 

The above examples describe the ways in which we unconsciously but actively displace and project our shadows into the world, but we also displace our inbuilt evil into the world through more passive methods such as what was famously termed “the banality of evil” by Hannah Arendt who reported on the trial of Adolph Eichman, a Nazi government apparatchik who she discovered was not exactly a monster but was himself a victim of a larger group consciousness that he had no psychic ability to push back on so he just did his job like everybody else and felt good doing it.

Sociological experiments such as the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment show how unconscious group-think as well as overt pressure from authority figures in the service of the group can degrade the morality of humans down to the basest levels. The rationalizations for small acts of evil are made at the unconscious level and we could say that our shadow is the aspect that is making these choices.   

Jung often said that groups which act psychopathically obtain their power through the personal shadows of the members.  Because the individuals have no experience facing their own darkness, they are incapable of seeing it when it passes invisibly and subtly through the group they identify with.  

Ponerology

Political Ponerology is a term coined by the late Andrew Lobaczewski which translates to the study of political evil.  In his book by the same name he describes the psychological mechanism whereby a small group of psychopaths and related defective personality types, ascended to positions of power, act as spellbinders who hypnotize others around them and the public at large into becoming agents of evil.  The author would presumably place the majority of the blame for mass atrocities at the feet of spellbinding psychopaths but Jung would probably argue that the psychopaths are only one triggering element in a larger play that requires the unconscious participation of all involved and that the real blame is to be placed on all of us for walking around unconscious of our own shadow material which is seeking release.  

I believe that if we were to remove every psychopath from power the human body politic would produce more of them because they are serving a purpose, although a maladaptive one.  We could see these groupings of psychopaths in power as cancer tumors and while it is possible to cut out a tumor, one must get to the psycho-spiritual conditions that underpin the infection or it will come back.  

Healthy Shadow Displacement 

I must mention that we do have some healthy means of displacing our shadow energy although we are not conscious of what we are doing.  Our shadow material that has to do with personal wounding and neurosis must be addressed at the personal level with inner work and therapy, which we will discuss in the next article, but shadow material that is collective and archetypal can be processed through physical ritual, art and the contained loosening of social restrictions.

Competitive sport is a powerful  and healthy way we collectively displace our aggression and is a safe alternative to war.  Sports teams simulate warring tribes and we the public get to project our dark as well as golden shadows onto the athletes.  We demonize the “other” team while we idolize our team as heroes.  We follow our favorite athletes closely who act as warrior stand-ins for ourselves.  We cheer them on in gigantic stadiums with thousands of other humans to give us the feeling of group identity but the outcome is a grand old time for all, rather than genocide.  If we didn’t have our collective sports, we might have all killed ourselves already.  As mentioned above, the culture wars online are serving the same purpose and while they might not be healthy, they are less destructive than physical revolutions and war.  

Art of all kinds including visual art, music, poetry, literature and fiction, theater and film have always been a method for moving shadow material into consciousness.  It’s a way to get in touch with the most despised psychic contents of humanity and to get a feel for their dark power without getting personally burned.  And when our consumption of art is in public such as with music concerts with dancing (or slam dancing/most pit!), the physical ritual element also benefits us.  See my article “The Art of Facing Darkness” for an exploration of how this writer used extreme metal music as a form of shadow integration practice.  

Comedy is another very powerful way in which we integrate shadow material in a positive way.  All comedians of substance can describe how this works.  Their job is to touch upon the audience’s shadow material that is close to the surface and give it an inoculating treatment that contextualizes it in a way that pushes it though.  When they do this, it literally tickles us.  We experience a guilty pleasure at laughing at a description of something or someone that would be totally unacceptable in so-called polite society.  Comedy is a controlled shadow release method that works extremely well and when parody is used in the political context, it throws a wet blanket on collective shadow projection.  Dictators notoriously have zero tolerance for parody of themselves and their regimes because of comedy’s ability to neutralize the shadow. 

Societies also legalize or decriminalize certain behaviors such as drug or alcohol use and prostitution so that a limited amount of public release of shadow material can be had.  All of these practices are as old as society itself.   

Conclusion

Our unrealized and unprocessed darkness is rapidly degrading our own health, sanity and quality of life, and at the same time, because of the way we project and displace our shadows, we are all the creators of evil in the world. That’s a big take away!  So there is a personal self healing component to this as well as a social duty component that we must consider.  In the next article we will continue to explore the nature of shadow material and discuss the actual practices of doing shadow work.  

Jung said almost the same thing as what I said here 80 years ago but only a few heard him.  Those were mainly Jungians who carried the torch, but for the majority of academics, it went in one ear and out the other.  For this reason, this important work is being left to the rest of us.  My role in this area begins with doing this integrative work on myself and in the context of my relationship, then to understand it scientifically as much as possible and to teach what I’ve learned to others.  Now you can potentially do the same.  

Colin E. Davis