(I am not an analyst, you might read my stuff and think I have no idea what I am talking about, that is fine… I might just agree with you. I have recently come into the writing of CG Jung and am beginning to walk a road of understanding this requires the collection of my thoughts and dialogue therein. Please, let me know what you think)
Another of Jung’s core archetypes is the Shadow. The Shadow appears in our dreams and also in our fantasies as different things. The shadow itself is the part of the human psyche that we often don’t want to acknowledge. Often times parts of ourselves our relegated to shadow because of some strict moral judgement, and sometimes because of the way we fit into cultural norms.
For example, let’s talk about pride. Pride finds itself in the top 7 of the deadly sins list and for centuries has been the negative focal point of sermons and philosophical expressions. To view pride as a negative thing is rather black and white. I would say there are two sides to pride. There is the negative side, which I like to call Vanity, then there is the positive side, which can be understood as a positive self esteem. There are such phrases as, "pride in our work," "pride in our job," and "pride in the life we live." These things are important… we cannot live a life without pride it doesn’t work, but we take a word like pride and define it in a way that makes all pride seem bad.
Other examples might be in words like, religion, doctrine, and sexuality. All these things have negative connotations and often those connotations are exaggerated for the purpose of getting ones way or winning an argument. These things if not expressed find themselves in the shadow.
Of course it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. We often live unbalanced lives, there are very spiritual individuals out there who are accountants but never act on their spirituality because they are accountants not some form of minister. When something like this happens one might commit him/herself to work in such a drastic sense the spiritual aspect of the psyche is not experienced, the psyche will try to balance this, sometimes through dreams sometimes through fantasies, and there are other ways. Watch the imagery, a Catholic man dreams of a rose blooming from between the keys of his computer… the psyche might be saying something… something like, "Express me!"
I am typing all this to say, the Shadow is not necessarily bad or wrong, nor is it evil. When dealing with the shadow it is often necessary to cast no moral judgement until it is better understood. In dreams the shadow might appear anywhere from an elusive woman to a demon king, all depending on how ready we are to hear what the psyche has to say.
Does this mean we take the shadow in fullness and bend toward its will? Of course not, we have the ability to make choices in relation to, how we act and even what we believe. If one has been living a life of low self esteem and self deprivation he/she may figure that out and arrogate oneself falsely trying to compensate, because, well in all honesty a bit of an Ass. This might just be a case of letting the shadow run the show, remember when dealing with the inner self, the ego can and often must make moral decisions on what action is taken.
The same with Sexuality, Western Culture tends to dichotomize sex. It is either all evil or all good. Often sex is encouraged to be left in the bedroom and never mentioned, or something that is to be toyed with until one figures out his own way to make it work. That statement represents to polar views. Sex in itself is neutral, it is what we do with sex that places it in the moral realm. Human beings are sexual creatures, why do I say that, because all other animals are, and there seems to be this strong desire, whether it be bingeing or in sexual anorexia. An individual who deems sex, if not in voice but still in action, as evil or something to be feared might have very erotic dreams or fantasies that often seem out of control. Those who binge in the realm of sexuality might have dreams and fantasies expressing the opposite, maybe a nun or a priest, either way something will appear in the shadow.
In both cases one will need to connect to that aspect that has been relegated to the shadow as to gain psychic wholeness.
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