Beauty and the Beast
He sees enough who doth his darkness see
Lord Herbert of Cherbury
The destructive side of
human nature Jung calls the shadow and which in astrology is connected to
Saturn, the “Dweller on the threshold”.
Most of us will do
anything to avoid it. It is much more pleasant to think that one is a decent,
“okay” sort of fellow – maybe with a few flaws, but basically alright – and
much easier to assume that it is the government, the blacks, the hippies, the
communists, or the foreign immigrants who have created all the evil in the
world. For some people it is easier to assume that the devil has created all
the evil in the world, thereby removing human responsibility from the issue
altogether.
Unfortunately, the
repercussions of this kind of apathy and blindness may, although not touching
the individual for many years and sometimes not even in one lifetime, ripple
out to become an important and even devastating social problem. We are all
acquainted with the attitude that if it does not happen on my doorstep, it
cannot possibly be my responsibility; and it is only when his own darkness
catches up with him and engulfs him that a man will begin to question himself.
Edward Whitmont
describes the phenomenon of “shadow projection”, as it is known in analytical
psychology, very aptly in his book The
Symbolic Quest:
“This type of situation is so classical that one could
almost play a parlour game with it – if one wished to court social ruin. Ask
someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most
impossible to get along with, and he will produce a description of his own
repressed characteristics – a self-description which is utterly unconscious and
which therefore always and everywhere tortures him as he receives its effects
from the other person”.
Unfortunately, although this shadowy side of the
personality is usually “utterly” unconscious in the individual, it is not so
hidden from everyone else; and the more repressed and unconscious it is, the
more obvious it will become to others. Often we may hear a man declare, “I simply hate
dictatorial people, they make everybody’s lives miserable,” and then on another
occasion, the wife or friend says, “Well, he really behaves like a tyrant
sometimes, but whenever I try to tell him this he flies into a rage and I can’t
make myself understood at all.” It may be people who are dictatorial, lazy,
stupid, prejudiced, bad-tempered, manipulative, or unfeeling who drive us mad, but blindness to one’s own dark
side – and projection of it upon others – is incredibly common and few of us
are exempt from expressing it. What we generally do not do, with
occasional exceptions, is understand what it means.
It is important to
comprehend something of the implications of the shadow before we can look at
the astrological chart to see what inferences may be drawn from it. Ideally we
should perhaps not need such things as horoscopes to help us to see our own
shadows; but the shadow is as its name implies, is almost always unconscious,
and it is not a question of will or intellectual acumen, nor even good
intentions, when one is trying to deal with this extremely unpleasant aspect of
the human personality. The road to hell is of course paved with good
intentions, and certainly with intellectual acumen as well.
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. This act is the essential condition for any kind
of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable
resistance
Aion, C.G. Jung
Recognising one’s own darkness appears to be a necessary
prerequisite not only for self-knowledge, but also for knowledge and acceptance
of others. Like everything else in the unconscious, the shadow, if it is not
brought into the light, will be projected. The problem of the shadow is not only
significant in an individual’s own development and in his capacity to form
personal relationships; it
is also extremely important in a collective sense. Were we more cognizant
of this darkness in ourselves, it is entirely possible that collective
phenomena which exhibit the
projection of a group shadow – such as persecutions, inquisitions, purges,
racial intolerance and prejudice, and other phenomena which involve the
sacrifice of the scapegoat – would never occur. Even among children we find
this ugliness manifesting: there is inevitably one child in any group who, for
reasons which may be inherent in his own psychology but which are scarcely his
fault, attracts the shadow projection of the group and becomes the scapegoat,
the outcast who is mocked and ridiculed. He is made to bear the brunt of that
childish savagery and brutality which, if unchecked in childhood, will
eventually express its least destructive side in bigotry, and can attain its
most horrific flowering in such examples of appalling bestiality as Auschwitz
and
Relating,
Liz Greene
