Beauty and the Beast

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 Belsen. We have a mercifully dim awareness of the extent of our potential cruelty to each other in even the smallest of things; and although many people would prefer to forget about Auschwitz and its ilk because “somebody else” was responsible (certainly not decent people like you and I), we can see the pale reflection of this mechanism in the time-hallowed practice of the social snub.

 

Relating,

Liz Greene