It's more useful to strive for a greater awareness of consequences,
and to develop an openness to change,
than it is to cherish certainty.
Avoiding Dr. Jekyll’s Fate
In order to make our parents happy we started covering up parts of ourselves before we could walk. And we definitely knew the difference between approval and disapproval before we could talk. It's a basic survival skill. We can't make it on our own as infants. We depend upon the goodwill of others to survive. So if we hear we're too much trouble, or our poop stinks, or we're too lively or too clingy or too clumsy or too stupid, we stuff those parts down into our shadows. By second grade, hiding parts of ourselves in order to please other people has become second nature.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. In order to become a thinking human being who can cooperate with other thinking human beings, some of that old animal instinctual nature needs to be controlled. Some parts of the psyche are like the bad sisters in fairy tales: extremely selfish. "Letting it all hang out" just won't work among intelligent mammals who've been honing their warfare skills for thousands of years.
So some repression serves a useful purpose. It allows children to become functioning, cooperative members of society. We learn not to drown our baby sister or hit our brother over the head with a baseball bat. We learn how to sit still and pay attention to others. We figure out that we are not the center of the universe (hopefully).
However, once we grow up, we have a responsibiity to get curious about what happened to all that juicy emotional energy we've been actively repressing since we were children. Otherwise, we're liable to end up becoming a danger to society anyway — but a nice, sneaky, civilized danger. As Robert Bly said once, "If we want to pretend we're always nice, then our creeps have to sneak around to get out."
Yeah. If we refuse to admit that we even have certain feelings, we exclude the possibility of dealing with those feelings rationally. If we don't take any notice of — or responsibility for — whatever's lurking in our shadow, then we set other people up for ambush by our unsupervised inner demons.
In the famous book by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll was a perfect gentleman. A widely respected, highly cultured, upper class, sterling citizen who spent most of his daylight hours ministering to the poor and needy. Afraid to mar his perfect image but full of unappeased desires — this was the Victorian age, you know — Jekyll created an alternate ego, Mr. Hyde, to act out the shadowy urges in his soul. Bad idea. Because when Hyde slipped out the laboratory door at night he headed straight for the seediest parts of London. As time went on and Jekyll kept denying his influence, Hyde's desires took ranker and ranker forms. He persecuted prostitutes, preyed on the weak, committed murder. The "hidden" Hyde grew ever more warped, ever more bestial, ever harder for Jekyll to control. Eventually? You know it. Jekyll became all Hyde, all the time.
There's a recurring theme in literature about soothing the savage soul. But for that to happen, someone in the story has got to pay attention to the poor beast. Conscious, direct attention. It's the same in the inner world as in the outer world: no critter likes to be caged.
Which means: any archetypal character prowling around in your psyche — and we all have hundreds of them — will perform better and be easier to handle if you can (1) look right at it, admit that it exists, that it's yours; and (2) find out what it wants. Then you can open negotiations with it. Then you can figure out how to handle it without harming others.
from Midwest Book Review
MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW, Reviewer's Choice:
There is a darkness in all of us, and how we deal with it is what determines our future, on a personal as well as a societal level. Shadow in the USA is a discussion of human nature and philosophy, as Kay Plumb argues that humanity’s power to hurt itself has run amuck. With honesty and knowledge, Shadow in the USA presents plenty to ponder and makes for a very much recommended reading.
James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review
Small Press Bookwatch: October 2011
Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows
You can all mixed up with complexes, things like that, but really, as the Polynesian saying goes, you are then "standing on a whale, fishing for minnows." We are standing on a whale. The ground of being is the ground of our being. If we only look outward, we see problems here and problems there. But when we begin to look inward, we see that we are the cause of them all. –Joseph Campbell
Shadow in “The Black Swan”
(Originally appeared on March 8th, 2011)
Every few years we're blessed with another great artistic example of what happens to those who deny or bury their shadow. This year, it was The Black Swan.
Nina was a good girl. A good girl nearing the top of a grindingly competitive profession where harsh judgment was the norm. A good girl trying to placate a fragile, frustrated, controlling mother. A good girl trained since early childhood to ignore the complaints and demands of her own body and the needs of her own soul.
Perhaps not since Robert Louis Stevenson woke up from a dream and began writing down The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have we been presented with such a splendid and graphic vision of what happens next to such good girls or boys.
They die.
Maybe not right away in fine dramatic fashion, like Jekyll or Nina. Art has to over-emphasize life to make an impression on us. In fact, maybe you won't even notice their deaths, since almost everyone else you know will be doing the same thing: that slow, mute, miserable shrinkage of the soul which occurs every day as we dutifully trim our dynamic, multi-faceted pegs to fit into the small round holes of Corporate America. But it will still be death.
There was a lot of buzz about sexual repression in reviews of The Black Swan. Which was certainly part of the picture. But the frame around the whole canvas was that trying to conform to any outside authority—a domineering mother, an artistic mentor, or a judgmental culture with rigid professional standards—without regard for the needs of your own soul will 1) drive you crazy and 2) kill you. “Perfect” is a human construct. It does not occur in nature.
There's a lot of juice in the shadow. A great deal of creativity. But ignored, split off, or denied access to consciousness, the shadow turns deadly to its own ego. We can’t “be good” all the time. It’s as deadly as being bad all the time. Those who strive to please others without looking into their own hearts will be attacked from within.
As the great analytical psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz once wrote:
The shadow is not necessarily always an opponent.
In fact, it is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along.
Sometimes by giving in,
sometimes by resisting,
sometimes by giving love –
whatever the situation requires.
The shadow becomes hostile only when it is ignored or misunderstood.
Question your motives
Do we need to stop being such pushovers? Get in the habit of questioning the motives of others before we buy whatever they're saying or selling?
Certainly we do. Look around you. Evil exists. It's all human based. And we don't seem to be controlling it very well.
Which means that — since you and I are both human — then first off — and even more importantly — we need to develop the habit of questioning our own motives.
Blaming is inevitable
We're not ever going to get to the place where we don't want to blame every little thing that goes wrong in our lives on someone else. It's the ego's first defense.
But we can get to the place where we're becoming aware of it.
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow…
The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Each of us has some part of our personality that is hidden from us. Parents, and teachers in general, urge us to develop the light side of the personality — move into well-lit subjects such as mathematics and geometry — and to become successful. The dark part then becomes starved. What do we do then? –Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow
Projection of shadow material
Projection of shadow material causes most of the misery, injustice and warfare in the world. –Robert Bly
Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race. –Carl Jung
Couple of questions
1) Was it Spengler who said that every mighty civilization so far started to fail when it got so successful it refused to tax itself enough to pay for those succcesses? And is that where we are?
3) When did an entire political party in the US — once honorable and devoted to democracy — become more interested in pleasing wealthy patrons and extreme talk show hosts than in governing wisely?
4) What the hell is wrong with compromise, anyway? When did we start confusing hardheadedness with backbone?
