Shadow in “The Black Swan”

Posted on by kay

(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

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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

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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…

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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

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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

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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?

 

 

 

 

We all lie.

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The stories we tell about ourselves shape our lives.

We build a psychic structure out of life stories, just like a carpenter builds a physical structure out of wood, and then we live inside that structure. "House," in dream analysis, stands for "the psychic space you're inhabiting."

The stories we tell about ourselves — our psychic structures — can be thoughtfully built over time, with an eye toward getting to the real truth of each situation. We can keep an eye out for leaks or weaknesses, and get to work repairing damage whenever we find it. In which case our psychic structures will be level and plumb, and will grow stronger with age, will settle solidly into themselves, so to speak.

Or the stories we tell about ourselves — our psychic structures —  can be hastily assembled out of whatever comes to hand, more with an eye toward making an impression than with a regard for what really happened. We can paint over any problems or failures, just slap the story together instead of building it consciously, in which case our psychic structures won't be "on the level," but will be rickety and out of plumb; will grow more dangerous, more unstable, with each passing year.

Here's the bitter truth about being human:  we all lie.

All we can do is try to figure out when we're lying and cut it out. (And, in self-defense, try to become more aware of when other people are lying to us. Try to be forgiving of each circumstance, without becoming susceptible to either.)

Building a sound psychic structure — a true life story — is a long process, a never-ending process. Because there's a shadow hard at work all the time within each of us trying to prove how innocent we are and how guilty everyone else is. The process is amazingly powerful and completely automatic. It's the ego's first, best and oldest line of defense.

Accepting and dealing with the falsehood in one's own heart has never been easy. And now, perhaps, has never been harder. We've reached some sort of crisis of untruthfulness. We seem to be approaching the acme of falsehood, collectively. We know the vast majority of people who appear in the news every day aren't even trying to be truthful. They're only trying to look cool, win points, gain power… and they're the famous ones, the "heroes" among us.

The macro reflecting the micro.

 

 

 

 

What It Is Like To Go To War

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Karl Marlantes' new book, What It Is Like To Go To War, is astounding. He was already being halied for Matterhorn, one of the best books ever written about being "in country" in Vietnam, and this book is even better than Matterhorn.

Because not only does Marlantes tell us what it's like to go to war in this book, he tells us what we need to do for those returning from war, to help them re-enter and re-adjust to civilian life.

 

And things are different now… how?

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The following passage is from Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy:

"You know that capital oppresses the laborer. The laborers with us, the peasants, bear all the burden of labor, and are so placed that however much they work they can't escape from their position as beasts of burden. All the profits of labor, on which they might improve their position, and gain leisure for themselves, and after that education, all the surplus values are taken from them by the capitalists. And society's so constituted that the harder the laborers work, the greater the profit of the merchants and landowners, while the laborers themselves stay beasts of burden to the end. "

and it was written in 1873. In Russia.

Perhaps we're not as advanced or unique as we like to think we are.

We're having arguments — fierce, government-stopping, I'm-going-to-take-my-ball-and-go-home-if-I-don't-get-my-way arguments — about simply asking the very wealthiest among us to pay as much in taxes as the laborers do?

It's a cryin' shame.

 

M. Scott Peck on “Evil”

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"Those I call evil are utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection. They are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal. They are acutely sensitive to social norms and what others might think of them. They dress well, go to work on time, and outwardly seem to live lives that are above reproach.

The words "image," "appearance," and "outwardly" are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear to be good. Their "goodness" is on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie… a lie designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves."

–M. Scott Peck, PEOPLE OF THE LIE, Toward a Psychology of Evil