Avoiding Dr. Jekyll’s Fate

Posted on by kay

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

Posted on by kay

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

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Blaming is inevitable

Posted on by kay

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…

Posted on by kay

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

Posted on by kay

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

 

 

 

We all lie.

Posted on by kay

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.

 

 

 

 

M. Scott Peck on “Evil”

Posted on by kay

"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

Hate has more to do with us than with them

Posted on by kay

Overheard this line as I walked through the kitchen, which was coming from the tail end of a program on NPR. Unfortunately I can't tell you the name of the program, because I just caught the very last line:

Hate has more to do with you than with them.

And it kept running through my mind today as I walked through the woods.

Hate has more to do with us than with them…

Yeah. Exactly. That's the whole point here.

Admitting your ego casts a shadow so you can start to deal with its consequences.

Beginning to realize that the real enemies lie within.

 

The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts.

That is where the battle should be fought.

–Mahatma Gandhi

 

Fear of Change

Posted on by kay

A person who doesn't want to change themselves can't afford to acknowledge the changes that other people make. Particularly hard changes, soul changes, positive changes. On a sub-conscious level, it's just too threatening. Oh my gosh! If they can change, that means I could, too!

If we fear change ourselves for some reason — from a narrow and biased upbringing, or from love of the staqus quo, or from sheer spiritual laziness — we pigeon-hole another person early on So-and-so is like this, and then spend the rest of our lives trying not to let that particular pigeon out of the cage we've constructed for it in our minds. Even if it turns into a swan or an eagle or a phoenix right before our eyes.

You see it all the time in families. You see it all the time in politics.

We accuse the other person (or the other party) of acting the way they did 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 40 years ago, rather than making an honest effort to see how they're acting right now.

Wonder what this world would be like if we let one another change, if we let one another grow.