Archetypes: "Shadow"

We all have our own ideas of who we are and we are constantly seeking for confirmation of this image from everyone around. We tend to view ourselves as always doing our best and having good intentions. Contact with reality often verifies this belief i.e. when we mess things up because of our negligence, lack of competence or when we are just not in the mood to do something. According to Jung the personal Shadow grows in parallel to the Persona as its negative and is completely independent of the Ego.

It is a creation, living in our unconsciousness: a container for all the aspects of our Self that didn't fit in the frames of our own image of ourselves or were not socially appropriate.

"Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected" - Carl Gustav Jung

We usually negate the Shadow or project it onto others which leads to interpersonal conflicts. We tend to believe that everyone else operates the same way as us and is led by the same reasons. Unconsciously we expect other people to experience the world in the same way as we do. However, such an expectation is irrational and not logical.

For example, you surely came across somebody in your life (your boss, co-worker, in-law) who you believed “disliked” you for no reason. When this happens you are likely to be convinced that their words, tone of voice or the way they look at you reflects their hidden hatred towards you. You fail to notice that the belief you hold towards them is often nothing more than a product of your own projection. When you dislike someone in the first place, you “protect” yourself from this feeling (you reject that you could possibly dislike someone because of our own jealousy, prejudices or even for no reason, hence you fail to admit it) by projecting it on someone else.

When you become irritated and short tempered with that person, you can either project it onto them with your anger or, as we often do (to maintain the “good” image of yourself) suppress these emotions, and pull the (unwanted) energy back into what we call the Shadow.

Dreams - "Movie"

(Boris - man, age 46)

Dream:

"A movie which I have made is about to be shown in a cinema. Inside the projection room, there is a big and wide movie screen and two clocks on the wall: one of them shows the number of viewers present in the room. And the second one, in the form of a stopwatch displays a countdown to the start of the movie.

“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.” - Sigmund Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams"

The countdown starts from ten seconds and gradually goes down. I am looking at the timer … eight, seven. When it comes down to six I realise that oddly enough, I am seeing the whole scene from the bedroom in my house. I am laying in bed next to my wife. When the countdown drops to somewhere around five seconds, I reach over my wife's body and begin to nervously search for something behind her. Though I am not quite sure what I'm looking for, I have a feeling that I need it before the start of the screening. Three, two... And then suddenly I see a huge slide which appears just for a split second but it completely terrorized me. It shows a black and white drawing of an "OK sign" shown with a thumb which is stuck in an anus. I wake up screaming in terror."

Dream interpretation:

[Dreamer’s association: it comes to my mind, that the cinema screen and the movie that was about to be shown somehow relate to something I am working on. l have been a teacher for over twenty years, and recently I have decided to write a book. In a dream I felt disappointed when the number of viewers in the screening room was going down. It somehow felt that there would be fewer people interested in my book.]

The dreamer in his association connected the cinema screen with the book he recently started writing. Considering his age and the teacher's background, it's natural to assume, that his writing is a form of self expression unfolding from the depths of his soul. Therefore, the diminishing number of viewers present in the room symbolises a total annihilation of the dreamer's ego. He is watching, how one after another, his personas burst like soap bubbles before the screening time. In order to write and eventually publish his book, he would need to obey the idea of not only intellectual but also an emotional exhibition of himself. And consequently embrace the energy hidden deeper inside. That opens up the gate into his Individuation (def. process of self realisation, the goal of individuation is to create a stable personality as a whole with a sense of individuality), outwardly associated with the process of writing.

We spend vast amount of time trying to adapt to the surrounding reality. Somewhere along the way, we realise that the person we became is not quite who we really are. In other words we may feel as what we have created within us, does not resonate with our Self truthfully and no longer serves us. When the countdown is almost up, he sees a black and white slide; a thumb, that symbolises his inflated ego stuck in an anus, quite literally “up the ass” of his unconsciousness; a blunt metaphor from the dreamer's Self to let him know, that to succeed sincerely (with the book, and essentially on the way of individuation) he will need to reach beyond the boundaries set by his own ego. The slide embodies deeply repressed emotions accumulated throughout the whole life, though anchored in the anal stage of Psychosexual Developement. Freud has described this period as a stage of conflict between the three core elements of the human psyche: Id, Ego and Superego. It occurs between the ages of one and three during “potty training”. Children at this time learn to control their bodily needs. Usually this happens under the parents' supervision and results in the conflict between psychic parts; the Id (def. unconscious psychic part motivated by the pleasure principle, id wants to gratify all impulses immediately) and the freshly developed Ego which is now aware of its separateness and learns to operate from the reality principle (def. control of pleasure seeking of in order to behave within the norms of the external world). This process builds the foundation of the Superego, which later and for the rest of our lives sets the moral standards in our daily reality. In the Psychic Sphere, the superego generates a moral compass for the Ego.

The slide in its rather obscene manifestation ends the dream to reveal symbolic death of the dreamer's Ego. This message, however unpleasant brings a clue to unlock his blocked creativity. The Self is demanding to separate from whatever the dreamer identified himself with. The foundation he has been building for years on the outside, now puts a limit to what he feels inside. The slide is so terrifying to him, because the source of the renewal lies in his Shadow (def. part of the unconscious mind, shadow contains all those aspects of the personality that we choose to reject and repress). Until now, the dreamer was most likely predominantly concerned about expanding his social status and all the things that didn't fit into the frame of his ego have been swept "under the carpet". Consequently, he denied all the hidden potential of the “unwanted” energy that has been pushed into the darkness of his soul and exploded to wake him up screaming in fear.

Dreams - "Big City"

(Pascal - man, age 40)

Dream:

"I am walking around a peaceful area on the countryside. It looks like a familiar neighbourhood. I meet one of my friends and he suggests that we should go to the city to meet a person that will give us drugs, that we can later sell in order to make money. We arrive inside the huge city, where we are at the centre surrounded by tall skyscrapers and streets with a lot of cars and traffic.

"We discover that body processes will mirror dreams when the body is encouraged to amplify and express its involuntary signals, such as pressures, pain, cramping, restlessness, exhaustion, or nervousness." - Thomas Arnold Mindell

The city is rather futuristic, it reminds me of Tokyo, despite the fact that I have never been there. There are no sidewalks or any people around. We wander around and we can't find the meeting point with the person who sells drugs. My friend suggests, that we should go down the elevator to the “basement” of the city. He says that every man there will have drugs and we can just steal them from anyone and sell them. We are in the elevator plunging down very fast into a big gloomy car park at the bottom. When we arrive, something happens and my friend has to run away. I think he is being chased by somebody. I'm left on my own. I decide to give up on the idea of stealing, and while I'm walking across an abandoned dim car park I meet a man on my way. I don't trust him at first, we talk for a moment and he wants to give me a chunk of money.

[Dreamer’s association: nothing comes to my mind about drugs but when a man at the car park offered me money in the dream, it reminded me about the recent situation at work when one of my employees offered me his help with some casual work. At the start I hesitated because I didn't want to trouble him and just wanted to do what I was doing by myself. But I accepted his help.]

For a brief moment I hesitate to accept it but then I take the money. He tells me that i can keep it as a loan until he will be back. He also says, that now he needs to go, and he will explain everything to me when we meet again. He left me a lot of notes of small value. At the end of the dream I walk in the countryside again and I have pockets full of notes that are popping out and I am trying to push them back in."

Dream interpretation:

This is an inner journey of the dreamer in search of his connection with the Collective Consciousness which appears in his dream as a tall skyscrapers. This picture brings a Tokyo to the dreamer's mind, and in fact Tokyo is one of the “highest” cities in the world. Skyscrapers represent the structures of the Collective Psyche in his dream. His disintegration from the collective is manifested as none existent sidewalks and no people around - just cars in the big traffic and fast lifts in the tall buildings. This picture mirror's his introvertion in reality. The elevator illustrates the link between the Collective Consciousness (skyscrapers) and the dreamer's own unconscious (gloomy basement). The dreamer associates the money in his dream with a real situation when one of his employees offered him help. In the space of Collective Unconscious money relates to the perception of the material world and materialises the taboo energy when repressed may easily drive one to a complex. We need money but in the same time we don't like what money represents. James Hillman (Jungian analyst) associated money with a devilishly divine energy. Carl Jung on the other hand, was strongly convinced, that the money energy is essentially rooted in the archetype of the Great Mother which stands behind a creative force in life as well as art and ideas. A powerful archetype that, depending on its correspondence to the dreamer’s unconsciousness, can either nourish and support his Ego, or swallow it up in Psychosis.

The dreamer's lack of money in given context is referring to the mother complex that possibly results in feelings of isolation in reality. This complex (def. a group of unconscious associations, or a strong unconscious impulse lying behind an individual's actions and reactions) is embodied by his friend. The complex is also manifested in the dream in the form of the plan; in order to make money, they need to meet someone in the city who will give them drugs that they can sell. Led by his friend in the dream (under the rule of the complex in reality) he is unable to find the destination of his journey - the money (the Mother). His way down the elevator is a metaphor of connection with the deeply rooted feelings; unconscious feelings and memories that also reflect on the aspect of his Shadow (def. repressed unconscious aspect in our personality, it is the source of both our creative and destructive energies). There, symbolically he partially breaks through his Ego dependence on the complex. The dreamer in a mythological sense needs to go to the dark to be able to come back to the light again. He is only able to accomplish that after his friend disappears. From the Ego perspective it feels as if he was abandoned at first. However, on the subconscious level there is no good or bad as it all comes out from the same source; the Self (def. totality of the body and the mind). Ego categorises our feelings as good or bad which creates complexes in the Psyche that lead to repression of some emotions and after time could possibly result in neurosis. The dream suggests that some of the old mechanisms which the dreamer uses to cope with life perhaps are no longer useful to him. The dreams speak in symbols and leave us with the riddle to solve. The keys are to be found in the dreamers associations.

Psyche tends to lean towards the future in the same way as the individuation process. This symbolic detachment from the complex (described in his association; after a moment of hesitation he decided to accept help) is an inclination of developing belief in himself as well as developing the connection with the collective consciousness. And both are the products of the individuation. The ending fragment of the dream refers to the inner fragmentation of the dreamers Psyche; money symbolically came to him in the form of a loan, and its acceptance equaled connecting with the Collective Consciousness, (def. deeply rooted unconscious component of the Psyche which is not shaped by personal experiences but inherited genetically) at the cost of losing the part of the Ego layered with the complex principle. The idea of the loan embodies the dreamer's interconnection between his Ego and the Collective Consciousness. That's why embracing an ability to receive help is something he is not used to, and makes him uncomfortable and suspicious. But to accomplish the goal of the inner journey revealed in the dream; to unlock the creative energy which is tied around the mother complex he has to come to terms with himself in regards to acceptance and tolerance of himself along with his projection on others.