 Dr. von Franz, can you explain the concept of the personal shadow and the collective shadow? Well, in practical life they emerge, but the personal shadow is the personal shortcomings of things which every human being could be conscious of, which is not archetypal and therefore not a mystery. For instance, such things as greed for money or jealousy, jealousy is one of the main aspects of the shadow or laziness, sloppiness, unrelatedness, sentimentality and what not, inferiorities, which everybody has, but prefers not to know about. And because we generally strive through education and through environmental pressure to be a bit better than we actually are, or we have our own ideals, I often to be jealous, I often to have a power complex. But you see, for instance, that in criminals they sometimes live their inferiority and then they have a personal shadow which is noble. They dream about noble people and it's just reversed. They live, so to speak, their mean side and then they have a positive shadow. And therefore, even in what is more the average truth, the inferior shadow is not really bad. It's just human, all too human. And something one could know about, if one is jealous or if one is suddenly possessed by wanting money or so on, one could know about it if one is honest with oneself. But the collective shadow has to do with the dark side of the archetype of the self. That means it's the shadow of the God image. In the Christian tradition it would be the devil. And that has always been personified and felt as something which has not to do directly with the human being. I mean, if somebody is possessed by the devil, he's much worse than just, he's not human. It's demonic. But on the other hand, generally that merges. First you have this area of dim, dark side and behind it lurks the other. For instance, seeing that when Germany went to the devil in Nazism, people fell into it through their personal shadow. For instance, they didn't want to lose their job because they were clinging to money. That was their personal shadow. But then they joined in with the Nazi movement for that reason and did much worse things than they would have done normally under normal social conditions. So you can say the personal shadow is the bridge to the collective shadow or the open door to the collective shadow. But the collective shadow comes up in those terrible mass psychosis. Well now, if a person becomes more aware of the personal shadow. That's why it's so tremendously important because then you don't fall into the collective shadow. There's not that automatic link. It's like if you have a room and there's one door on a trap and there the devil can come in. And if you know your personal shadow, you can shut all the doors. So for example. And then you don't join in into massacres and holocausts and such. You catch yourself and you stop. You catch yourself and you realize and you can keep out of it and keep reasonable. Keep your head. While the average person who doesn't know about her personal shadow, they get swept away by the collective evil. Is it possible to speak of a shadow in terms of national identity? A shadow in Switzerland? A shadow in the United States? Yes, naturally. The summing up of every society has its ideals and lives up to those ideals and has also a shadow. The average American has a typical shadow and the average Swiss has a typical shadow, which is slightly different. But there again you can say the more individuals in the nation know about their shadow, the better that nation is off. Or less likely to fall into a mass psychotic, destructive sweeping away movement where people lose every measure. You know, I mean just kill their relatives, kill thousands of people without even having a bad conscience about it. It's real, just madness.