 Let's now turn to a very central archetype in the Psyche that of the shadow The very name gives us a key to what we're dealing with Something in the shadows something not quite in the light something dark Jung says that and I quote a closer examination of the dark characteristics that is the inferiority's constituting the shadow Reveals that they have an emotional nature a kind of autonomy and accordingly an obsessive or Better possessive quality. This is from collected works 9 to paragraph 15 Here we have a very important idea about the shadow It is highly emotionally loaded with the life of its own at times We know this because of what happens when we begin to project the shadow It feels as though it takes us over for a little while Try this exercise Think of someone of the same gender as you are Someone who you really dislike Someone whose habits and behaviors and attitudes are quite disgusting to you someone who really irritates you with their behavior Do you have that person in your mind? Now list the qualities that they have that you dislike they could be selfish or gossipy or vindictive or always late The person you just imagined is a real living walking example of your shadow and The qualities that you dislike about them so much are your own qualities the qualities of your shadow You have met your shadow and it is you Feeding a little uncomfortable right now You and I both know that you keep these qualities to yourself Very well hidden because if people knew about your shadow side, they would never want to be around you Jung said and I quote Though the shadow is a motif as well known to mythology as anima and animus It represents first and foremost the personal unconscious and its contents can therefore be made conscious without too much difficulty In this it differs from anima and animus For whereas the shadow can be seen and recognized fairly easily The anima and the animus are much farther away from consciousness and in normal circumstances Are seldom if ever realized With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow so far as its nature is personal But when it appears as an archetype One encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus in other words It is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize that relatively evil side of his nature But it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of Absolute evil end quote and again is from collected works 9 to paragraph 19 Now very important we can think of the shadow as a complex Recall that complexes are the structures we find within the personal unconscious I will give greater detail about the complexes in a later episode What is useful for us now is that we can imagine the complex to have three layers almost like an onion The outer layer is the personal shadow The next or middle layer of the is the cultural shadow and the central core is the archetype of the shadow Don't get confused by the fact that we have an archetype at the center of the complex I said that complexes belong to the personal unconscious and that archetypes belong to the collective unconscious. That's quite right So think of the archetypal core of the complex as simply being connected to an archetype in the collective unconscious The first layer the personal shadow is Built up of all of our personal experiences with the darker side of life As an infant we get early messages from our parents that certain behaviors are bad or naughty We try to stop these behaviors But they all end up adding to this first layer of the shadow complex in the form of the personal shadow So this layer is composed of all the nasty or shameful parts of yourself that you prefer No one else knows about your spitefulness your bigotry your racism your cruelty, etc Jung said that the shadow and I quote is the thing a person has no wish to be end quote That's from collected work 16 paragraph 470 The next or middle layer is the cultural shadow Think of how the society you grew up in has a dark side a side in which people were discriminated against or persecuted or minorities were hounded Your cultural shadow if you are in Canada like I am now is The manner in which first nations people have been stripped of their land their language and their culture Another cultural shadow on the island I live on Vancouver Island is The wholesale decimation of the natural world through clear-cutting of the forests So you can see that all societies all cultures have a dark side What is yours? The third or inner layer of the shadow complex is the shadow archetype We know this archetype well as we have seen the archetypal image that derives from it in a variety of places For example people raised in the Christian religion know that the devil is the embodiment of the archetypal shadow We often tend to think of historical figures as being the embodiment of the archetypal shadow people such as Hitler or Stalin If we consider what these individuals did in their time We can understand that they enacted something beyond simple bigotry Something far more powerful than simple discrimination They enacted archetypal forces of the shadow The Holocaust is an horrific example of just how terrifying the archetypal shadow can be What is very important in our understanding of the shadow is how well we actually know it Jung was clear that we can never eliminate the shadow, but only come to terms with it There is a very good reason why we cannot eliminate the shadow At the core of the shadow complex is an archetype the archetype of the shadow And we are not able to alter our archetypes Only to become more conscious of their images and impact on the rest of the psyche This means that we know what our shadow qualities are Cringe whenever we think about these qualities, but endeavor not to enact them on others As Luke Skywalker finds in Star Wars, the evil we see around us is within us too This means that if we are conscious of our shadow We are also far less prone to project the shadow onto others and even better We have a reduced tendency to enact the shadow To be conscious of the shadow Permits the projective capacity of the unconscious I alluded to in the earlier section of this episode