The Darkening Spirit by Tacey David;

Author:Tacey, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1244894
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Chapter 6

The integration of the dark side

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The existence within us of something that can turn against us, that can become a serious matter for us, I regard not merely as a dangerous peculiarity, but as a valuable and congenial asset as well.

Jung1

The need to befriend evil

I would like to concentrate on the problem of the ‘dark side’, which has been intimated in previous chapters. In particular I want to focus on the possibility of integrating darkness or evil into consciousness, culture and religion. This is a mammoth undertaking and I can only sketch out a few ways forward for this project, which Jung sees as vital for the future of civilisation. Darkness is the element most often left out of religious systems, social ideologies and personal self-images. Indeed, most religions explicitly worship the light, and social ideologies think of themselves as forms of enlightenment. Since the dark side falls into the unconscious, it acquires an autonomous power and can readily destroy us. Jung felt that if we pay more respect to evil and integrate it into a revised picture of our identity, we might be able to reduce its hold over us. He wrote in his memoirs, ‘We have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip.’2

Jung argued that we underestimate the dark side and ignore it in ourselves, preferring to project it upon our neighbour. This insight is not original to Jung, but comes from a wisdom tradition that can be traced back at least as far as Jesus:

Why do you observe the splinter in your brother's eye and never notice the plank in your own? How dare you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye’, when all the time there is a plank in your own? Take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother's eye.3

This viewpoint is never popular and can never be so since it asks us to accept what we do not want to know about ourselves. But wise people of all times have kept emphasising this insight, since we can get so caught up in our rightness that we fail to see the psychological dynamics we are projecting on others. Each wise person who comes along and gets crucified for his or her wisdom puts up a mirror to our dark side and asks us to recognise ourselves in the doppelgänger or alter ego that it brings to our awareness.

Jung's concern is not to make us ‘go over’ to the dark side, as is sometimes ludicrously suggested by hostile critics. He asks us to become aware of evil and see how it influences our actions and thoughts in subtle and profound ways. He is inviting us to ‘give the devil his due’, to find out what the dark side is about and why it is strongly alluring in our time. The cure is homeopathic: take in and imbibe some of the poison so it does not totally destroy us.

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