Beginner's Guide to Jungian Psychology by Robin Robertson

Author:Robin Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780892546039
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc

WHY THE SHADOW APPEARS

Let's return to the example of the little girl with mechanical ability, and the little boy with a developed feeling function. If the parental pressures are strong enough, the girl will probably forget about tinker toys and erector sets, and turn her interests to dolls and dresses. The boy whose inherent empathy should have been appreciated and rewarded will probably learn to be tough, to stand up for himself, and not to take any guff from anyone. After a while, the boy and the girl will no longer even remember those childish (?) interests.

But you can't destroy inborn abilities. They just get pushed underground, into the unconscious. There an interesting thing takes place: those personality traits inevitably become personified. That is, a personality (or multiple personalities) form around the abilities that we diverted into the unconscious. Jung called this personality the Shadow because, like our physical shadow, it presents a dark outline of our total being. There is no logical necessity for this personification to occur; we could very well be constructed so the abilities merely lie dormant, awaiting some call from life that reawakens them.

Some animals are seemingly solitary by nature; they don't appear to need the company of others of their species. Usually, this is because of evolutionary pressures. For example, the poor orangutan has evolved over time into a solitary creature, because it lives in a region where its food supply is spread over so wide an area that a band of orangutans cannot find enough food to sustain them within a day's walk.

However, we humans are more like our cousins the monkeys—gregarious by nature. Isolated from other humans, we tend to become something less than human. That's why solitary confinement is the most feared punishment in a prison. In Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos,4 he tells the story of two trappers who spent the long Alaskan winter together. One died while the winter was still young. The other couldn't bear to be alone, so he kept the body frozen in a sitting position, and propped him up at a table in their cabin at mealtimes. That way, he could pretend that he still had a companion.

All our relationships with the world seem to eventually take on the form of our relationships with friends or enemies. We relate to the people we see on TV, the people we hear on the radio, as if they were intimate friends or relatives. Our pets become people to us. Even objects, like cars and computers, become personified if we like them enough. For example, one of the many charms of the columns Jerry Pournelle writes in computer magazines like Byte and Infoworld is that he has a name for each computer. These include his first computer: a Z80 (that's a computer chip for those who don't know) he calls Ezekial; its successor Zeke-II; his current mainstay: Big Cheetah; and his Cambridge Z88 laptop computer: Sir Zed. Even Jerry's home has a name—Chaos Manor.

Similarly, a woman I know named every art object in her home that had any sort of human or animal appearance.

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