My deviations from Jung's concept of the shadow aren't really "disagreements" . . . more like different points of focus.
To me, the shadow is primarily a
quality of the unconscious. Although shadow figures are common in dreams and fairytales, the archetypal personage of the shadow makes fewer appearances than, say, the anima or animus.
When the archetypal shadow does appear, there is almost always some sense in which the personage could be said to represent the Self . . . and not "the face of absolute evil" that Jung mentions in the last quote from Sharp above. My current belief is that the archetypal shadow is what the Self looks like when it is aligned against one of our ego-positions. The force of this Shadow-Self (as I like to call it) is corrective (of the ego) . . . and ultimately beneficial to the organism. It can thus hardly be described as "evil".
My experience is that extensive work with the shadow eventually leads one to an understanding that there is no fundamental difference between the shadow and the Self . . . other than the ego's perspective on it. Therefore, most archetypal characters that could be seen to represent the shadow or the Self exhibit qualities of both.
This notion actually fits in with the fundamentals of the Golden Rule of morality. I.e., self and Other are actually the same. When trying to derive meaning from our dreams, it can often prove beneficial to look closely at the shadowy figures we encounter and ask ourselves, "How might this character actually represent a corrective or compensatory aspect of the Self?"
Part of my tweak on Jung's shadow concept is that the "seat of evil" in the psyche is shifted from the shadow onto the ego. The ego is ultimately responsible for all evil thoughts and actions . . . and pushing the blame off onto a shadow archetype is not an effective way of working to become conscious of our shadowy qualities.
This is a tricky twist . . . especially in a self-described "moralist" like me, because it relatives evil tremendously. It basically points to the idea that there is no evil, per se. That is, there is no Evil-as-Other. Evil is not its own autonomous entity. Evil, as we think of it, is largely a matter of the individual ego's interpretation of unconscious and instinctual input. I think the vast majority of evil acts and thoughts are umbilically linked to ego frailties. That is, they are the result of flaws in the ego-position that allow the individual to dehumanize the other into an object that "deserves" to be treated "evilly" (because it is excessively base or has committed some "crime" which "demands" punishment).
This failure in ego-position is primarily the result of not being able to see oneself in the other, not being able to empathize or identify with the other. "Evil" people are thus capable of behaving ethically in situations where they are able to identify with the other or see themselves in the other-object. Such "evil" people are also committing aggressive and destructive acts against the otherness in themselves that they cannot identify with . . . and could often even be said to be aggressive of hateful toward external others in an attempt to "destroy the totem" of their own projected internal otherness.
This seems to be the general psychological pattern even in psychopaths (who probably have a biological factor impairing their sense of ethics). The psychopath has a more severe divide between self and Other, an internal dissociation. An alternative way to view the psychopath is that s/he has a "defective Self" that does not compel the ego to identify with the other to the degree that "healthy" human beings would. The characteristic "remorselessness" of the psychopath could be attributed to this inability to instinctively see value in other individuals. I really don't know that much about psychopathy . . . other than what it feels like to be in its presence as an other, so I will have to leave further speculation to people who have studied it more closely.
One of the curiosities of morality in relation to the Jungian idea of shadow is its relationship to instinctuality. I have written elsewhere about the moral instinct (adopting the idea with only minor revisions from the evolutionary psychologists' concept of morality as an evolutionary adaptation based on the social/survival benefits of reciprocal altruism). After acknowledging the likelihood that morality has a biological foundation (i.e., is or is founded on an instinct), we must next ask, "But what of deception, aggression, and similar immoral tendencies? Aren't these also proven instincts?"
It would seem, undeniably, that yes they are. And it is not hard to recognize that they would also make for successful evolutionary adaptations. So we can look at the Jungian concept of shadow as a jumble of undifferentiated instincts, some of which are in potential conflict with others. I look at my two year old son and see this jumble all the time. He can experience empathy and altruism one second and aggression or greed the next. He did not have to be "taught" either. But to differentiate between the two and determine when one instinct is more effective than another or when one instinct is impeding the healthy operation of another (e.g., hitting mommy for the sadistic pleasure of getting a strong reaction is not conducive to also getting milk from mommy) . . . that seems to require a mediator.
In other animals we might observe, such "mediation" seems to be based itself on an instinct . . . or the "appropriateness" of one instinct over another in a given situation is somehow "written in" to that instinct. The environmental situation determines the instinct . . . like the spring season determines the mating time.
Humans seem to operate just a bit differently. We have adapted a separate organ to act as an "instinct determiner". One might assume that this special organ is needed in our species in order to navigate the infinitely more complex realm of human culture . . . with its massive tangles of abstract information. This information-rich environment is unique to our species. And of course, the organ I am referring to is the human ego . . a "non-local" collaboration of various cognitive modules that operates in short-term memory.
The tricky thing for us to understand is how the ego, too, must be a biological adaptation . . and therefore, an expression of the mediating instinct that other animals appear to derive directly from the specific environmental situation. If the human evolutionary environment is the information menagerie of "culture", then our mediating organ (the ego) would have to be an adaptation to this particular informational environment.
And, if this theory has any legitimacy, it isn't all that hard to imagine that the human ego is the logical solution to this evolutionary need. As the information environment contains much more data to factor than the physical environment, there would appear to be an evolutionary need for a "sieve-like" organ that could operate as quickly as possible (approximating the "automatic" instincts) to formulate a "value-complex" or "meaning-complex" out of the vast array of information . . . and then to propose a behavioral strategy for the organism based on this value-complex. The "quickness" I am poking at here is the human short-term memory itself. Short-term memory could be seen as a necessary limitation of condensed information processing.
If anyone is familiar with computer chess programs, they might recall that the computer chess player calculates most of its strategical choices very quickly . . . and derives more complex, long-term strategies with further processing. The programs know how to recognize common situations that have standard strategical procedures. I.e., when situation X arises, Y is always the best strategy. Therefore, there is no need to calculate every permutation step by step. Knowing that X facilitates Y is part of the core program.
But when the computer is faced with a situation that does not have an immediate pre-programmed solution, it must "think" . . . and (depending on the raw power of the hardware running the program), this thinking can sometimes go on indefinitely.
I am proposing that the ego formulates value-complexes to be used as "pre-programmed" strategies that can be "juggled" effectively within the confines of short-term memory.
The best way to condense these value-complex strategies, it seems, is by encoding them as symbolic stories that "remember" situations, things, others, events, moods, etc. as abbreviated approximations or "as-ifs". Think of it this way: take a fairytale. It is a story condensed to, let's say, one written page. Now start thinking about the tale. Think about the psychology of each character in the tale. Think about all of the choices made by each of the characters and all of the reasoning behind these choices. Think about all of the potential outcomes and how each tiny factor could have effected a different outcome (sometimes drastically different).
But what is the story? The story is
exactly what it is. Nothing else. All of the choices, all of the circumstances, all of the fates . . . everything has to come together in exactly this way to make the story what it is, to make it an identifiable whole or unity.
Story is the most condensed form of complex information. It is therefore no wonder (a marvel, a numinous marvel . . . but not a wonder) that story is the the format in which the ego "thinks" and perceives. All information perceived by the ego (from both outside and from within) is story-encoded. To "make meaning" is to make disparate information into a story.
There is a tremendous burden on the ego, then, to make stories that compel effective living strategies. In this sense, everyone is a poet. We are all trying to make sense of our worlds in some radically condensed piece of artifice . . . a sonnet, perhaps. Super-efficient stories make for successful living. So there is a natural emphasis placed on efficiency. But this condensed efficiency also means that more and more potentialities will be left out . . . and eventually, too many will be left out. The story will then have to be revised or expanded.
And there are a couple interesting (although perhaps not ultimately meaningful) parallels to this process that come to mind. The first is evolution itself. In evolutionary terms a species is a story that strives for ultimate efficiency (adaptation to its environment), but must be continuously revising itself (in order to survive) as that environment changes. And so you get "additions in the margins". Traits that are added on to other traits . . . all of it accumulating into a being that is a catalog of revisions/adaptations (some of them a bit incongruous). It would be like writing a story in which it was impossible to erase anything and start over.
The second parallel that comes to mind is the formation of synaptic structures. I am woefully ignorant about the actual physical functioning of the brain, but I seem to recall that synaptic structures or webs of connection between neurons have a kind of trial and error connectivity process. This can form complex structures that keep getting reinforced and growing, but at the same time are always relinquishing some connections and reaching out for other ones. Perhaps "synaptic structures" is the wrong technical term . . . but I'm pretty sure that there is some kind of neural cellular/chemical behavior that functions like this. I just need to brush up on my terms.
I guess I'm thinking of something like this:
Now you may be thinking, "Lovely digression, Matt, but what does this all have to do with the shadow?"
Well, in the paradigm I proposed above, we might see the shadow in the undeveloped potential that the stories the ego choses eliminate or in the potentially more effective stories the ego could have come up with but didn't (due to various self-imposed and arbitrary limitations). That is, for each story we cling to and try to draw a wealth of meaning from (like trying to draw blood from a stone, perhaps), we are unconsciously necessitating the creation of a counter-story, a negative image of our chosen story . . . in which the hero chooses to go left instead of right. Making choices means shutting certain doors in favor of others.
But we are short-term thinkers. We might not be able to see the detriment of the right-going path until we have gone down it some distance. Then we have to face the aggravation of turning around and going down the path we initially discounted. We have to revalue the thing we originally chose to devalue. And since we are made out of these story-strategies and identify ourselves with them, we have to destroy an established part of ourself in order to revalue the thing we originally discarded instead of it.
The ego has failed, then, to effectively mediate the instincts, and its living strategy gradually breaks down. The strategy breaks down because the organism is not able to generate a reciprocating libido. Typically this is a matter of overvaluing external information in the egoic story-making process. The ego starts to behave too autonomously and tries to survive as if it was the entire organism . . . but this approach can lead to a loss of drive. And the Self asserts a corrective force just as the physical body always self-regulates to the best of its ability.
This "force" as perceived by the ego (in story form, of course) is the shadow scratching at consciousness. This shadow will come with a mix of countering instincts that "assault" the ego-position like a particularly malicious editor. It will probably make no sense to the ego why it is facing such resistance. And, since it has rather deeply invested in its story, it will be inclined to resist the shadow's counter-force. This resistance is often composed of the basic stuff of all infantile resistance: aggression, denial, displacement, blame, projection, delusion, etc. All those self-preserving defenses that are actually very functional. These are instinctually-driven strategies that the ego had always used to deal with overwhelming unknowns . . . at least until these unknowns became more known, and different strategies proved more effective in addressing them.
This is where many Jungians see the shadow. They see these infantile strategies welling up to defend against something. Perhaps the individual even has dreams with infantile characters in them that are deemed shadow characters. But I think these are actually ego-defenses against the Otherness of the shadow or the Shadow-Self. When "shadow characters" in dreams are displaced (and the ego does not directly identify with them), the dream could be saying, "Hey dumbass! Look at this behavior of yours from an outside perspective. Pretty revolting, eh?"
It is easy to mistake our ego reactions to Otherness with the actual content of that Otherness. But what we might do better to see in this paradigm is how radically ineffective our infantile strategies are against the Shadow-Self. As the shadow gains power and comes closer to our conscious awareness, our attempts to fight it start to seem increasingly pathetic and ridiculous. Or, as is frequently the case, our dreams (and at times our actions) show that our infantile defense of aggression is a drastic overreaction. We strike out at some other as though we were fighting a great evil . . . only to realize (in wounding it) that we ourselves (our egos) were the aggressor. The Other is humanized, and we are filled with remorse for our "demonic" aggressiveness.
It occurs to me that this needs a great deal more explanation and numerous examples before it will start to make better sense . . . but this post is already too long, and I have to get myself home.
I can see right off the bat that some approach to archetypal villains needs to be formed in relation to the above. A great deal can be said about this, and there are innumerable examples in myths, dreams, and fairytales.
I will think about this more and try to make my approach more efficient.
-Matt
