How it is made
Nobody chooses their shadow. It is assembled for us, early, by the people whose approval we could not do without.
“We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”
The poet Robert Bly, who spent years teaching Jung’s idea to rooms of non-specialists, offered the image that stuck: an invisible bag we drag behind us, filling it through childhood with every quality that met disapproval.5 What goes in depends on the household. In a family where anger frightened everyone, anger goes in. In a family that prized modesty, the child’s pleasure in being looked at goes in. Where toughness was admired, tears go in; where niceness was, appetite and ambition go in. School adds a layer, then the first workplaces, then a culture with a bag of its own: the collective shadow, everything a society declines to see about itself and locates instead in an enemy, an underclass, a neighbouring country.
The mechanism is compensation. Jung observed that the psyche seeks balance, and that a personality leaning hard on one quality builds up its opposite underground. The more exclusively someone identifies with being kind, the larger and less examined their cruelty becomes; the more a person insists on being rational, the more unruly the feeling that finally breaks through. ‘Everyone carries a shadow,’ he wrote, ‘and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.’6 The shadow is, in this sense, a measurement. It tells you how one-sided you have had to become.
This is why suppression does not work as a strategy, however moral it looks. ‘Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for headache.’7 What is suppressed does not weaken. It waits, and it looks for a door.