What the shadow is
Not the whole unconscious, and not simply the bad in us.
The word Jung used was Schatten. He meant it literally: the dark shape a lit object throws, inseparable from it.
Carl Jung used the word shadow for the part of the personality a person refuses to recognise as their own. Not the unconscious as a whole, and not simply the bad in us: the shadow is the specific set of traits, wants, and feelings that were sorted out of the self we present, because at some point they did not fit. His own definition is plain. The shadow ‘personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly’.2
Two words in that sentence do most of the work. Refuses: the shadow is not what we never had, it is what we have and will not own. And thrusting: it does not stay put. Disowned material has a way of arriving anyway, in a tone of voice we did not intend, a judgement that comes too fast, a resentment we cannot quite justify.
The shadow forms in tandem with its opposite, the persona, Jung’s term for the face we compose for the world. The persona is not a lie. It is a necessary compromise between who we are and what a family, a school, or a profession will accept. But every persona is built by subtraction. The agreeable colleague has subtracted their anger. The self-sufficient friend has subtracted their need. Whatever was subtracted did not vanish. It went into the dark, and the dark is where it grew.
Jung was insistent that this is a moral problem rather than an intellectual one. ‘The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.’3 The difficulty is not understanding the idea; most people grasp it in a minute. The difficulty is the recognising, one instance at a time, that the quality you find intolerable in someone else is one you carry.
He was equally insistent that the shadow is not only dark. Late in his life he wrote that the unconscious side of a person ‘does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses’.4 What we put away to be acceptable includes a great deal of what would have made us alive.