Fourteen words, in the order that makes them easiest to learn. Jung wrote in German, across forty years, and his translators were not always of one mind, so most of these terms arrive with a cloud of looser meanings attached. What follows is what each one means here, on this site, plus his own sentence on it where there is one to quote.
The shadow
The part of you that you won’t own. Not the whole unconscious, and not simply the bad in you: the shadow is the particular set of traits, wants and feelings that got sorted out of the self you present, because at some point they didn’t fit. The weight of Jung’s definition falls on the refusing. It isn’t what you never had; it’s what you have and won’t claim. And it doesn’t sit still. Disowned material arrives anyway, in a tone of voice you didn’t intend, or a judgement that comes too fast.
The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly, for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies.
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 5132
The face you compose for the world, and the shadow’s opposite number. A persona isn’t a lie, and you need one. It’s a working compromise between who you are and what a family, a school or a profession will accept. But every persona is built by subtraction, and whatever was subtracted went somewhere. The agreeable colleague has put away their anger. The self-sufficient friend has put away their need. If you want the shape of a shadow, look first at the face being held in place over it.
The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.
C. G. Jung, ‘The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious’ (1928), CW 7, par. 30537
Meeting your own disowned quality, vividly, in somebody else. It isn’t the same as noticing. Other people really do have faults, and an accurate observation carries no charge. Projection carries charge. The tell is disproportion: the reaction runs hotter, larger and longer than the situation warrants, and it arrives with a certainty that feels like moral clarity. This is where most people meet their shadow first, because a quality is much easier to see across the room than to find at home.
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.
A cluster of images and feelings gathered round a sore spot, usually an old one, and held together by a single emotional tone. Touch it and the whole cluster fires at once: the voice changes, the reasoning narrows, and for a minute you are not quite the person who walked into the room. Jung found complexes early in his career by timing how long people took to answer the words in a list. The shadow is built out of them, and so is most of what catches you off guard.
The via regia to the unconscious, however, is not the dream, as he thought, but the complex, which is the author of dreams and of symptoms.
C. G. Jung, ‘A Review of the Complex Theory’ (1934), CW 8, par. 21038
The I that wakes up in the morning: the centre of your conscious field, and the part of you that has opinions about the rest. It is a smaller thing than it believes. Jung made it the centre of consciousness but not the centre of the psyche, which leaves it governing a much smaller territory than it assumes. That is why meeting the shadow stings. What arrives is not new information about somebody else. It is a correction to the ego’s account of itself.
It forms, as it were, the centre of the field of consciousness; and, in so far as this comprises the empirical personality, the ego is the subject of all personal acts of consciousness.
Jung’s word, capitalised to keep it apart from the everyday one, for the whole of a person, conscious and unconscious together, and for the ordering centre of that whole. The ego is the centre of what you know about yourself. The Self is the centre of everything you are, most of which you don’t know. Dreams tend to picture it as something round, or as a figure with a quiet authority who knows more than you do. Individuation is the long business of the ego learning that it is not this.
The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, par. 4440
The layer underneath your own history. Below the personal unconscious, where your forgotten and disowned material sits, Jung placed a deeper stratum that isn’t personal at all: inherited tendencies of imagining, common to everyone, which is his explanation for why strangers’ myths keep rhyming with your dreams. It is the most contested part of his psychology and the least necessary for shadow work. Your shadow is mostly personal, assembled by a particular family in a particular decade. The collective bag is real too, though: what a whole society will not see about itself.
There exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.
C. G. Jung, ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’ (1934), CW 9i, par. 341
Not an inherited picture but an inherited tendency to form one: a shape that keeps recurring in the way people imagine mother, father, hero, trickster, death. The pattern is old. The content is always local, filled in by your own life. Jung was careful about that distinction and his readers usually aren’t. For shadow work the word matters mostly as a caution against neatness. The eight figures here are working names for clusters of disowned material, not archetypes handed down intact, and they are prompts rather than a catalogue.
The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.
C. G. Jung, ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’ (1934), CW 9i, par. 642
Jung’s terms for the contrasexual figure in the unconscious: the anima, an inner feminine image in a man; the animus, an inner masculine one in a woman. He meant them to carry whatever a person’s training in being a man or a woman had made unavailable, which is why they turn up in projection, wearing the face of somebody you can’t stop thinking about. The gendered scheme is of its time, and later analysts have loosened it. What survives is the mechanism, and the ache it explains.
Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious.
C. G. Jung, ‘Marriage as a Psychological Relationship’ (1925), CW 17, par. 33843
Becoming the particular person you actually are, rather than the one you were assembled to be. It isn’t self-improvement, and it isn’t getting better at the persona. It is the slow work of taking back what was disowned, including the parts that don’t flatter you, until the personality is more whole and less edited. Jung thought it took most of a life, and that it usually got going in the second half of one. Shadow work is the early, unglamorous stretch of it.
Individuation means becoming an ‘individual’, and, in so far as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as ‘coming to selfhood’ or ‘self-realization’.
C. G. Jung, ‘The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious’ (1928), CW 7, par. 26644
Jung’s method for talking with unconscious material instead of being run by it. You take an image, a mood, a figure from a dream, and hold your attention on it until it starts to move on its own; then you answer it, in writing or in paint, the way you would answer a person. The rule is not to tidy the replies. Most of the practices on the figure pages are small versions of it: give the anger a face, ask what it has been protecting, write down what it says.
The tendency of anything pushed far enough to turn into its opposite. Jung took the word from Heraclitus and used it for a pattern he kept meeting: the crusading moralist with the private life that contradicts him, the tireless carer who wakes up cold, the reasonable man overrun at fifty by a feeling he can’t explain. The more one-sided a personality, the harder the swing when it comes. It is the reason suppression is not a strategy. What you sit on doesn’t weaken. It gathers.
I use the term enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.
C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (1921), CW 6, ‘Definitions’45
The gold in the bag. Not Jung’s phrase, this one: the analyst Robert A. Johnson gave it a name and noticed something odd about it, which is that people resist the noble parts of their shadow harder than the dark ones.12 The exuberance in a quiet house, the ambition in a family with other plans, the tenderness among brothers who mocked it all went into the bag with the anger. It comes back as admiration that tips into ache: the life you dismiss a little too quickly as impossible for you.
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.
C. G. Jung, ‘Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology’ (1959), CW 10, par. 87213
Owning a disowned quality: not acting it out, not sitting on it, but recognising it as yours and giving it somewhere to live. In practice it is small and unheroic. You notice the charge. You ask what it is doing there. You say the direct no instead of the sideways one. What gets integrated doesn’t disappear; it stops running the show from behind your back. Jung’s name for the alternative was suppression, and he rated it about as highly as beheading for a headache.
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
C. G. Jung, ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’ (1932), CW 11, par. 51920