On Jungian Shadow Work

If you’re looking for mental health guidance, I highly recommend reading Jung, but in addition to or even before reading Jung, I recommend finding a therapist who can prescribe the right kind of therapy for your specific trouble. I personally have found Dialectical Behavioral Therapy along with Catholic Mindfulness practice to be extremely helpful. In addition, I have enjoyed Inner Child Work. It feels kind of wishy-washy to me, but it makes some sense and many people find it beneficial.

Doing shadow work is okay, but it is like outdated medicine, in my opinion. It is like getting leeches to let blood to heal muscle pain. It’s what they used to do, but now there are better ways to treat muscle pain, like physical therapy or Aleve.

That said, we should all strive to know ourselves, including the unconscious parts of ourselves, the things we do on autopilot, our shadows.

The problem with shadow work is that it is dangerous and there are far easier and more effective ways to get to know our shadows and ourselves. These include science-based mindfulness practice, cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies, Catholic examination of conscience and confession, and journaling.

I don’t have much else to say about shadow work. I have done it. I don’t regret doing it. But it was excruciating and I have since come to believe that there are better ways of discovering myself. I am a huge fan of both mindfulness practice and examination of conscience.

Jung’s Influence on Mindfulness Practice

Jung wrote of needing to accept the parts of ourselves that we see as evil. This is also an aspect of mindfulness practice.

Release of shame was another great Jungian idea. In fact, this idea comes from something greater than man. Christ died on the cross in part to express that he, God, loves us in spite of our most shameful sins.

Mindfulness is also concerned with seeing one’s automatic thoughts and breaking the chains they form. This aligns with Jung’s idea of looking at one’s unconscious self. When we can see those automatic/unconcious thoughts, we can transcend them and determine whether we should give them any merit or simply let them pass like a leaf in a stream.

On Jungian Archetype Theory

Archetypes, in my understanding, are rough personifications of virtues and vices. Take the book King Warrior Magician Lover for example.

It discusses four, supposedly masculine, Jungian archetypes. Really, these are discussions of what the Catholic Church calls the cardinal virtues.

The king archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of justice. The warrior archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of fortitude. The magician archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of prudence. The lover archetype is, roughly, the personification of the virtue of temperance.

The similarities are enough that I felt a little slighted after reading the book and finding that the authors never once mentioned the cardinal virtues. But maybe they came up with these archetypes independently of the virtues.

The two shadow sides of each archetype presented in the book are simply the extremes to the mean. This idea aligns with Aristotelean ethics which states that each virtue is a “golden mean” between two extremes.

The king’s shadow sides are the tyrant and the weakling. The tyrant is the excess of justice, overreaching. The weakling is the deficit of justice, allowing others to overreach, not setting or enforcing boundaries.

The warrior’s shadow sides are the sadist and the masochist. The sadist is the excess of fortitude; over-ambition, presumptuousness, and stubbornness. The masochist is the deficit of fortitude, cowardice.

“The Masochist projects Warrior energy onto others and causes a man to experience himself as powerless.”

Moore and Gillette, King Warrior Magician Lover

I will not beat a dead horse by expounding upon the extremes behind the magician and lover archetypes. It is clear that the archetypes align with the cardinal virtues. However, that does not diminish the value of the book or the archetypes.

The reason archetypes are worth looking at, even though we already know about virtues, is that they give personified examples of the virtues, and they show how the virtues and vices overlap and interact. For example, the trickster archetype is primarily a personification of the vice of intemperance. In order to protect oneself from the manifestation of this archetype, one must exercise not only temperance but also prudence, and possibly several other virtues as well. The virtues interplay with one another, they lift one another up. The archetypes more fully express this by personifying the virtues.

For this reason, study of the archetypes is not only interesting, but can also be useful. That said, I much prefer the writings of the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, who wrote about virtues and provided very good human examples of them, to the writings of Jung or his disciples. Additionally, I much prefer gaining knowledge of the archetypes by reading myths and good stories which happen to be more entertaining and often less confusing than a scholar’s analysis.

The archetypes describe, by way of gods, the vices which can rule over us if we’re not careful. We must aim to the one true God, and then the virtues in us will be aligned to their golden means; the archetypes in us will mature to their ideal forms.

Archetypes make great characters in stories and good heroes, but we must not forget that they are simplifications of true humans. They ignore the multitude of complexities in the human as individual. Nobody really fits an archetype or a documented personality (e.g. the Big Five/OCEAN profile), and humans are always changing and growing anyway, so to label someone with a trait or an archetype is to disregard a huge portion of their humanity.

Jung’s Worst Idea, IMHO

That brings me to my biggest disagreement with Jung, and the thing he gets tragically wrong: he sees God as an archetype rather than a living being. If God is merely an archetype, then I cannot find a good reason to go on living. If God is merely an archetype, then none of the archetypes have any meaning because the world is only meaningless matter.

Jung’s Best Idea, IMHO

Jung was often stating the importance of knowing oneself. We must know ourselves so that we are not doing things unconsciously. If we do something unconsciously, we can’t make a moral judgment about it, and if we can’t make a moral judgment about an action before we do it, we are liable to allow ourselves to commit evil actions.

Moral judgment can also be clouded by things like anxiety, depression, and attachment. We must overcome our neuroses, which Jung indicates is possible, learn what we value, and envelop our lives in virtue. In order for any of this to happen, we must know ourselves.

How Jung’s Ideas Finally Made Sense to Me

Jung is very difficult to understand. His ideas are complex and build on top of one another. It is easy to misunderstand one, then understand several others based on that one, then realize you misunderstood the base one and subsequently misunderstand the others that are built on top of it.

I exclusively read Jung and his disciples for quite some time. Through that, I began to understand his ideas, but I also spent a huge amount of time in thought, contemplating the ideas. Still, I couldn’t quite piece everything together. I started asking questions that I couldn’t find the answers to on Quora or reddit.com/r/Jung.

I found there are tons of people out there who think they know what they’re talking about in regards to Jung’s ideas, but really they are fools who have only read a couple blog posts. Nonetheless, I did find a couple sensible minds out there who helped me a good deal.

Finally, it was when I began reading ideas similar to Jung’s, but from people who likely didn’t even know of him, or from people who completely reworded his ideas into concepts of their own, that I started to understand his ideas on a new level.

An example of the former is the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, one of Hitler’s greatest enemies. An example of the latter is the therapist and author, Jasmin Lee Cori. When I read their ideas and saw how they were similar to Jung’s, when I made those connections I really started to understand Jung’s ideas.

The Best Outcome of My Own Shadow Work

I think the best thing Jung and shadow work taught me was how fortunate I am to have not lived during a time like the Holocaust in the mid-1900s.

Through introspecting my psyche and my actions, I realized my own inclination to value myself based on how others value me. This often lead me to seek acceptance from others above moral righteousness.

Many times, I have sought acceptance instead of morality. If I had lived in Germany in the mid-1900s, I might have been a murderer in order to be accepted by my peers and neighbors. That is a terrifying thought and I gasp in relief that it is only a thought.