Shadow Work
“Shadow work” has become a general term for looking at the parts of oneself one would rather not see: the envy, the anger, the neediness, the ambition, the traits one condemns in others and cannot find in oneself. The phrase, and the idea, come from Carl Jung, who used “the shadow” for everything a person has refused to recognize as their own, and who held that meeting it was the first and hardest step in becoming whole (Jung, 1951/1959).
Jung was Freud’s closest collaborator for seven years before the two broke, and the shadow is the Jungian name for territory that psychoanalysis maps with other words: repression, projection, the return of the repressed, and what Nancy McWilliams calls the question of what a defense is defending against. The traditions diverge on what else is down there and on what to do about it.
The Map
- The shadow
- The sum of what a person has rejected in themselves in order to be the person they intend to be. The psychoanalytic equivalents are the contents of repression and the feelings kept at bay by defense generally. See what a defense is afraid of.
- Projection of the shadow
- Jung’s central observation: what we will not see in ourselves we see, vividly and with disproportionate feeling, in other people. The person who cannot stand a colleague’s self-promotion may have a shadow full of ambition. This is projection, and the diagnostic rule is the same in both traditions: an unusually strong reaction to someone else is a clue about oneself.
- Integration
- Taking back what has been projected and acknowledging it as one’s own, which Jung held makes a person less perfect and more whole. Psychoanalysis describes the same movement as the undoing of a defense, and Klein described it as the depressive position: owning one’s hatred alongside one’s love, with the guilt and the wish to repair that follow.
- The golden shadow
- Later Jungians noted that the shadow holds disowned strengths as well as faults: a creativity, a confidence, a capacity for pleasure that was not allowed (Johnson, 1991). The psychoanalytic version is Winnicott’s true self hidden behind compliance, and the devaluation of self-image that keeps a person smaller than they are.
- The persona
- The social mask, the self one shows. Jung paired persona and shadow: the brighter the mask, the darker what it hides. This corresponds to Winnicott’s healthy false self, and to the reaction formation that turns an unacceptable impulse into its opposite.
Where They Agree
- What is disowned does not disappear. It acts from outside awareness, often through other people.
- Strong reactions are information. Both traditions read disproportionate feeling toward others as a pointer back to the self.
- Wholeness over goodness. Jung’s preference for the whole person over the good one is close to the psychodynamic preference for integration over idealization.
Where They Differ
- Where the shadow came from. Jung’s shadow is partly personal and partly collective, an inheritance of the species. Psychoanalysis is interested in the personal history: who taught you that anger was unacceptable, and what happened when you showed it.
- Archetypes. Jung populated the deep unconscious with archetypal figures. Object relations populates it with versions of actual people. The inner tyrant, in one tradition, is an archetype; in the other, it sounds like somebody.
- Method. Shadow work as practiced today often uses journaling prompts and inner dialogue done alone. The psychodynamic tradition holds that disowned material shows itself most clearly in a relationship, where it is enacted before it is seen. See transference.
- The risk of a new label. “My shadow” can become one more thing a person has, a possession to be explored, rather than a feeling to be had. Both Jung and the analysts warned about this, in different words.
Sources
- Johnson, R. A. (1991). Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche. HarperSanFrancisco.
- Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)
- McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.