What is the shadow self?

Carl Jung, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Carl Jung answers

The shadow is what falls behind you when you turn toward the light. It is not, as popular usage has it, simply the "dark side" — the reservoir of cruelty and appetite that polite society forbids. That is the surface of it. What lies beneath is more precise and more interesting. Begin with the personal unconscious, which is the layer closest to consciousness: those contents that have the character of personal acquisitions, things forgotten, repressed, or simply never raised to full awareness.1

These are recognizably ours — we can trace their effects, find their origins in our personal history, and in principle retrieve them.1 When they remain missing from consciousness, the result is not some organic defect but something more like a moral omission, a gap in the personality that produces a feeling of inferiority precisely because the missing element is, at bottom, something one could own.1

The shadow is the name I give to this missing portion of the personality when it has consolidated into a figure — the inferior, undeveloped, and often primitive side of the person, the sum of everything the ego has declined to be. It is personal, yes, but it borders on something older and less individual. When the primitive images that appear in dreams and fantasies cannot be explained by personal history alone — when they carry a quality too archaic, too impersonal, too charged with the weight of the species — we have crossed into the deeper layer, the collective unconscious beneath the personal one.2

The shadow is also the place where the autonomous contents of the psyche make themselves felt most immediately. An inexplicable mood, a compulsion that defeats the will, a vice that consciousness cannot master — these are not, as the rationalist would have it, mere mechanical malfunctions.3 To call them "nothing but" neurological noise or the residue of childhood conditioning is an apotropaic euphemism, a way of giving a bad thing a good name in order to dispose of it without looking at it.3

What is disposed of in this way is merely repressed; the illusion only changes her face.3 The personality gains nothing and loses the shadow's corresponding depth — for the living form needs deep shadows in order to appear plastic, and without them it remains a two-dimensional phantom.3 This is the point that surprises people: the shadow is not simply an enemy.

What appears to contemporary knowledge as evil or meaningless might, at a higher level of experience, prove to be the source of everything good.3 Everything depends on what one does with one's seven devils. To explain them as meaningless robs the personality of its form; to integrate them — to recognize the shadow as one's own, however unwelcome — is the first and most necessary act of the individuation process. One cannot become whole by amputating half of oneself.45

Sources

  1. The contents of this layer are of a personal nature, inasmuch as they have partly the character of acquisitions of the individual existence and partly of psychological factors that could just as well be conscious.
    Chapter I
  2. These primitive images, of which I have given a great number of examples in my book Psychology of the Unconscious, challenge one to make a fundamental discrimination of unconscious material, a discrimination altogether different in character from the distinguishing of 'preconscious' from 'unconscious.'
    Chapter I
  3. It is an apotropaic euphemism when such things are disposed of with a 'nothing but' explanation. By so doing they are merely repressed, and, as a rule, only an apparent advantage is gained by it. Illusion only changes her face a little. The personality is not thereby enriched; on the contrary, it is impoverished and smothered.
    Chapter IV
  4. What to contemporary experience and knowledge seems evil, or at least meaningless and without value, might appear to a higher level of experience and knowledge as the source of everything good.
    Chapter IV
  5. The 'living form' needs deep shadows in order to appear plastic. Without shadows it remains a two-dimensional phantom or — a more or less well brought-up child.
    Chapter IV