The Ego and The Shadow

Carl Jung was one of the founding fathers of Psychoanalytic approach and established the Analytic school of thought under it. It emphasizes the importance of the individual psyche and the personal quest for wholeness. Unlike most modern psychologists, Jung did not believe that experiments using natural science were the only means to gain an understanding of the human psyche. He saw as empirical evidence the world of dream, myth, and folklore as the promising road to deeper understanding and meaning. That method's choice is related with his choice of the object of his science. As Jung said, "The beauty about the unconscious is that it is really unconscious. Hence, the unconscious is 'untouchable' by experimental researches, or indeed any possible kind of scientific or philosophical reach, precisely because it is unconscious. 

This article is an attempt to understand the concepts of 'The Ego' and 'The Shadow', taken from 'Aion: Research into the Phenomenology of the Self'; 9th Volume of Collected Works of C.G Jung. 

Not unlike Freud, who saw personality as an interacting tandem of the Id, Ego and Superego; Jung saw 'the psyche' to be made up separate but interacting systems of the ego, the personal unconsciousness and the collective unconsciousness. The first layer called the personal unconscious is essentially the same as Freud’s version of the unconscious. The personal unconscious contains temporarily forgotten information and well as repressed memories. The 'collective unconsciousness', a concept that predominantly set Jung apart from Freud, defines a level of unconscious shared with other members of the human species comprising latent memories from our ancestral and evolutionary past. ‘The form of the world into which [a person] is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image’.

The 'Ego' represents the conscious mind as it comprises the thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of. The ego is largely responsible for feelings of identity and continuity. The ego usually assumes itself to be the center of the psyche, for it believes it knows everything and comprises the self when in reality, it only makes up part of the self which also comprises of the 'unconscious'. Jung, defines this as, "Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body, of whose physiological and anatomical structure the average person knows very little too."

Therefore, one of the basic necessities for the process of individualization, the overarching goal of Jungian psychology is to differentiate the ego from the complexes in the unconscious which hold more about 'the self'. 

One of the components in our unconscious, as described by Jung, is 'The Shadow'. The shadow comprises hidden or unconscious aspects of oneself, both good and bad, which the ego has either repressed or never recognized. The shadow is composed for the most part of repressed desires and uncivilized impulses, morally inferior motives, childish fantasies and resentments, etc. – all those things about oneself one is not proud of. Jung defines the shadow as "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".

These unacknowledged personal characteristics are often experienced in others through the mechanism of projection, which is a defense mechanism where the inferior thoughts and motives in one are defined or seen as moral deficiency in the other person. This creates a veil of protection between the ego and reality. The realization of the shadow is inhibited by the persona, which is how we like to perceive ourselves as well as present ourselves to others. To the degree that we identify with a bright persona, the shadow is correspondingly dark. Thus shadow and persona stand in a compensatory relationship, and the conflict between them is invariably present in an outbreak of neurosis. The shadow in effect comes to comprise our entire unconscious. Jungians maintain that ‘the shadow contains, besides the personal shadow, the shadow of society ... fed by the neglected and repressed collective values.’

The shadow may appear in dreams and visions in various forms, and typically 'appears as a person of the same sex as that of the dreamer'. 

The shadow is not, however, only the dark underside of the personality. It also consists of instincts, abilities and positive moral qualities that have long been buried or never been conscious. An outbreak of neurosis constellates both sides of the shadow: those qualities and activities one is not proud of, and new possibilities one never knew were there.

If we were to analyze the character of 'the narrator' from the book the 'The Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk or the character of 'Gollum' from the series ' The Lord of the Rings' written by J.R.R Tolkien or even the classic 'Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' from a Jungian approach, we find that the neurosis in these characters stem from their conflicted 'Shadow'. These characters live their repressed desires and impulsive actions through a character that they manifest. This other character is their unconscious or their shadow. 

  

The overarching goal of Jungian psychology is the attainment of self through individualization. Jung defines "self" as the "archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche." Central to this process is the individual's encounter with his/her psyche and the bringing of its elements into consciousness. Humans experience the unconscious through symbols encountered in all aspects of life: in dreams, art, religion, and the symbolic dramas we enact in our relationships and life pursuits. Essential to this numinous encounter is the merging of the individual's consciousness with the collective consciousness through this symbolic language. By bringing conscious awareness to what is not conscious, unconscious elements can be integrated with consciousness when they "surface."

Carl Jung And Psychoanalytic Theory

The Psychoanalytic Theory propounded by Sigmund Freud, is a ground breaking that changed the way human psyche was understood. It affected not just the field of psychology but transversed across various fields and the understanding of the subject of their study. Carl Gustav Jung, was another pioneering figure who collaborated with Freud and supported his theory of the deep-seated unconscious. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland. The only son of a Protestant clergyman, Jung was a quiet, observant child who packed certain loneliness in his single-child status. However, perhaps as a result of that isolation, he spent hours observing the roles of the adults around him, something that no doubt shaped his later career and work. Jung was widely believed to be the one who would continue the work of the elder Freud. However, viewpoints and temperament ended their collaboration and, eventually their friendship. In particular, Jung challenged Freud's beliefs around sexuality as the foundation of neurosis. He also disagreed with Freud's methods, asserting that the elder psychologist's work was too one-sided. The final break came in 1912 when Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious. In it, Jung examined the unconscious mind and tried to understand the symbolic meaning of its contents. In the process, the work also took head-on a number of Freud's theories. Seeking to further distinguish his work from Freud's, Jung adopted the term "analytical psychology" and delved deep into his work. His most important development from this early period was his conception of introverts and extroverts and the notion that people can be categorized as one of the two, depending on the extent to which they exhibit certain functions of consciousness. Jung's work in this area was featured in his 1921 publication Psychological Types. During this period he also allowed himself to explore his own mind, eventually proposing the idea that there was not only a personal unconscious but also a collective unconscious from which certain universal symbols and patterns have arisen throughout history. Shared by all individuals in a culture, the collective unconscious could be regarded as the, repository of racial memories  and of the primordial images and patterns of experiences, which he calls archetypes. A philosopher, psychoanalyst and a disciple of Freud, Jung treated the human self as the totality of all psychic processes. While Freud believed literature to be an expression of the repressed conflicts and desires of the author, Jung regarded literature as an expression of the collective unconscious, as it provides access for readers to the archetypal images buried in racial memories, thereby helping in revitalising the psyche of the culture as a whole.Hence the importance of using myths and legends in African, Native American and other resistance literatures in a desperate attempt to reclaim the past, redefine history and assert their cultural identities. A powerful explication of this concept can be seen in Eugene O’Neill‘s Emperor Jones. Jung’s theory has also been a cardinal formative influence on Northrop Frye‘s Archetypal Criticism. Jung also postulated the concept of the Self as constituting of the anima and the animus—the anima being the unconscious female component in men, and the animus being the unconscious male component in women. At the heart of analytical psychology is the interplay of these with the ego, a process he labeled individuation, by which a person develops into his or her own "true self." Jung published numerous works during his lifetime, and his ideas have had reverberations traveling beyond the field of psychiatry, extending into art, literature and religion as well. He died in 1961.