Читать книгу The Essential Jung: Selected Writings - Anthony Storr - Страница 30

In Jung’s dream about Siegfried (quoted in Part 3), it will be recalled that he was accompanied by a “small, brown-skinned savage” who initiated the killing. This figure, Jung affirms, “was an embodiment of the primitive shadow.”

By shadow I mean the “negative” side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious. [CW 7, par. 103n]

The shadow is one example of an “unconscious personality” which possesses a certain measure of autonomy. The shadow might be said to be responsible for those slips of the tongue and other “mistakes” which Freud catalogues in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; mistakes which reveal feelings and motives which the conscious self disowns. The shadow is also often projected on to others. Examination of those attributes which a man most condemns in other people (greed, intolerance, disregard for others etc.) usually shows that, unacknowledged, he himself possesses them.

The shadow is usually the first archetype to be encountered during analysis. In the dreams of Europeans, the shadow appears as a figure of the same sex as the dreamer; usually as dark-skinned, alien or primitive, as in Jung’s own dream. Jung makes the point that making conscious the repressed tendencies and confessing the less desirable aspects of personality which the shadow portrays does not rid us of them.