Long ago and far away a king was once going along in his carriage when he overheard a woman by the roadside proclaim that if she was chosen as the king’s bride she would bear him twin sons with hair of gold. He was intrigued and stopped the carriage, inviting her up… They quickly fell in love and were soon married. Before long the new queen was with child..
In the castle there also lived a wicked witch who had long wished that her own ugly daughter would be queen. She was enraged that her plans had been thwarted. When invaders threatened and the king went off to war the new queen did indeed bear him two beautiful boys with golden hair. The witch then stole these infant twins and buried them in the garden, replacing them with two puppies which she then told the king about in a letter. He was so horrified he ordered his bride to be thrown into the sea where she were swallowed whole by a whale which then dived down into the depths of the ocean.
When the grief stricken and remorseful king returned he reluctantly married the witch’s ugly daughter. He then discovered that two golden pear trees had somehow grown up in the castle grounds. He found them quite delightful and liked to sit in there shade, little suspecting their origins. The wicked witch surmised their true nature and had the trees chopped down and burned. A passing goat ate a few leaves before the pyre was consumed and soon gave birth to two golden haired kids.
Again, the witch pounced and ordered the kids to be butchered for the royal table. As their lifeless bodies were being washed in the stream two pieces of their innards turned into golden fish and swam away…
Years passed. One day a fisherman caught a most unusual catch and was doubly surprised when the fish began to speak, offering him a rich reward if only he would let them go free and introduce them to the king. The fisherman released the fish as he was asked and two handsome young men with hair of gold leapt up in their place. They were then bought before the king who was told the whole story of what had happened and that their mother was still captive in the stomach of the whale. The king ordered the whale to be caught and sure enough she was found inside, safe and sound. Everyone was overjoyed except the wicked witch and her daughter who were gruesomely and creatively put to death.
The term ‘shadow-work’ gets bandied about a lot these days with some controversy about what it actually amounts to. Still less obvious is the nature of the shadow itself, except perhaps, that it constitutes unacceptable aspects of the personality, the self we refuse to be, a conglomeration of perceived personal inferiorities or negative qualities. Though he coined the phrase himself, Jung offers us a fairly cursory definition of the shadow, confining himself in the main to discussion about its projection. We are, he says, less good than we imagine ourselves or want to be…
‘Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. Carl Jung
His protege Neumann follows suit. According to him the shadow is a Mr Hyde to the ego’s Dr Jekyll..
‘All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion,’ Erich Neumann.
Though Jung pays lip service to the idea that creative attributes can also be a part of the shadow his view is generally that it is comprised of all that is socially unacceptable, requiring moral courage to face its shameful contents.
‘The only exceptions to this rule are those rather rare cases where the positive qualities of the personality are repressed, and the ego in consequence plays an essentially negative or unfavourable role. Jung vol 9.
Such definitions presuppose traits and attributes found to be at odds with societal values and summarily repressed. This somewhat fail to take into consideration the effect of traumas which occur earlier than ego formation and therefor without reference to social norms. Moreover, these definitions of the shadow tend to skip over the salient fact that what is most anathema to collective values is precisely our individuality. Thus, what first gets buried in the shadow tends to be comprised of those qualities and potentialities which contribute to a unique sense of self, the golden haired twins.
‘The frightened [infant] cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.” Erich Fromm
What this means is that the shadow, in its first iterations, is primarily made up of a person’s essential nature. What is given up to ensure going-on-being in the earliest years is not so much anti-social traits but our creative potential which is repressed out of the need to preserve the emerging self from repeated unmanageable blows of fate, the invading armies which defeat the king. The wicked witch in our story is the inner counterpart to these outer slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the hostile invaders breaching the nation’s borders. She responds to this attack on the realm by defensively burying the heirs to the kingdom, the personality’s future possibility.
In this way the diabolical figure traumatizes the inner object world in order to prevent re-traumatization in the outer one.‘ Kalsched
In the footsteps of post `Jungian analyst Michael Fordham (Defences of the Self), Donald Kalsched furthers our understanding of the shadow with the contribution that it is far more complex than previously understood. It is rather a complex comprised of an archetypal identification with the aggressor/invader coupled with the forcible encapsulation of the essential self. The wicked witch steals and buries the golden haired princes in the wake of alien conquest and puts her ugly daughter on the throne.
This attacking figure is an internalized version of the actual perpetrator of the trauma, who has “possessed” (invaded) the inner world of the trauma victim, though this diabolical inner figure is often far more sadistic and brutal than any outer perpetrator.’ Kalsched.
The perverse logic of such a malevolent ‘death mother’, to paraphrase Marion Woodman, is to prevent the repetition of trauma.
‘Those who carry the most ferocious manifestation of Death Mother may have been the most creative of children, [but] if there is unconscious hostility in the environment we will do anything to ensure that our life feels safe and secure, even if it is static, rotten, and dead.’ M Woodman.
To this end the wicked witch buries the golden haired princes and supplants their mother with her own ugly daughter, much as Donald Winnicott describes the process of the ‘true self’ being supplanted by the ‘false self’. The ‘true’ queen winds up in the belly of the whale, swallowed up by the unconscious, whilst the ‘false’ queen rules the land from the ego’s castle.
Never again,” says our tyrannical caretaker, “will the traumatized spirit of this child be this helpless in the face of cruel reality…. before this happens I will disperse it into fragments [dissociation], or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy [schizoid withdrawal], or numb it with intoxicating substances [addiction], or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world [depression].” … Kalsched
The wicked witch and her daughter draw their power from the instinct for self-preservation itself, misdirected though it may be. As can be seen from our story, they are forces powerful enough to repeatedly kill off the efforts of self-realisation. The popular idea that growth is simply a matter of ‘letting go’ greatly underestimates the spell casting power of the witch and negates the reality of unconscious complexes that may well have you in their grip, against which no amount of ‘letting go’ is ever going to make a blind bit of difference.
Fortunately the golden haired princes are as tenacious as the wicked witch. They morph into ever evasive forms with every effort to kill then off. This motif of twins is interesting and instructive. Jung was of the opinion that the symbolism of twins suggested some creative principle on the cusp of consciousness. Edinger states it more succinctly..
‘The ego destined for individuation is born as twins.’ E Edinger.
Yet in order for this occur there must be some means, already established in consciousness, to facilitate this process. The princes are returned to awareness by the intervention of a particular quality of being, the ordinary fisherman, whose native simplicity is what’s required to redeem the princes and bring them before the king.
Hemingway says of this old man archetype..
‘He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility’. Ernest Hemingway. (The Old Man and the Sea)
Simplicity, as the condition sin qua non for the return of the Princes, is emphasised time and again in the annals of alchemy as being the essential component for the redemption of spirit from matter, ie for the reclamation of unconscious contents.
‘That wo/man is well qualified to complete the work because s/he possesses that which is simple.’ C Jung
and again…
‘that which is nearest to the simplicity of the soul is the bridge to spiritual transformation.’ ibid
The complex is resolved by the simplex.
This somewhat changes how we might traditionally view psychotherapy. Instead of wracking our brains wondering about the origin of anxiety, for example, we might do as the fisherman does and find out what the golden fish want to become. They want to become embodied aliveness. Perhaps anxiety is not so much a projection of guilt or aggression but what simply happens to spontaneous aliveness when it is dismembered and buried out of the need to protect ourselves from further invasion. If life’s excitement cannot be entered into it is going to assume pathological expression. The notion that there is any such thing as a ‘negative’ emotion tends to focus on the eradication of anxiety, or tries to reduce it to a fear of something without asking what the anxiety wants to become, what it’s ‘telos’, its ultimate object or aim, might be.
Of course this is going to be a dangerous process, the king is going to take some convincing. The fisherman’s revelation is going to involve a radicle shift in his mind set and some considerable rewriting of history which will bring with it memories of defeat, realisations of betrayal, confrontation with inauthenticity. Yet these trials seem secondary to those already faced by the persistent twins whose determination for expression, whose lust for life, whose willingness to endure, have already escaped the machinations and transcended the power of the wicked witch.
Very interesting article Andy.