A First Encounter with the Enemy

Recently I read about the story of how the son of a wealthy HK Chinese garment quota merchant was made the target of prolonged unprovoked physical and psychological bullying by white hooligans at an Australian high school following which he showed signs of complete demoralization verging on psychosis. It is difficult not to ask oneself a series of questions: Why did he allow himself to be so treated? Why did he not stand up for his rights? Why was it that none of his friends lifted a finger to help him? Why was his condition not noticed by his teacher or student counselor? And if they did, why was nothing done to stop such bullying? But there is a more fundamental question: why did it happen in the first place? Not having been there to observe what happened, I would not be able to answer such questions. But I commented in that blog that that kind of story was certainly not new: the Christian bible has the story of Cain and Abel, of Joseph and his brothers and America did not abolish slavery until the second half of the 19^th century after a civil war and even then did not allow the blacks to ride in the same bus, eat in the same restaurants and study in the same public school until after the 1960s. Why the discrimination, why the racism and why the injustices? More generally, why is there evil in this world? To find out, I turned to Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams (91).

Our shadow has many names: the disowned self, the lower self, the dark twin brother, the double, the repressed self, alter ego and the id. When we encounter them, we say that we are meeting our demons, that we are wrestling with the devil, that we are descending to the underworld or the dark night of the soul or that we are having our mid-life crisis etc. But because the shadow is by definition unconscious, it is difficult for us to know if we are under its sway. Jung joked that if we want to know what our shadow is, all we need to do is to go to a Sunday sermon, to our wife or to the tax collector. Jung already started using the term “ the shadow side of the psyche” for the unrecognized desires or the repressed portions of the personality as early as 1912, a term he later elaborated as “the unconscious personality of the same sex, the reprehensible inferior, the other that embarrass or shames us” or as “ 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” in his essay On the Psychology of the Unconscious in 1917.

To Jung, the shadow is not merely the repressed consciousness of Freud, it is “an inferior personality that has its own contents” like autonomous thoughts, ideas, images and value judgments similar to the superior, conscious personality. To Jung, the unconscious is the creative source of all that we eventually become as individuals. And along with the self (the psychological center of the human being), the anima and animus ( the internalized ideal images of the opposite sex, the soul in each person), Jung classified the shadow as one of the major archetypes of the personal unconscious (innate, inherited structures in our unconscious with preformed characteristics and traits which we share with all other human beings). To Jung, “Gods are metaphors of archetypal behavior and myths are archetypal enactments”. But the shadow is not, as Freud insisted, just the immoral part of our personality. Our shadow also has potential for the realization of the highest moral values. It is that part of the unconscious psyche nearest to the conscious but which is not completely acceptable by our society and hence by us ( our aggression, our sexuality, our spontaneousness, our fears, our anxieties, our sorrows) and in practice, is always repressed. Our conscious ego consigns it to a part of our unconscious psyche, where it becomes isolated, splintered and sealed off from discovery. But according to Jung, unless our shadow is brought to awareness, acknowledged, accepted and assimilated, it may turn destructive, like the schizophrenic Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jackyll and Mr. Hyde. To, Zweig and Abrams, our shadow is as much a part of our humanity as our conscious socially acceptable part of our personality. Only if we bring out to light our shadow personality and assimilate it into our awareness, if necessary, in psychotherapy, will its inhibiting and destructive potentials be reduced and its trapped creative life energy released.

The poet Robert Bly compares our personal shadow to an invisible bag we carry behind us. As a child, we are a ball of energy radiating from all parts of our body. But when our parents say: “Can’t you be still?” or “It’s not nice to fight with or say you want to kill your brother/sister”, into that bag, that part of ourselves go because we want our parents’ love. When we go to school and our teacher tells us: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things”, we take our anger and put it into that bag and when we go to high school, our peers, our fellow students start telling us what kind of things are acceptable and what not and into our bag go all those things our friends find “unacceptable”. And when we work, we meet with even more injunctions of “unacceptable” words and conduct. Our invisible bag gets bigger and heavier and heavier. Different cultures fill the beg with different contents. In Christian culture, sexuality usually goes into that bag. In Chinese and Mediterannean societies, “shameful/face losing behavior” bringing dishonour to the family name goes into that bag and in Chinese society, “individuality”, innovative or “untraditional” behavior go into that bag. Bly says that “We spend our life until we’re 20 deciding what parts of ourselves to put into the bag and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.”. The nice parts of our personality the morally and ethically “good” parts, become “nicer and nicer” whilst our shadow becomes more and more remote from us until it becomes almost completely forgotten, until it takes on a splintered personality of its own after it gets angrier and angrier and then erupts into violence, much to our surprise and to the surprise of our family and friends. The truth is, when we put a part of ourselves into the bag, it regresses and devolves into barbarism and savagery: it becomes primitive and hostile and may from time to time revolt against us. When we put a human but socially unacceptable part of ourselves into a magical gourd , much as the traditional Chinese Taoist ghost buster put evil spirits into the gourd slung across the back of his flowing robe, sometimes, they may escape, if the “charm/spell” words written on a piece of paper sealing the gourd become frayed,  often during the night, to haunt us in our dreams.

Sometimes, our shadow will struggle for our attention in an ingenious way through the psychological mechanism called "projection". We “see” the unacceptable part of ourselves not in ourselves but in the words and conduct of “the others”. Thus those who cannot come to terms with their own sexual needs will become moral crusaders “against” pornography so that they may have a perfectly “legitimate” reason to justify gorging themselves on the most pornographic materials portraying all kinds of most “perverse” sexual acts and positions in most lurid details.  I am sure we can see not a few of such specimens amongst some of our Christian friends. Those who cannot come to terms with their own aggression will “justify” their own aggressive words and behavior by claiming that the others “started it first” etc. .But this type of things go on not only at the purely personal level. Each society too, has also got its own bag. It is easy to see what is in that bag by reading what that society’s political enemies are saying about it e.g. what American politicians say about China , Russia , Iran etc and vice versa.  

As I am never tired of repeating ad nauseum, the greater part of humanity lives in complete ignorance of what they really are, who they really are and why they are the way they are. They are puppets of their unconscious, in the words of Bly, of their invisible bag and in the words of Jung, of their shadow. They are driven by emotions the origins of which they are unaware, which by degrees, they have repressed in the course of their socialization. They live their lives like sleepwalkers. Their first enemy is therefore their ignorance. If they wish for salvation, they must learn. They cannot learn until they stop from their frenetic activities and take some time to reflect, in silence, upon what kind of forces are moving them and perhaps read a little of what others who have spent their entire lives researching into the human psyche have discovered.