Episode 55 - Identifying & Integrating the Personal Shadow

This Jungian Life Podcast

Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2019

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The personal shadow is created as a normal part of development, as we learn what behaviors, values and feelings are not acceptable in our family, school, or religious tradition. In order to be accepted by needed significant others, parts of ourselves have to be split off from consciousness and are therefore relegated to the unconscious as shadow. A major part of becoming more whole is discovering these exiled parts of ourselves and integrating the feelings they carry. Deb, Lisa and Joseph discuss some of the ways that shadow can be confronted and given a place at the table of consciousness.

The Dream:

I’m in my Dad’s wood shop, in the basement of the home where I grew up. I need to unscrew a panel on a metal box, and I’m finding the right screwdriver. The first one I pick up is too small, Mom hands me a better-sized one, a Phillips head with four fins. Somehow it is a very large size, and I notice the fins on the head are rusty. I sand away some of the rust on one of the fins, but when I come to the second, it is covered in masking tape. Instead of peeling off the tape, I try to sand away the masking tape, but the sandpaper continues to sand into the screwdriver fin itself, which is somehow made of corrugated cardboard. I am puzzled. I feel a pit in my stomach, like I’ve made a mistake. I find that only the first of the four fins is made of metal, the rest are cardboard. I “undo” (like you would on a computer) to get back to where I was after sanding the metal fin. The cardboard fins are intact again and I’m relieved. I then unscrew and open the panel of the box.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this Jungian life.
0:03.0	Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee,
0:09.0	invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.
0:17.0	I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia.
0:22.0	I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
0:27.0	I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod.
0:31.0	On today's podcast we wanted to talk about this idea about the shadow, which is something
0:36.9	that has certainly come up in previous episodes and we usually take a minute and define it, but we haven't really sunk into it and explored it deeply.
0:46.6	It was one of Young's major ideas.
0:48.9	I think it's very important in young psychology.
0:51.7	I think it has a lot of relevance both personally and
0:55.5	culturally. So we wanted to spend a whole episode on it and and we should just say
1:00.9	that when we talked about doing this topic, it is such a big topic that we felt it important to limit it in some way.
1:08.0	So today we're really going to be talking about our personal experience of shadow, how we find that, how we confront it, what we do with it,
1:17.8	how we integrate it.
1:19.0	And perhaps how we even work with it in a clinical environment. Sure. Okay well let's start with the definition. My
1:26.4	simplest definition because it helps me keep it in the forefront of my mind is that I
1:32.2	think of it as the underbelly of the ego.
1:35.7	It's there, it's connected with my conscious, rational, or we hope rational mind, And it is the underbelly that's hard to look at that is
1:47.3	hard to feel really connected to and it's often kind of loaded with feelings of disgust, profound discomfort,
1:57.2	and a feeling of wanting to push it away.
1:59.8	Yeah, I think Jung said something,
	...

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