Shadow work
“Are there relations of the heart that embrace what is most cruel for the sake of wholeness? For the world is only world when everything is included.” Rainer Rilke
"We must break away once & for all from the metaphors which depict consciousness as a luminous circle round which there is nothing but darkness. On the contrary, the shadow is at the centre." - G. Marcel
Who is the me that I can’t see?
“Shadow” is a term from Jungian psychology, which describes those parts of the personality that are hidden from view. Shadow work aims to bring those aspects back into the conscious personality or “ego”. This is generally achieved through writing and self-observation tasks. Shadow work is a healing process in the etymological sense of the word because it strives to make us whole. This movement toward wholeness is a central theme of Jung’s work on the Self.
The process asks you to explore three facets of psychology:
1. Projection. How is my own shadow projected onto other people? What bothers me about other people to an irrational degree? What do I find uncharacteristically intolerable about some people?
2. Transference and Countertransference. How do my feelings, attitudes and desires project onto people, and how do people typically respond to this? Do I often view people in a similar way, and do they react to me in a predictable fashion?
3. Cybernetics. How do my words and ways of living make me feel? Are there things I do that I hate? What is the significance of my negative emotional experiences?
This process may help you to develop a meaningful orientation in the context of training or life more broadly, as well as reconnecting you with parts of the personality you may not have been able to previously recognise.
This work is divided into three phases, each based around one of the psychodynamic principles mentioned above: 1. Projection, 2. Transference & Countertransference and 3. Cybernetics. The process is loosely guided by a reading of Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy.