Carl Jung’s Solution for Anxiety

Navigating boundaries, and the need to “integrate the shadow”

One of Carl Jung’s most famous ideas was the ‘Shadow.’ He thought that everyone had one — a collection of primal desires that civilization needed to control or eradicate in order to function cohesively. Jung explained that these desires acted “through” the person, overlapping with Richard Dawkins’s ‘Selfish Gene’ theory which says that we are vehicles for our genes to make more copies of themselves. We are often not conscious of these desires until they produce behavior that we struggle to explain to ourselves.

Most people learn to cover up their Shadow as they become socialized through childhood. They learn that always acting out one’s desires is likely to lead to punishment. They realize that other people will think they are weird. They acquire responsibilities at school and at work. Most adults won’t put up with someone under the constant sway of the Shadow.

Adult social life is characterized by an excess of politeness. People don’t have to spend time with us if they don’t want to: better make sure to be very nice, show etiquette, compliment their fashion sense. This creates a very misleading appearance. In his 2nd volume of ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Proust wrote that

“The nature we display in the second part of our life may not always be, though it often is, a growth from or a stunting of our first nature, an exaggeration or attenuation of it. It is at times an inversion of it, a garment turned inside out.”

When we were teenagers we had to pretend we were tougher than we actually were. Now we have to pretend we are more beneficent.

Our Shadow, and Our ‘True Selves’

As our need to please suppresses desires, our Shadow darkens; we become resentful. We think of our ambitions which were thwarted, the aspects of our personality which were suffocated. Hypocritical rules and boundaries stopped us from being great. The Shadow cannot be suppressed by force forever. It leaks out in moments of strange behavior, uncoordinated movements, brief spurts of hostility. When a normally polite person loses themselves in a moment of unprecedented aggression, they are seen as having been “fake nice.”

People will try to rationalize these moments. They will point out they were tired, or under unusual levels of stress, or had too much to drink. The role of these extenuating circumstances is that they remove the willingness to maintain the façade. So what you are seeing is, in fact, the ‘real’ them.

The fact that we often glimpse or feel our Shadow, but almost never perceive it in others, produces a lot of shame and anxiety. When it is our turn to have an unexpected moment of truth, we are mortified. We resolve to never put ourselves in that position again. Over the years we develop an extensive pattern of avoidance. We see boundaries and moral restrictions everywhere. We have elaborate fantasies, and do nothing.

This is partly why it is so hard to answer the question, “what do I want?” The answer is somewhere on the other side of your Shadow.

The major practical obstacle is that the stakes are set against integrating the Shadow. From society’s point of view, there is too much that needs doing, and not many who would naturally want to do it. Hence we are all subjected to extensive conditioning. With society’s voice in our head, censuring us, we can’t even face the question. We can’t admit that the reason we are dissatisfied is that we want more power, more freedom and sex with more attractive people. I am told that one of the results of having an affair is to make the person realize they actually do love their spouse. I think that must be an effect of discharging some Shadow-based energy.

Finding the Boundary

You have to cross the line to know where the boundary is. The person who has integrated their Shadow will probably have decided at some point that society could get fucked and that they were going to pull out all the plugs to get what they wanted. From this position they can judge society for what it is, want it back, and learn to appreciate that it and its people are a true necessity which must be balanced with individual freedom.

In Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Dangerous Liaisons, the Vicomte de Valmont is a libertine whose seductions have caused chaos in society. Madame de Volanges warns one of his potential victims, the Présidente de Tourvel,

“For aside from there being every reason to believe we should never renounce such a previous thing as the good opinion of others (assuming we had any right to expect it), a person not held back by this powerful constraint is the one most likely to do wrong.”

But, acting outside this constraint, one of the striking things about Valmont is his almost Zen-like equanimity. When the Présidente sends one of his letters back unopened, he writes

“You know me, I do not need to describe my fury. But I had to regain my composure and try by other means.”

When his friend the Marquise de Merteuil mocks his lack of progress in seducing the Présidente, he first praises her eloquence. And he is still welcome in society. Mme de Volanges admits

“You know as well as I do that one spends one’s life observing them, complaining about them, and then indulging in them… equally adept at approbation and ridicule… he charms people with the one and intimidates them with the other. They do not respect him, but they flatter him. That is how he survives in a world which, being more prudent than courageous, prefers to humor rather than confront him.”

Making the Unconscious Conscious

Though not a worthy model in the long run, Valmont has gained social success from giving free vent to friendly and hostile impulses, learning to calibrate both to the occasion. Once you have made their Shadow a part of your conscious life you will seem to be more authentic. When you smile it will be with relaxed eyes and a lifting of the cheeks, rather than the strained picture of congeniality which habit had produced. When someone acts like an idiot you will not be afraid to say so, nor to forgive them. Your body language will be smoother and you will be comfortable with physical touch. Friendships will arise from a place of warm regard and non-attachment.

Every event requires two parts: an occurrence in physical reality, and an observer who interprets it. People hope to change the physical reality; their attention would be far better spent on their recurring pattern of interpretation. As Carl Jung said,

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate.