The shadow self: resources.  articles  sites  books......

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.. .. Every human being is an artist. As adults we can recreate the boundless joy of unself-conscious art by setting aside intellectual critique and self-doubt and reconnect with 'the Source' - the spiritual center others may call instinct or soul. Aviva Gold ..from book Painting from the Source:  Awakening the Artist's Soul in Everyone  by Aviva Gold, Elena Oumano

Those of us called to create authentic art in Western Culture have been up against formidable challenges.  In order to express the uninhibited depths of our originality and soul we must risk being unacceptable to a prevailing, polite, status quo and thousands of years of rigid Judeo/Christian ethic.  To do our job as artists well, we need to be outspoken, meticulously honest and authentically emotional, which means that we and our art may express rage, grief, destruction, depression, death and sexuality. We may need to paint African Mask faces in midnight black and blood red. Our art may show up as flamboyant, aggressive, morbid, corny, disgusting, primal, spiritual, provocative and totally outrageous. from essay The Creative Soul Lives in the Shadow by Aviva Gold - on her site .. from book The Soul of Creativity :  Insights into the Creative Process  by Tona Pearce Myers

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Not all dark impulses lend themselves to redemption; certain ones, soaked in evil, cannot be allowed to break loose and must be severely repressed.  What is against nature, against the instincts, has to be stopped by main force and eradicated.  The expression "assimilation of the shadow" is meant to apply to childish, primitive, undeveloped sides of one's nature...  But there are are deadly germs that can destroy the human being and must be resisted, and their presence means that one must be hard from time to time and not accept eveything that comes up from the unconscious. ..Marie-Louise von Franz. The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

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from book: Metaphysics in Jars by Stephen Aldrich & Walton Mendelson

 
 

There is no light without shadow  and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. C.G. Jung - from his book Psychological Reflections

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Revealing the dark side of human nature has been one of  the primary purposes of art and literature. As Nietzsche puts it,  "We have art so that we will not die of reality." ...  Through a vicarious enactment of the shadow side,  our evil impulses can be stimulated and perhaps  relieved in the safety of the book or theater. from book Meeting the Shadow

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..Nina Auerbach.  Our Vampires, Ourselves Auerbach (English, U. of PA) looks at the meaning of the vampire in the past 200 years of Anglo-American cultural history, examining text, film, and television sources to show how every age embraces the vampire it needs.  She explores conceptions of the vampire in relation to changing ideologies of power, and discusses the rebirth of the vampire tradition in queer theory. [from Book News review] "In case anyone should think this book is merely a boring lit-crit exposition... Auerbach sets matters straight in her very first paragraph. 'What vampires are in any given generation,' she writes, 'is a part of what I am and what my times have become. This book is a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires.'... Her book really takes off." Maureen Duffy, New York Times Book Review

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Horror fiction burrows into our primal psyches and ferrets out an emotional reaction: fear -- "the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind" according to the founding father of modern horror, H. P. Lovecraft. The feeling of fear can even be simply atmospheric -- just eerie or weird. In fact, Lovecraft used the term, "atmosphere" to describe what creates the sensation of horror. You can find this atmosphere throughout literature from Shakespeare to Gogol, in Melville's Moby Dick and decidedly in Kafka. ... Horror can deal with the most fantastic of the supernatural or the terrors of the mundane.

Paula Guran - in her Dark Thoughts essay:  The Meaning of the "H" Word   ..related books: Best of H. P. Lovecraft Franz Kafka books

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...TechGnosis: Myth, magic+ mysticism In the age of information  by Erik Davis author site: Erik Davis' Figments & Inklings

What I wanted to do in TechGnosis was to unearth some of the many ways that we have imagined technology, because those "unconscious" imaginations (which also appear in popular culture) haunt the "conscious," supposedly utilitarian, use of technology. We will never understand ourselves or our deeper impressions about technology unless we mine this imagination. Don't ask yourself whether a given technology is something good or bad, useful or lame.

Ask how it makes you feel, what it reminds you of. That way our relationship to technology becomes an aspect of "soul-work." Many thinkers who write about "soul-work" (Moore, Sardello, etc) hate technology and always write about in mournful, lamenting tones. This is funny, because they have a golden opportunity to confront their own shadows. quotes and photo from interview  with Erik Davis by Dolores Brien  on the CG Jung Page

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---book: Archetypes & Strange Attractors : the Chaotic World of Symbols
(Studies in Jungian Psychology..) by John R. Van Eenwyk

Carl Jung believed that psychological development proceeds according to the influence
of symbols in our lives. In stripping us of our old points of view so that growth can occur,
symbols invariably feel chaotic. That's Jung's theory, but until recently there was little in
the hard sciences to back him up. Now, with the advent of chaos theory, there is new support
for his psychological perspective.

Archetypes & Strange Attractors maps the correspondences between the dynamics of symbols
in the psyche and the dynamics of chaos in the world of matter. Just as the material world
oscillates between states of order and chaos, so also the individuation process involves stages
of psychic balance and disruption. ...

In accepting that chaos can be creative as well as destructive, we are challenged to revision
our basic notions of psychic health and to enter into a new dialogue with the forces of change.

John R. Van Eenwyk, Ph.D., is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute in Chicago and a priest
in the Episcopal Church. He has a private practice in Olympia, WA, and is a clinical supervisor
at the Medical School of the University of Washington. He has lectured internationally on the
subject of this book and on the treatment of torture survivors.    [bookworld.com review]
 
 

**A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Robert Bly

The ancient Chinese culture emphasizes the Yin-Yang symbol, which shows the white part of the personality and the black part of the personality united inside a circle. I wrote this poem one spring day. Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever! I am wrapped in my joyful flesh, As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green. Rising from a bed where I dreamt Of long rides past castles and hot coals, The sun lies happily on my knees: I have suffered and survived the night, Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass. The strong leaves of the box-elder tree, Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear Into the wilds of the universe, Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant, And live forever, like the dust.

One could speculate that because ancient Chinese poets, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, tried to reconcile the dark side and the light side, they preserved more feeling for plants and animals than we have preserved.  Plants are asleep, and so they live always in the dark side, though their leaves reach out for the light. So we could say that each weed in our back yard unites dark and light as the rose window of Chartres does, and sitting by them is much cheaper than flying over to France.       Robert Bly

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As Jung says, "The shadow is 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.... "The shadow also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc."  ..Shadow Dance : Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side by David Richo

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..Anger, Madness,and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity by Stephen A. Diamond, PhD. "Diamond shows how existential depth psychology can help us understand the anger and violence so rampant in American society. He explains how we are both subject to and responsible for powerful psychic forces active within us, forces which, depending on how we respond to them, can press toward either creative or destructive expressions. Diamond's book is elegantly written, well researched, and clinically well informed. It is an important contribution." -- Michael Washburn, author of Transpersonal Psychology in Psychoanalytic Perspective [cover illustration: Buddhist temple guardian Kongo-Rikishi, "wearing arms with his face full of anger, fighting ignorance"]

*related interview:**Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D.: The Psychology of Creativity: redeeming our inner demons

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As we begin to acknowledge hidden so-called negative traits -- laziness, jealousy, impulsivity, self-centeredness -- as well as undeveloped positive traits -- creative talents, parenting skills, healing abilities -- in our shadow figures, we expand the range of who we are. The shadow reveals its gold in creative works, which build bridges between the conscious and unconscious worlds. The arts have the power to loosen the tight grasp of the conscious mind, permitting unknown moods and images to arise. Writers and artists alike have helped to lift the veil and allow others a glimpse of the infinite riches of the shadow realm. from: Romancing the Shadow  by Connie Zweig, PhD and Steve Wolf, PhD   // photo from site of Connie Zweig***

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Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche - by Robert A. Johnson We all are born whole and, let us hope, will die whole. But somewhere early on our way, we eat one of the wonderful fruits of the tree of knowledge, things separate into good and evil, and we begin the shadow-making process; we divide our lives.  In the cultural process we sort out our God-given characteristics into those that are acceptable to our society and those that have to be put away. This is wonderful and necessary, and there would be no civilized behavior without this sorting out of good and evil. But the refused and unacceptable characteristics do not go away; they only collect in the dark corners of our personality.

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**The Demon and the Angel : Searching for the Source  of Artistic Inspiration  by Edward Hirsch Hirsch, a poet committed to elucidating the power of art, launched his ardent quest with How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999) and now ventures into the very heart of the matter: the nature of artistic inspiration.  An elusive subject to be sure, but Hirsch is so steeped in literature, painting, and music, and so voracious in his pursuit of the revelations art delivers, that he's able to articulate the seemingly ineffable through brilliant critical analyses and empathic insights into artists' lives.  The overarching theme of this unique, exhilarating, and virtuosic performance is an extended definition of duende, "that indefinable force which animates different creators and infuses their deepest efforts."

.. .. Federico Garcia Lorca is Hirsch's guide to the "artistic night mind," the demonic realm from which this "joyful darkness" flows, while Emerson is his mentor in the study of the angelic aspect of inspiration and its "ferocious light."  Not only does Hirsch evocatively explicate the mystical creative experiences of such diverse and seminal artists as Rilke, Stevens, Klee, Pollock, Martha Graham, Miles Davis, and Jimi Hendrix, he also unveils the origins of such radical departures as abstract painting and jazz.  Hirsch himself is imbued with the soulful spirit he celebrates, and its "dark radiance" shimmers on every inspired page.  [review by Donna Seaman, American Library Association]

   

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--articles:
 

The Meaning of the "H" Word - by Paula Guran
The word horror (in a literary sense) has had so many meanings and connotations over the years it's easy to get confused. Recently, the "H" word has been downright abused, twisted into a salable product, then abandoned as not commercial. ... It's been both disavowed and vaunted by its creators, fans, and publishers, but seldom have most readers considered what horror is.

On the Borderland by Jerome Bernstein
"The Borderland is what I call that psychic space where the overspecialized and overly rational Western ego is in the process of reconnecting with its split-off roots in Nature. ... I am talking here of a profound, psychic process in which the very psychological nature and structure of the Western ego is evolving through dramatic changes. It is becoming something more and different from what we have known in the past." Jerome S. Bernstein is a Jungian analyst in Santa Fe.

The Psychology of Creativity : redeeming our inner demons - interview with Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D.
 
 

The Psychology of Evil - Devils, Demons, and the Daimonic by Stephen A. Diamond, Ph. D. In contrast to the demonic, the daimonic includes the diabolic as well as divine human endowments, without making them mutually exclusive; it is that numinous aspect of being and of nature that is both beautiful and terrible at the same time. In this regard, the daimonic resembles certain tenets of pre-Christian monistic religions like Hinduism, which holds that both good and evil stem from the the identical, ultimately inseparable, divine principle (Brahman): "The great gods of India," writes Russell, "including Kali, Shiva, and Durga, manifest opposite poles in a single being: benevolence and malevolence, creativity and destructiveness....      Chapter 3 from his book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity

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Redeeming Our Devils and Demons by Stephen A. Diamond, PhD
"A preoccupation with the perplexing problem of evil is not new to psychology -- though it is certainly timely.
Freud wrestled with this thorny issue, as have many other psychologists and psychiatrists in this century, including
Jung, Fromm, May, Menninger, Lifton, and recently, M. Scott Peck." - by Douglas Eby

Women and Violence On Screen - by Douglas Eby
 

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articles on depth psychology:    Parabola Magazine*----

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CG Jung Page articles

more......article pages index......articles front page

--sites:
 

The ArcticChaos Gothic Offramp
In this endless dark trudge through existence, there aren't enough rest stops, particularly for those with a taste for the macabre. In your search through the Web for cool sites with a gothic flavor, you may get bogged down with all the self-absorbed misery and ominous overtones. Who said one must be somber all the time to enjoy this darker genre? Remember, we're into this because we like it. We relish being different from the mentally costive mainstream, and the remaining ignorance-lolling bulk of the populace can go munch a carotid artery (not that this will happen; that's our job).

The Center for Story and Symbol
site of Jonathan Young on Joseph Campbell and Archetypal Psychology - "the psychology of fairy tales,
mythic stories, creativity, and movies as mythic imagination."

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Creativity and Madness - Psychological Studies of Art and Artists conferences - The American Institute of Medical Education
"Aimed was founded in 1982 to provide the best quality and most interesting continuing education possible to physicians, social workers, psychologists, marriage and family therapists and others interested in the psychology of artists and the creative process."
 << related book: Barry Panter, MD, PhD, et al. Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Art and Artists

DarkEcho Horror
"This site incorporates all of the content of DarkEcho OMNI Horror, originally produced (1996-1998) under editors Ellen Datlow and Pam Weintraub for pioneering professional Web publication OMNI Online (now a static site). Other content came of the original DarkEcho's Horror Web site (established 1995) that was produced in support of , a weekly email newsletter for horror writers and others."

Dark Side of the Net  Dark Literature, Art, Entertainment, Horror; Dark Movies etc

Stephen Diamond, PhD website

Pacifica Graduate Institute
"Programs in Psychology and Mythological Studies in the Tradition of Depth Psychology"
 

<< more sites on page: mythology

 
---books:
 

Marc Ian Barasch.  Healing Dreams  "If Healing Dreams open us to a greater vision of reality, that vision must inevitably includes the dark as well as the light, the Below as well as the Above. Any revelation would be incomplete which shows us only what we most aspire to, and omits what we dearly wish to avoid. Jung used the term 'shadow' for those repressed aspects of the self that do not fit our ego ideal---shameful wants, embarrassing lacks; our venom and our vanity. The shadow appears in our dreams in the guise of the characters and predicaments we most fear and despise... such dreams, in their refusal to kowtow to the idealized self, offer us a deeper knowing of ourselves and world we live in. ... They dig up buried truths and lay them at our feet... Shadow dreams force us to face not only our own unresolved inner contradictions, but the most pressing questions of human existence: What do we do with our hatred, greed, lust, and avarice? With that bifurcated heart that so often puts us midway between heaven and hell? The shadow comes to us in our dreams like some dark fallen angel, demanding we wrestle it for an answer...."

Joseph Campbell, et al. The Power of Myth

Valdine Clemens. The Return of the Repressed : Gothic Horror from the Castle of Otranto to Alien

Carol J. Clover. Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Barbara Creed. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis

Stephen A. Diamond, PhD. Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity

Debbie Ford. The Dark Side of the Light Chasers : Reclaiming Your Power, Creativity, Brilliance, and Dreams
[excerpt:] 'Jung first gave us the term "shadow" to refer to those parts of our personality that have been rejected out of fear, ignorance, shame, or lack of love. His basic notion of the shadow was simple: "the shadow is the person you would rather not be." He believed that integrating the shadow would have a profound impact, enabling us to rediscover a deeper source of our own spiritual life. "To do this," Jung said, "we are obliged to struggle with evil, confront the shadow, to integrate the devil. There is no other choice." You must go into the dark in order to bring forth your light. When we suppress any feeling or impulse, we are also suppressing its polar opposite... Our full magnitude is more than most of us can ever imagine. ... Many of us have spent too much time chasing the light only to find more darkness. "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light," said Jung, "but by making the darkness conscious."

Debbie Ford. The Secret of the Shadow : The Power of Owning Your Whole Story

Cynthia A. Freeland. The Naked and the Undead : Evil and the Appeal of Horror
".. seeks to counter both aesthetic disdain and moral condemnation toward horror by focusing on a select body of important and revealing films, demonstrating how the genre is capable of deep philosophical reflection about the existence and the nature of evil -- both human and cosmic.... the book examines a wide array of films including The Silence of the Lambs, Repulsion, Frankenstein, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Alien, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, Psycho, Frenzy, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Hellraiser, and many others." [Amazon.com review]

Barry Keith Grant. The Dread of Difference : Gender and the Horror Film

Judith Halberstam. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters

Carl Gustav Jung. Man and His Symbols

Maureen Murdock. The Heroine's Journey
 

*----Marie-Louise Von Franz. Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

Connie Zweig, Jeremiah Abrams. Meeting the Shadow : The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

Connie Zweig, Steve Wolf.  Romancing the Shadow: Illuminating the Dark Side of the Soul   "Beneath the social mask we wear every day, we have a hidden shadow side: an impulsive, wounded, sad, or isolated part that we generally try to ignore, but which can erupt in hurtful ways. As therapists Connie Zweig and Steve Wolf show in this landmark book, the shadow can actually be a source of emotional richness and vitality, and acknowledging it can be a pathway to healing and an authentic life."

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more :   the shadow self.........the shadow self : page 2..........the shadow self : page 3........

--related pages:.......depth psychology...........dreamwork.........intuition / instinct.........mythology

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