The Shadow
Relative Evil, Absolute Evil
- First attested
- 1912The earliest dated printing is the 1912 "Neue Bahnen der Psychologie", printed complete from the German in the second edition of CW 7: §438 has "this shadow-side of the psyche" — Schattenseite, an ordinary German noun for the dark side of a thing, not yet the technical term. The companion appendix, "The Structure of the Unconscious" (1916, §§442-521, from Jung's own German manuscript), never uses the word. "Identification with the shadow" stands at §41 of the essay the Collected Works prints as "On the Psychology of the Unconscious" — but that is the fifth edition, Über die Psychologie des Unbewussten (Rascher, Zurich, 1943), of a book first issued in 1917 as Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse and retitled in 1926, revised both times ("fairly extensive alterations", made "particularly in the chapters on types and on the unconscious"; "a thorough revision"); its footnote defining the shadow cites Toni Wolff's essay of 1935. The connected treatment is later and firmly dated: a Zurich lecture of 1948, printed in Aion in 1951.
Aion (1951) gives the shadow seven paragraphs, and §19 splits it in two — the personal shadow can be seen through "with a little self-criticism", while the shadow met "as an archetype" raises "the same difficulties as with anima and animus" and, at the limit, "a rare and shattering experience" of absolute evil — the half rarely carried over into the popular shadow-work literature.
The hidden, rejected, or unacknowledged parts of our personality that we disown or project onto others.
Jung gave the shadow one chapter, seven paragraphs. Chapter II of Aion — Rascher, Zurich, 1951; Hull's English, 1959 — runs §13 to §19 across three pages, and a footnote records that it and the next chapter came from a 1948 Zurich lecture to the Swiss Society for Practical Psychology, printed that year in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde. §13 allows the rare case where the positive qualities are repressed. §19 then divides the thing in two: the personal shadow yields to "a little self-criticism", while the shadow appearing "as an archetype" meets "the same difficulties as with anima and animus", and to gaze into "the face of absolute evil" is "a rare and shattering experience". Integration is Jung's own word — at §42 the first stage of analysis — yet §16 grants assimilation only "to some extent".
Light
Recognising the shadow is, at §14, "the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge" — and Jung prices it: "no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort". §16 rates the recognition of a projection "a moral achievement beyond the ordinary".
Shadow
§16 says of a man's projection that "there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself", which leaves the claim no negative case — the point where the charge of unfalsifiability attaches. In a 1946 BBC talk Jung applied the term outside the consulting room, to Germany and to nations.