Introduction
This essay examines the psychological and social consequences of rejecting the shadow-self; the repressed aspects of the psyche identified by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It argues that much contemporary narcissism, DARVO behaviour, and resentment of authority arise from projecting this unintegrated shadow onto others rather than confronting, accepting, and assimilating it. The piece traces how a shift in late-20th and early-21st-century psychology industry and academia, prioritising protection from discomfort over deeper analysis, enabled the normalisation of dysfunction and contributed to wider cultural patterns, including the scapegoating of males and the rise of what is described as a death cult. Drawing on Christian moral observation, the hero’s journey, seasonal cycles, and mythology, it contends that individuals and civilisations require containment and the willingness to “straighten oneself out” in order to restore stability, responsibility, and renewal.
The Jungian Shadow
In the psychology of Carl Jung, the shadow is the part of the psyche that contains everything a person has repressed, denied, or refused to recognise in themselves. It is not simply “bad” traits; it holds whatever has been pushed out of conscious awareness because it conflicts with the self-image a person wants to maintain. Jung argued that wholeness is only possible when the individual confronts this material, accepts that it belongs to them, and assimilates it rather than continuing to reject it. Without that integration, the shadow remains active outside of awareness and is commonly projected onto other people, turning them into carriers of what the individual cannot yet own.
Events Along The Way
It has frightened them that they were so two-dimensional and transparent, that an analytical expert using a system which works could find out information about them very quickly; information which they even concealed from themselves, to and beyond the point of denial.
The psychologists were aware of this problem. Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung would talk about it; it helped Jung to develop his own theories, which is very obvious when you look at what his theories are and when you look at what Freud’s theories are.
The idea that there is a shadow-self, constructed of that which we repress, and that we can only become a whole person by confronting it, accepting it and assimilating it. A lot of people simply are not willing or ready or capable of confronting it, much less accepting it, much less integrating it to become a wholesome person. They rejected and repressed it.
My theory is that a lot of DARVO activity (Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender), which is why we’re seeing the rising narcissism for decades and generations, is a direct result of people rejecting the shadow and projecting their own shadow onto other people. Victim blaming, shaming, weaponised vulnerability, topping from the bottom, entanglement into passive-aggressive dynamics, using dysfunction, delusion, negativity and fear, to control and to repress other people, even where those other people are more capable of seeing straight and deeper into situations.
This couples with the resentment of Authority, the opposite of respecting Authority. The undermining of Authority. We have here to notice that there are several things which use the same word, Authority, and the same word, Respect. Living in fear of somebody simply because they are an Authority who we are supposed to respect, without any evidence of their being unfit for the position of social responsibility which Authority is, without knowing who they are or trusting them at all, and the fear is because that person has control over our lives, control over defining who we are even without communicating with us or analysing us correctly, to determine who we are.
Our fear of the Authority is the shadow; the method of empowerment and becoming wholesome is to confront our fear and accept it, rather than to go into conflict against it. I write this at a then when much of Europe is burning from civil unrest, largely from left-wing activists and islamic immigrants, neither of whom respect the structure of traditional Western Authority with its Christian foundation.
In psychoanalysis, there’s a problem that when a person recognises who we are deeper than we accept it about ourselves, by using the system developed by the early pioneers in psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, a lot of people reject them along with rejecting their own shadow.
Because a lot of human psychology is psychosexual, it became very easy to criticise those analysts of being perverts. Freud got this more than Carl Jung did. The average person who has even heard of Freud will say he was a pervert; they will not say he was accurate a significantly large amount of the time, correctly identifying a person’s subconscious motivations for their behaviour and for any trauma or baggage they are carrying. Because inevitably, human adults are sexual; it’s a huge and significant factor in who we are. How a person relates to their own sexuality is as important, if not more so, than how a person relates to their own fear, the significant symbol of which is how we relate to mortality and death.
A person who is not afraid to go there, who is not afraid to use as a model to identify a person’s subconscious and conscious psychological make-up, by analysing their relationship with their own sexuality and their relationship with their own death, such a person becomes a threat to those who want to repress that information because they’re afraid of accepting it, of confronting it, which is preventing them from assimilating it successfully.
What happened in psychotherapy, during the second half of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century was an increasing trend towards a different model of psychology where protecting people from feeling uncomfortable came to outweigh any other factors. This enablement of behaviours, this normalisation of dysfunction to the extent it extended, became social movements, many of which are now recognised to came under the umbrella of Wokism.
The rejection of Authority (“smash the patriarchy”) has resulted in the emasculation of males, the dissolving of boundaries and borders, blame-shifting onto males, who are the scapegoat under attack from all directions, and who have no support or back-up. Naturally, that social environment is resulting in a pandemic of male suicide.
The deviation has resulted in the death cult. It’s sold under the guise of female liberation, enabled even to the extent of female supremacy movements, symbolised by female sexual liberation, legal abortion, abortion pills. Women have been so much dissociated from their own nature, they have fallen into the shadow-self version of what women are when they’re in that state; this has been normalised. The natural, harmonious state of females when whole and complete is actively targeted by the death cult, as 'repression of women'.
The death cult has already killed one third of the population of the next generation. Western civilisation is in decline because its numbers are falling below the levels that it’s possible for it to sustain itself.
Over the two thousand years of Christian morality, which at times was rigid and other times was more flexible, observations were made that the hedonism, the permissiveness of non-accountability, the refusal to straighten yourself out, the lack of ability to straighten yourself out, the war against straightening yourself out, the glorification of not being straightened out, historically has observably led to social decline and the fall of civilisations. They sell it as 'freedom', implying its reverse is imprisonment. This is bogus. Its reverse is stability, coherent harmony within the individual and a thriving, stable community.
The Christian religion itself, being a religion, has managed to survive, so far, throughout the fall of civilisations to become a knowledge base from observation of cause and effect in these matters.
What do I mean by 'straightening yourself out'? Confronting the shadow self, accepting it, assimilating it, becoming integrated, becoming wholesome. Doing what is necessary to live the right way for your own personal good and for the good of the community.To dissolve the shadow self ability to control you, through desire or unconsciously, by channeling it through safe routes and systems known to work.
Christianity has picked up a lot of strange peculiarities as it adapted to strange and peculiar subcultures through 2000 years. It had a Reformation in an attempt to straighten itself out although, it having been a power base, the forces of corruption always want to control power bases. This is why there are different versions of Christianity, most pronounced of which is the Church doctrine versus the Teachings of Christ.
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung both self-identified as Christians with that morality framework. The late 20th and early 21st century psychologists using a different system of enablement and empowerment of deviation, did not study in practice Christian morality to the same extent. I have to underline how glorification of open deviation is not the same as private arrangements between stable couples. Burning churches and cars, smashing shop windows, and assaulting people, is not the same as consensual kinky sex with a trusted partner behind closed doors.
My studies of mental health disorders in the late 20th and earlier 21st centuries, my studies of gender relations in the late 20th and 21st centuries, and my study of Christianity, and my study of the psychology models used successfully by both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, all point to the same structural basis.
People need containment, they need frame, and they need to agree on what that is and to work with and within it, in order to navigate and orient and function successfully. This is even more necessary as the world becomes increasingly chaotic and meaning is lost. As the civilisation falls around us, and as an active war against stability is waged at every level possible, the one place it cannot destroy is those who originally adhere to a system which has held individuals and civilisations of communities together, strong, healthy, affluent, influential and stable, throughout history.
It is the hero’s journey. Confronting the shadow self is symbolised as a journey through hell, and return with the knowledge of success, of how to restore and renew life. This journey is matched by the seasons where winter is death, spring is return of life, rejuvenation, summer is coming into closeness with the divinity at the same time as the scorch trial, and autumn is the death of all which is irrelevant, and the loss of that which we’d relied on, that we must find other ways to survive now in the New World which is coming, if we can make it through the death and hardship of winter.
Civilisations who lived hand in hand with the elements, with nature, with the cycle of the seasons, knew this is a matter of life and death in a way which postmodern people who have hot water on tap, plastic wrapped food available in supermarkets in walking distance, petrol driven engines to get them there, neighbours on the street whose names and faces we do not even know, do not. We have lost community, we’ve lost the family, we’ve lost trust for the social structures which once supported us, government councils, even the churches. We are a lost people, a lost civilisation, a civilisation in decline. Whether we’re still in autumn or already in winter is debated by people. It is possible we can rejuvenate but first, before spring time, we have to put the work in to surviving through the dark hard times, which are already upon us.
In straightening ourselves out, we read the Book of Revelation in a different way when it’s personal to the life of the individual, a Fisher King, rather than as a pan-galactic prophecy of perpetually forthcoming future world events. Mediaeval people have already lived through the Book of Revelation more than once, repeatedly, every time their civilisation fell, and every time their civilisation fell it was because the community turned away from the ways of righteousness which brings community stability, and personal stability. They turned away from the shadow and it swallowed them.
Many of us have been isolated. There is glorification of being in a dysfunctional relationship or surviving a dysfunctional relationship; blame-shifting your own shadow onto the ex-partner or the current abuser is a much bigger for-profit industry than is actually sorting things out. Taking responsibility, taking accountability, doing what is necessary, to improve your situation. A lot of it is from ignorance of not knowing how to do that, a lot of it is from not having the opportunities to do that because of the state of the society we live in. Whether that’s been managed upon us or not, it’s our own individual and community responsibility to get us out of that.
So: confronting, accepting, assimilating, the shadow self, that one can become integrated and wholesome.
Our mythology, our histories show us the same pattern repeatedly. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung used it as the basis for their psychology model. Joseph Campbell recognised it as the underlying structure of mythology and stories. The hero’s journey.
The hero’s journey is to go into the night, to discover the light, and return, changed, into a rejuvenated world, which exists in harmony with the character’s personal development.
The wisdom of the lantern bearing Hermit card in the tarot relates directly to the Fool card in the tarot, where the character, setting off on their journey, has everything but wisdom.
See Also: Events Along The Way
See Also: Finding The Path
See Also: Walking The Path