A Little Book on the Human Shadow

by Robert Bly

  Booth: So we are particularly sensitive to a quality in someone else that we have been burying in ourselves?

  Bly: Yes. The peculiarity of our shadow lies in what we are burying. I for example have longed to think of myself as a nice person, that is, responsible, decent, thoughtful, etc. This is one of the major efforts I make. I have been told that I should be a nice person. As far as we know, this is not something the old Celts were told in the time of Cuchulain. They were told that you were to be a daring person, a brave person. You were never to whine; even at the moment of death you were to tell jokes. That would have quite different results. So their shadow probably lay in cowardice and in melancholy. Our shadow tends, because our parents urged unselfishness on us, to lie in being greedy or sneaky, wanting fame without deserving it, being an operator. Were you brought up to be nice?

  Booth: Of course. It’s still a big problem.

  Bly: We bump into that problem in the men’s groups. The Widow Douglas wanted Huck Finn to be nice. And after he has floated down the river with the black man, Aunt Sally wants to adopt him and “civilize” him. Huck says, “I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

  Let me give you one more answer to the question, “How do I know I have a shadow?” The other day I was making coffee for Ruth and myself. I put a spoon and a half of ground coffee in her filter and the same in mine. Then something inside me reached back and took another half spoonful for mine. It wasn’t me—I didn’t do it. I just noticed it happen.

  Booth: I once heard a man say about a certain placid young woman that she had no shadow. Is it possible for someone not to have a shadow?

  Bly: Have you ever seen anyone walk in the sun and yet the shadow was missing?

  Booth: It would have to be a very thin person.

  Bly: Terribly thin. Perhaps transparent.

  Booth: But transparency could imply either that a person is insubstantial or that he or she has nothing to hide.

  Bly: It is said that some old Zen people have done so much work on their shadow that they will do greedy things right in front of you and laugh. By showing the greediness directly, in daylight, somehow they bring it out of the world of shadow and into the world of play. It is said that old Zen people stop dreaming. It is possible that one of the reasons that all of us dream so much is that the dreamer wants to remind us of the amount of shadow that we haven’t absorbed. I would think it possible that a sixty-five- or seventy-year-old person could be transparent. But the woman was in her twenties?

  Booth: Yes.

  Bly: I’d say there’s no chance. Such a woman might even say that she doesn’t dream, but if you checked her rapid eye movements, you would see that she dreams quite a bit.

  Booth: So such a person is not aware of the shadow, but it is there.

  Bly: It is inconceivable that at twenty-eight we could have lived out everything. Our shadow includes a whole landscape. Some of our shadow, in the 20th century, obviously hides in the sexual area, for example—in sexual greediness, sexual brutality—and pornography makes that clear. But I believe that there is also a hunter and hermit area of the shadow, containing various primitive impulses that have nothing to do with sexuality—maybe a desire to live in the woods, a desire to kill animals and smear their blood on our faces, a desire to get away from all profane life and live religiously like an Australian aborigine. There is no way we can live all that material. Then there is an abundant landscape where the emotions of hatred, fear, anger, jealousy live. We have a bigger store of those at birth than we are able to live out. Just think how angry and irritable we get if an airline clerk makes a mistake! At least I do. So I have been thinking of the shadow as threefold.

  I read an article in Psychology Today, and the gist of it is that in China the children are not allowed to speak or act out their negative emotions. If a child expresses anger, the mother will put two fingers to her cheek and say, “Shame!” She will respond similarly to competitiveness or greed. The child, then, is taught politeness toward parents, noncompetitiveness toward brothers and sisters; and if he has anger, he is taught not to express it. Jung said that when the shadow is successfully repressed, the person doing it finds it very difficult to talk to other people about feelings. The people who wrote this article report that in a Chinese family very little discussion of feelings takes place. The child almost never talks with his parents about his or her feelings, never with brothers and sisters; the child sometimes talks about feelings with cousins. Luckily there are many cousins in the Chinese extended family. The shadow of the Chinese, then, would seem to have its foothold in the third area, the area of hatred, fear, anger, and jealousy.

  In our culture, as a result of permissive theories of child-rearing, kindergarten teachers, or some of them, still think it is good if the child expresses anger, gets the aggression “out of his system”—that’s the phrase that is used often. With us, some children are urged to express their anger. So that part of their shadow becomes visible, appears in broad daylight.

  Booth: This sounds like an antidote to the problem of stuffing things into the bag.

  Bly: The planners intended it as an antidote. Yet the plan has not worked very well. I’m not sure that the expression of the sexual material in the young has worked out very well either. The problem is this: whenever a kindergarten child expresses violent anger and acts it out, it’s as if the electrical impulse makes a path in the brain down which the anger can go even more easily next time. But explosive anger is often felt by the ego as a defeat. The ego is in charge of making a social being out of us. If the child’s tantrum angers an adult, the child’s ego may be damaged by what happens next. When the child brought up permissively becomes forty or fifty years old, he may still be acting out anger in the kindergarten way, as electricity passes along the old grooves in the brain. The person is not strengthened, but in fact is humiliated, by these explosions of anger.

  Booth: So the child has to experience freedom of expression, but also experience a strengthening of the ego.

  Bly: Well, it’s as if there were some kind of game being played here between the ego and the shadow. When permissive educators come in and tell children to express their anger, it’s like giving the shadow side fifteen balls and the structure side none. Permissiveness is a misunderstanding of the seriousness of that game. George Leonard, in his book called The End of Sex, describes himself as having been enthusiastic about the complete expression of sexuality during the sixties. He now feels that such expression results eventually in some humiliation of the ego, and the psyche as a result loses some of its interest in sexuality; it loses some of its eros.

  The culture has a longing for primitive modes of expression as an antidote to repression. Nazi youth groups emphasized a kind of back-to-nature primitivism. Obviously Nazism involved a state insanity, and not all back-to-nature movements involve insanity; most embody health. And yet we can understand through Kurtz’s experience in Heart of Darkness that the Western longing for the primitive is dangerous to the psyche. The ego becomes unable to hold its own among the primitive impulses and dissolves in mass movements, vanishes like sugar in water.

  Booth: I notice that most people who talk about a “personal shadow” or a “national shadow” have trouble keeping the term “shadow” neutral. “Shadow” and “dark side of the self” have negative connotations and associations with evil.

  Bly: This tendency to associate the dark side with evil came up very interestingly in some responses to the interview that Keith Thompson and I did in New Age a couple of years ago about the wild man. You remember that we discussed a scene in the Grimm brothers’ story “Iron John,” in which after men bucket out a pond they find a man entirely covered with hair lying at the bottom. As we experienced the responses from men and women who wrote or spoke to us, it became clear that we failed to make one important distinction—the distinction between the wild man and the savage man. We’re going to make it in the next interview. Our language includes in its spectrum the tame, obedient m
an, on one end, and the savage, represented by men who rape women on pool tables, on the other end. There is no place in the psyche for the wild man who is neither. A few men took the image of the wild man as permission for being savage, failing to make any distinction.

  When the Los Angeles Free Press reprinted that interview, a woman psychoanalyst, German by birth, wrote to the newspaper and said something like this: “There is something we have to make very clear, and that is that this person under the water is a killer!” But Iron John throughout the story behaves in a gentle, even courtly way. She took her grasp of what happened in Germany and imposed it upon this particular story. To say it another way, she had no room in her mind in which the concept of the wild man could live; the walls between the rooms had been broken down by the savage man, who occupied the wild man’s room as well as his own.

  We could distinguish between the wild man and the savage man by looking at several details: the wild man’s possession of spontaneity, the presence of the female side in him, and his embodiment of positive male sexuality. None of these implies violence toward or domination of others. I feel that the man under the water resembles a Zen priest more than a so-called primitive who in our view would only grunt. The image of the wild man describes a state of soul that allows shadow material to return slowly in such a way that it doesn’t damage the ego. Apparently what we’re hearing in “Iron John” is a narrative reminder of old initiation rituals in northern Europe. The older males would teach the younger males how to deal with shadow material in such a way that it doesn’t overwhelm the ego or the personality. They taught the encounter more as a kind of play than as a fight.

  When the shadow becomes absorbed the human being loses much of his darkness and becomes light and playful in a new way. The unabsorbed shadow can darken the air all around a human being. Pablo Casals is an example of the first type, and Cotton Mather of the second.

  Booth: I’m confused by your use of the word “light” in this context—saying that a person who absorbs the shadow becomes not dark, but light and playful. You have sometimes used the word “light” in a negative sense. In your 1971 shadow reading you said that Bertrand Russell had too much light in his personality. You wanted a political leader who was a crow, not a dove or a swallow.

  Bly: OK—then I’ll withdraw the term “light.” Marie Louise von Franz says somewhere that a human being who has done work with the shadow or absorbed the shadow gives a sense of being condensed. Other people willingly give him or her some authority in moral matters. If a teacher has worked with his own shadow, she says that students, no matter how young they are, sense it, and discipline in that room will not be difficult, because the students know that the teacher has his crow with him. Other teachers, she says, who have not worked with their shadow, can talk about discipline all day and never get it. I like the idea that the work a person does on his or her shadow results in a condensation, a thickening or a densening, of the psyche which is immediately apparent, and which results in a feeling of natural authority without the authority being demanded.

  Booth: Do you see that quality in any of our political leaders?

  Bly: Ronald Reagan has certainly not absorbed his shadow. There is nothing condensed about him at all. We know that he is still projecting his shadow on Russia, which he calls an evil empire. And he insists that desperate farmers in El Salvador are all puppets of Russia. He’s drawing on a fund of wise-father-longing which Americans project on him. Winston Churchill did absorb his shadow, and he exercised a natural authority. There was something extremely infantile in him—that’s where his shadow lay—but he seems to have faced that and eaten it. Do you see anyone in politics who has a good condensed feeling about him?

  Booth: My mind went back to Lincoln. I think he had a tremendous moral authority that went along with a lack of illusion about himself and his causes. He wasn’t sanctimonious.

  Bly: Another quality that comes in when a person absorbs his shadow is a certain kind of humor. Lincoln had it. Someone asked Lincoln if he would find him a good government job, and Lincoln said, “I have very little influence in this administration.” When a woman he met on a train told him he was one of the ugliest men she’d seen in her entire life, he didn’t become offended. “What should I do about that?” he asked the woman. “Well,” she said, “you could stay home.” Lincoln told that story on himself—he liked her answer.

  Booth: You gave a reading in the late sixties that I remember, and you seemed exhilarated then by the evidence of shadow in America—in long hair, rock music, new interest in art, the emergence of good poetry such as Gary Snyder’s and Galway Kinnell’s. You said, “It’s a wonderful movement; we’re all returning to the shadow.” How does that movement look to you now?

  Bly: If we had done any work in truly absorbing the shadow, some shift, however small, would have occurred in the whole American psyche in the direction of an ability to admit our dark side. It’s clear that no such change has taken place.

  It is said that inside our body there is a vast gap—perhaps thousands of miles across—between the power chakra in the stomach and the heart chakra in the chest. I remember a scene once at Ojai. Some gentle Krishnamurti people asked Joseph Campbell, at one of his lectures, about the spiritual seed brought from India to California in the 1920s by Vivekananda and others. Didn’t he think that this seed was already working, and that a new stage in world culture had already begun? Joseph said, “I can’t assure you of that. As a matter of fact, it is my opinion that the popular culture never gets above the power chakra.” That’s a stark and fierce view. It coincides, by the way, with the theme of power over others that one always hears in the Nashville lyrics, and the obsession of popular movies with power—the James Bond movies—as distinguished from love or spirit. If Campbell is right, mass culture will never teach the absorption of the shadow. If a person is to absorb the shadow, he or she would have to move up to the heart area. Since popular culture did dominate the sixties, I was wrong to imagine that the culture as a whole could move out of the power chakra. Many of us were wrong about that.

  Another way to put it is that people under thirty-five cannot teach themselves or others to eat the shadow. The initiation rituals hinted at in “Iron John” imply and suppose old men who teach younger men how to eat the shadow. That teaching did not appear in the sixties, and it’s not appearing now. Old men like Reagan, in fact, are teaching younger males how to project their shadow, not how to eat it. Reagan teaches a kind of genial commercial paranoia, so I don’t think things look hopeful.

  Let’s go back again to this game that the ego plays with the unlived material. Baker Roshi, during a little talk one day, remarked that ordinarily in our culture we have only two ideas: either we express or we repress. Either one represses anger or one expresses it. For example, it could be said that Richard Straus is repressing certain negative emotions, whereas punk rock is expressing them. But expressing is not any more admirable then repressing. The Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul. Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by it. Either a man dominates women or he is dominated by them. Joseph Campbell describes the two opposites as two horns; and if we get hooked on either, we die. Baker Roshi remarked that in Zen the student tries to imagine a third possibility. It goes like this. In meditation, he said, one might allow the anger to come in, so that the whole body burns with anger. The anger is not repressed; your whole body is anger. One may want to feel that anger for three or four hours. During this time one is neither expressing it nor repressing it. Then, when the meditation ends, one has the choice to express the anger or not. The ego or personality can make the choice later, to express it or not. Moreover, expressing it might not involve the kind of scarifying scene in which you scream at someone and wear tracks in your brain. In fact, the anger might be expressed by some witticism on the phone that would take twenty seconds, but the listener wouldn’t forget it for five years. The personality would find an appropriat
e way to express anger which would support playfulness, give honor to the anger, and yet not contribute to the disintegration of its own organized psyche.

  Booth: As usual, what you are saying requires growth. You’re not talking about jumping back to childhood and pulling things out of the bag.

  Bly: A woman told me a touching story about jumping back. She was a California woman, and had been invited to a women’s conference in northern Minnesota, her first. On the opening night, she said, all of us were nervous, and we didn’t say much the first time around. The second time around we said more. The third time around each of us said a lot. By the fourth round, which came the next day, much hurt feeling and anger appeared—the dry-eyed were taking care of weeping women lying on the floor. In the fifth round even more came loose, and everyone was honest. It felt at the time like a tremendous victory. But, she said, a few days later I felt drained and defeated, and nothing had really changed.