The eight figures

Jung never produced a catalogue of shadows. He thought of the shadow as singular and personal, as varied as the people who cast it. The eight figures here are a working taxonomy, not a doctrine. They were drawn up by asking one question of the shadow-work literature14 and of a great many ordinary conversations: what do people most often refuse to own? The answers cluster. Anger. Ambition. Need. Envy. The wish to be seen. Appetite. Incompetence. Self-interest.

Each cluster is given a name and a face, because that is how Jung himself worked with unconscious material: as figures one can address, rather than forces one can only suffer. Active imagination, his term for the method, is essentially a conversation with such a figure. Personifying the shadow makes it possible to speak with it instead of being it. ‘The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness.’15

A word of caution. These are not types of people. Everyone has all eight, in different volumes, and the volumes change with the seasons of a life. Each entry names the persona it hides behind, since a shadow is always the reverse of a face, and each records where the figure is most often met: at work, in love, in bed, and among others. The scenes are composites. If one of them reads as uncomfortably specific, that is worth noticing.