Jung on the shadow
20 passages, each with its source, and five sentences that circulate under his name but are not his.
Jung wrote about the shadow across forty years and a dozen volumes, and he is quoted more often than he is read. The passages below are the ones that carry the idea, given with their sources so they can be checked. Paragraph numbers refer to the Collected Works, which are numbered by paragraph rather than page so that any edition can be consulted. A short list at the end covers sentences that circulate under his name but cannot be found in his work.
On what the shadow is
The definitions, in his own words.
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938), CW 11, par. 1316
The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly, for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies.
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 5132
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism.
C. G. Jung, ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’ (1917), CW 7, par. 3522
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.
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 4415
On projection
Why other people are where we meet it first.
Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.
C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii, par. 178
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)9
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938), CW 11, par. 14011
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
C. G. Jung, Letter to Kendig B. Cully, 25 September 1937, Letters vol. 121
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
C. G. Jung, ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’ (1917), CW 7, par. 7810
On the moral problem
Why understanding the idea is the easy part.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii, par. 143
Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for headache.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938), CW 11, par. 1337
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
C. G. Jung, ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’ (1932), CW 11, par. 51920
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
C. G. Jung, ‘The Philosophical Tree’ (1945), CW 13, par. 33516
The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 4523
On wholeness and the gold
The shadow as the missing half rather than the bad half.
How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.
C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)1
There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), CW 12, par. 20817
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.
C. G. Jung, ‘Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology’ (1959), CW 10, par. 87213
The shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938), CW 11, par. 13419
The unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses.
C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii, par. 4234
That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ, all these are undoubtedly great virtues. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself, that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved, what then?
C. G. Jung, ‘Psychotherapists or the Clergy’ (1932), CW 11, par. 52018
Not Jung
Often attributed, never located.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Widely shared, never located in Jung’s published works or letters. It condenses a real theme of his, but the sentence appears to be a later paraphrase.
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
Not found in this form. It reads as a compression of the passage on the enemy who must be loved, quoted above, which says something subtler.
Whatever is rejected from the self appears in the world as an event.
No source has been found in Jung. It is closer to later popular psychology than to anything in the Collected Works.
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
Joseph Campbell, not Jung. It comes from A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Osbon (1991), and travels in a dozen rewordings with Jung’s name attached.
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
No source has been found in Jung’s works or letters. It surfaces on quotation sites from the 2000s onwards, already attributed, and nothing in the Collected Works matches it.