December 22, 2023

I used to think that C.G. Jung’s concept of the “shadow” was relatively simple.  The shadow is a figure who shows up in our dreams and gets projected on other people, but it is really a personification of everything about ourselves that we have repressed because we do not approve of it.  Okay, we all have antisocial impulses, and we have to learn to keep them to ourselves if we are to be civilized human beings in a civilized society.  This implies a degree of self-awareness, but you don’t need a degree in psychology or years of therapy to recognize in yourself the potential for universal human selfishness and try to rein it in.  

But events in our time are making clear that the commonsense attitude is insufficient.  The shadow is a more complex and difficult phenomenon than I had realized.  We have been experiencing recently something like an epidemic of antisocial behavior, much of which takes the form of tantrums, outbursts of temper when people are asked to observe certain social rules or when they do not get their way about something, usually about something minor, so that the pattern is of a great uproar over some perceived slight or quibble.  “Playing uproar” my first wife’s family used to call it.  A lot of this is the “monkey see, monkey do” pattern so easily observable in children, the childishness of the behavior being exactly the point.  People are enormously suggestible to a degree that they rarely realize, and much of the time when they think they are being spontaneously impulsive they are merely caught up in the mood of a larger group or the whole society and acting the way they have seen others acting.  Needless to say, people are often infected with the impulse to toxic behavior by the electronic media, which amplify the herd instinct both by their very nature and through being used as instruments of manipulation by cunning puppeteers. 

Small-time bratty behavior is being consciously or unconsciously modeled on that of some big-time players who, when faced with consequences for their destructive behavior, scream in red-faced outrage like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum in the aisle of a store because he has been told he is not allowed to have something or do something.  George Santos, when expelled from the Senate for ethics violations and pathological lying, loudly vows that he’ll be revenged on the whole pack of ‘em, like Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  Rudy Giuliani, when ordered to pay $148 million for ruining the lives of election workers with what he himself admitted were lies, doubles down on the lies and says defiantly, “I don’t regret a damned thing.”  Elon Musk tells advertisers to go fuck themselves when they depart from Twitter/X rather than have their brand be tainted by association with the toxic characters that Musk has allowed to creep onboard.  And of course these big-time posturing posers are in turn modeling their behavior on that of the Baby-in-Chief, Donald Trump, whose rants are getting more unhinged by the day.   

Liberals, progressive, and moderates are faced with the dilemma of how to react to this mass phenomenon.  Ever since 2016, they have been urged to curb their reflexive impulse towards self-righteous judgment.  Trump supporters, we are told, are people who have been left behind by the economic changes of our time, and by the Democratic party that should have supported them but instead cares only for upscale educated professionals and the wishes of billionaire donors.  We should treat MAGA people with respect and try to engage them in genuine dialogue.  But some of us have slowly been disillusioned by this scenario.  The present situation is not a replay of the 1930’s.  Those who are complaining and misbehaving are not for the most part out of work and impoverished: that is true only of a minority.  Although that minority deserves sympathy and assistance, most Republicans and Trump supporters are not in dire straits financially.  After all, what the hardship of the Depression produced was a wave of left-leaning sympathy, resulting in the New Deal.  No, the lemming march rightward that we are witnessing is something different, complex in the sense that it is a twofold phenomenon. 

On the one hand are the MAGA true believers, the openly avowed extremists.  These are people who have been taken over, possessed by the collective shadow.  Some critics of Jung feel that there is no need to mythologize, to confuse the issue with esoteric mumbo jumbo woo-woo terms like “the shadow,” but the truth is that we are dealing with a mythological phenomenon, with imagery and behavior that are rooted in the deep pre-rational level of the psyche.  Ordinary rationalist psychology cannot account  for the bizarre and often shocking extremism on display everywhere.  When Trump says that Mark Milley, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed because he would not summon the military to support Trump’s attempt at a takeover, MAGA supporters cheer, just as they used to chant “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton in a nation that supposedly believes in the rule of law.  A psychology based on the assumption that people are basically rational is helpless in the face of the collective irrationalism of the mob, just as Enlightenment sages had no idea what to make of the head-chopping frenzy into which the French Revolution devolved during the Reign of Terror. 

In Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, one of the more insightful thinkers of the original Jungian community, Marie-Louise von Franz, interprets the symbol of a wolf in a fairy tale in a way that, taken out of context, would read as a devastatingly exact diagnosis of so many extremists and their followers at the present moment:

In man, the wolf represents that strange indiscriminate desire to eat up everybody and everything, to have everything, which is visible in many neuroses where the main problem is that the person remains infantile because of an unhappy childhood.  Such persons develop a hungry wolf within themselves.  Whatever they see they say,  “Me too!” If one is kind to them, they demand more and more.  Jung says it is a drivenness which cannot be identified clearly with power or sex.  It is even more primitive; it is the desire to have and get everything.  Give such people an hour a week and they will want two; if you give them two, they want three. They want to see you in their spare time, and if you gave that, they would want to marry you, and if you married them, they would want to eat you, etc.  They are completely driven.  It is not really that they want it; it wants it.  Their “it” is never satisfied, so the wolf also creates in such people a constant resentful dissatisfaction.  It stands as a symbol of bitter, cold, constant resentment because of what it never had.  It wants really to eat the whole world.  (256)

It wants to eat the world: that is a powerfully evocative way of putting it.  “It” wants power, ever more power, admiring autocrats as strong men who take what they want, and who keep on taking. It is sexually insatiable and predatory, from the rapist ex-president to the Christian nationalists who keep getting exposed, shall we say, as sexual abusers and weirdos. Among the 1% it wants ever more wealth, even though it doesn’t know what to do with it; it motivates the startling number of grifters and con artists that we see everywhere, including the highest levels of government, people for whom the distinction between the government and crony capitalism has disappeared; among those with ordinary income it is the peevishness of those who as a group are spending and consuming enthusiastically even as they complain that they cannot afford groceries, and who are furious at the “elite” professors who demonstrate with  figures the hypocrisy of at least a portion of their complaining.   Yet compulsive desire for power, sex, and wealth are not the cause but the effect of a deeper, less rational desire. 

The other side of right-wingers’ insatiable hunger is hatred: hatred of any group that seems to get in the way of that hunger by garnering more privileges than they do.  This includes people of color; poor people, who are seen as parasites and criminals; women, especially feminist women; and people of diverse gender and sexual identity.  Some of the hatred arises from a paranoid fear of “difference,” but there is also an angry envy.  These groups have been recognized as “victims” in our society, and therefore special attention is given to them, and sometimes special help.  “But we matter too!” say the aggrieved, and the assistance given to persecuted and underprivileged groups is at the expense of those who feel they have worked so hard and deserve rewards that are going to disreputable others.  I have been enjoying Amanda Marcotte’s book Troll Nation (2018) lately.  Marcotte is one of my favorite political writers, and I always enjoy her hard-hitting articles in Salon.com, partly because, unlike so many on the left, she does not write gloomy jeremiads from a position of Saturnian detachment.  She is angry as hell, but always lifts my spirits with her exuberant wit.  I was, however, a bit uneasy ahead of time about her thesis, which is that absolutely everything that passes for a political position on the far right can be explained by the far right’s addiction to “owning the libs.”  Usually, theories that reduce complexities to a single cause are suspect.  Yet I have to admit that she makes an impressive case, with detailed illustrations: in area after area, including women, the environment, health care, guns, and race, those on the right are driven by a compulsive need to troll, taking up any position likely to get a rise out of liberals.  Marcotte argues that this trolling resentment is a more controlling motivation than “traditional values,” Christian or otherwise, than the influence of big business and billionaire donors, even than their own interests.   Those things play their role, but in the end the tribalism of the right originates in a sense that “We are united by our hatred of liberals and liberalism.”  And why do we hate liberals?  Liberals are those who want to give away what is ours, only ours. 

As noted previously, some people claim it is “uncharitable” and arrogant simply to attack the right.  We should try to see things from their point of view by engaging in respectful dialogue with them.   In journalism, this becomes “both sides-ism,” the need to “balance” any negative observation about conservatives with something critical of liberals.  But we are talking here about people like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Rudy Giuiani, Elon Musk, George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sarah Palin, Lauren Boebert, J.D. Vance, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, not to mention Jared Kushner and the three Trump siblings, not to mention you-know-who himself.  In addition, there are the hardcore MAGA proletariat.  Good luck trying to have a dialogue with these poor, misunderstood souls. 

But what about the less crazed, less crooked fellow travelers along the rightward path?  What about the nice people, quite possibly including our family members, friends, and work colleagues, who really are genuinely nice, shirt-off-their-back people, who nevertheless listen to Fox News and whose votes, with a little help from gerrymandering, have given the above crowd safe red districts so that they are free to be totally obstructionist, with no need to compromise?  In another newsletter, I imagined a hypothetical Aunt Joanie.  Her support enables so much evil to transpire—and yet, well, she’s so nice.  What of Aunt Joanie?  The answer is that, while her niceness is genuine, everyone, even Aunt Joanie, has a Jungian shadow.  The old religious talk of “original sin” and “innate depravity” understood that no human being is without a streak of corruption, a predisposition to evil.  In fact, the nicer the surface personality, the more we should be on our guard, wary of a hidden malice.  Because we all harbor such malice, what Coleridge, speaking of Shakespeare’s Iago, called “motiveless malignity,” and it is neither cynicism nor religious obscurantism to say so.  By all means Aunt Joanie is worth trying to engage in “dialogue,” and worth being given some benefit of the doubt based on possible ignorance and naiveté.  But there is such a thing as willful ignorance, and naiveté can be a form of denialism, of saving people from having to confront their own hidden nastiness.  Occasionally Aunt Joanie will give herself away with a slip of the tongue, something not “nice” about “those people” or whatever.  I remember an evening with my former wife’s extended family, people who were warm and genuinely likeable, but who got into a conversation around the dinner table that turned into a righteous defense—in Cleveland!—of the poor police officers whose efforts to protect us from all that scum out there are hampered by those who defend the scum.  They didn’t use the word “scum,” but they meant it. 

The more repressed the shadow, the more it will be a matter not just of occasional minor slippage. Jung says: “One is rather inclined to be lenient with sinners who are unconscious of their sins.  But nature is not at all lenient with unconscious sinners.  She punishes them just as severely as if they had committed a conscious offense” (“Psychology and Religion,” 76).  Actually, the punishment is often visited on others, on those who are in psychic range of it. Radioactivity is undetectable, but those who are exposed to it come down with radiation sickness anyway:  “it is highly moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particularly hellish moods which make them insupportable to their relatives” (76).  Elsewhere, Jung tells an amusing story at his own expense:

I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage—in fact, one might easily call him a saint.  I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him.  My feeling of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself.  Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me….Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since.  But this I did learn: that any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis.  (“The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” 194). 

Elsewhere, Jung speaks of how what is repressed into the parental shadow may also be visited upon the children, mentioning another paragon whose son committed suicide and whose daughter became a prostitute, the children’s lives blighted by shouldering the burden of the father’s dark side.  Von Franz traces the origin of the hungry wolf personality that wants to eat the world to the effect of an unhappy childhood.  It is appalling how many tens of millions of followers Trump has, and, if Von Franz is correct, even more appalling to consider how many unhappy childhoods that implies.  But if we do, at that moment the illusion of “normality” is shattered, and we are confronted with the society we actually live in.  There is a strongly reinforced consensus that normality is, well, the norm.  Dysfunctional families exist, surely, but they are exceptions.  Most of them, we think, are on the bad side of town, where it’s only to be expected that people will be bent out of shape by a bad environment.  Children raised in respectable families who have “gone bad” are regarded as weird, inexplicable anomalies.  In fact, the hidden neurosis of supposedly “good” families is a major theme of modern fiction.  Growing up, I became aware that most of the families of my friends and schoolmates were unhappy, some more than others.  I came to regard it as lucky that my own family’s dysfunctionality was too spectacular to be hidden.  The spectacles were literal: my dad’s alcoholic antics managed to dominate just about every family gathering, and my parents’ screaming matches could be heard down the block, or so I felt.  But that is better than living in a family where the problems are kept secret, and heaven help the offspring who opens the family closet and exposes the skeletons.  If you doubt that, just ask Harry and Meghan. 

Where did Trump come from?  His father, Fred Trump, was by all accounts an emotionally abusive monster, and Trump has turned his sons into Mini-Me’s and his daughter into a barely disguised incestuous fantasy.  In short, the MAGA phenomenon is far more than an effect of economic inequality, although economic inequality has exacerbated it.  Economic corrections, although necessary, are not going to be sufficient.  The United States is going to have to confront its collective shadow, although not alone, as the entire world is erupting with similar symptoms.  Some sort of worldwide psychological crisis is occurring, which is terrifying, and yet at the same time could be regarded as strangely hopeful.  If the fever can be broken, perhaps the human race could find itself on the verge of a possible sanity for the first time in history.

That is one way of stating the theme of William Blake’s epic poem Jerusalem, which I have just reread.  Jerusalem has a prelude, a shorter poem called Milton, that explains the personal crisis out of which both poems emerged.  Blake, who lived in poverty and whose wife was ill, had an aristocratic patron named William Hayley who, with the best intentions—of course—persistently pressured Blake to abandon his epic in favor of more money-making ventures of which Hayley approved.  To make the situation even more irksome, Hayley was himself a third-rate poet, author of The Triumphs of Temper.  In Northrop Frye’s witty summary:

Finally, even Hayley lost his usually triumphant temper, and, no doubt, said the things that an ordinary man does say when exasperated by a great man who is his social inferior.  This broke down the deadlock at once. Even if there were mutual apologies and an agreement to forget everything afterwards, Blake had seen, for a few moments, something looking at him out of Hayley’s eyes that was not anxiety for his welfare.  It was hatred; a half-spiteful, half-horrified mixture of resentment and fear; the response of society to the prophet.  After that, Blake knew that neither friendship nor gratitude could ever again tempt him to abandon his genius.  (329)

The shock of being on the receiving end of Hayley’s unacknowledged shadow and its hatred led Blake to mythologize the situation in Milton, splitting his own psyche into two figures embodying attitudes that are Contraries needing to be balanced, Palamabron and Rintrah.  Palamabron is reasonable and willing to compromise with social demands for practicality and gracious manners.  Rintrah, however, is the fierce spirit of the Old Testament prophets, who told kings what they did not want to hear.  Rintrah is the spirit of the unrepressed shadow. 

I have always admired Jung’s own attempt to live honestly, not attempting to hide his shadow.  He kept a bust of the bitingly satirical iconoclast Voltaire in the waiting room of his office, saying that its purpose was to remind his patients that their analyst had a shadow.  The documentary Matter of Heart (1986) is refreshingly candid in showing not just Jung but the whole original Jungian circle without their respectable personas—with their eccentricities, their jealousies and squabbles, their transferences, their relationship problems, their human foibles on full display.  I would have felt very comfortable in that environment because there was no need to fear hidden agendas: the craziness is all out in the open, and therefore more or less harmless.  I feel the same way about the characters in Robertson Davies’ novel The Rebel Angels, set in a fictional version of the University of Toronto where I was a graduate student, and in fact a student of Davies.  The feeling is: These people are half crazy, but it’s my kind of crazy.  The Jung who emerges from Matter of Heart is ornery—not mean, just ornery, sometimes kind and giving, sometimes, when the mood was on him, a bit of a pain in the ass.  The analyst C.A. Meier, a huge man with a huge laugh, tells with great gusto, smoking his pipe, of a time when he and Jung were out rowing on the lake at Bollingen, and Jung in a perverse mood relentlessly criticized Meier’s rowing.  Meier finally said, “Fine, do it yourself,” and refused to row any further, so that Jung had to row them back himself.  “You see, I was actually a better rower than he was,” he says, and roars with laughter. 

Okay, so Jung was sometimes infuriating, far from perfect, though non-malicious by most accounts.  Tom Batiuk has captured the type in his aptly named school bus driver Crankshaft in the comic strip of that name.  I’d rather be around Jung’s volatility than around the one of the holier-than-thou types who will not even raise his voice let alone lose his temper, who argues in a maddeningly reasonable tone even as he is gaslighting you.   Men will complain that nice guys finish last, but as a matter of fact they sometimes do because there really is such a thing as being too nice, and women do not find it attractive.  Again a comic strip captures the personality type: for years in Greg and Karen Evans’ Luann comic strip, the nice guy Gunther adores the teenaged Luann, but she ignores him because he is wimpy and boring.  At times it’s almost painful to read, but Luann’s instincts are correct.  Gunther is cut off from his deeper vital energies, perhaps psychologically under the thumb of a domineering mother.  Last week I mentioned Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel Anansi Boys (2006) about the two sons of the Trickster Anansi, one a god and one human.  The human one, Charlie, is another repressed wimp.  Bullied as a kid, he was given the nickname Fat Charlie, and the name sticks even though he is no longer fat, because he is still at heart the passively bullied kid he always was, working for an abusive employer.  His girlfriend  won’t sleep with him, saying she is saving herself for marriage.  It turns out that what she is saving herself for is Charlie’s Trickster brother Spider, with whom she jumps right into bed.  He is amoral, but he is exciting.  In real life, this can lead women to hook up with abusers, but that’s another story.  

In real life and in his poetry, Yeats lived out the pattern.  As a young man, he was a willowy, melancholic poet of the Celtic Twilight, writing mournfully of the loss of Fairy Land and the “autumn of the body.”  Predictably, perhaps, he fell in love with a woman who was his opposite, Maud Gonne, a fiery activist whom he later compared to Helen in his famous poem “No Second Troy”:  “Why, what could she have done, being what she is? / Was there another Troy for her to burn?”  Maud Gonne dumped him for a soldier named McBride.  Later, in “The Cold Heaven,” Yeats is suddenly beset with “memories, that should be out of season / With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago; / And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason.”  That last line has always seemed to me unutterably sad.  

Something similar is true of women.  The “good girl” is not exciting to men: if they want her, it is more often as a mother and housekeeper.  That does not mean they are just looking for a slut.  What they want, the good ones anyway, is electricity.  In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare contrasts two heroines, the docile, father-obedient Hero, whose reward is to be married to an ostensibly reformed jerk, with Beatrice, a quick-witted, quick-tongued live wire who has to marry Benedick because no other man could keep up with her.  Shakespearean comedy features a whole line of heroines more intelligent and resourceful than any of the men, and not just the comedies.  In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra has a conversation with her women about how to keep your man’s interest.  One of the women recommends trying to obey and please him in everything.  Cleopatra replies:  “The way to lose him.”  If ever literary characters embodied liberated shadow energy, energy which, like the fertile Nile, “o’erflows the measure,” it is Antony and Cleopatra.  Their enemy Octavian, who will become Augustus Caesar, has a coldly chaste and obedient sister in good Roman style.  Antony is betrothed to her for political reasons and immediately goes back to Cleopatra again.  Cleopatra is not “good”:  she makes scenes and is drama queen par excellence.  But she does things like hop down the street on one foot as long as she can until she is red-faced and out of breath, just out of impulsive fun.  Antony and Cleopatra  get drunk, and she dresses him in her clothes while she wears his sword.  Octavian is shocked and repelled.  He will never understand what Antony sees in such a woman.  That is because Octavian represents Roman control and discipline.  Virgil’s Aeneas is the same sort.  He throws over the passionate Dido and later marries a woman for political reasons, and Virgil insists that sacrificing your own happiness, which means your own instinctual fulfillment, for the sake of the larger cause is what a hero does.  But there is a price.  Aeneas gives up all personal gratification and is what we would now call clinically depressed.  Antony and Cleopatra refuse to be bound by the strictures of such a hypertrophied superego. 

In David Copperfield, David loses his first wife Dora, because Dickens kills her off so that he can marry the woman Dickens thinks he ought to marry, Agnes.  Dora is immature, but playful and clearly very sexy.  Agnes is the Victorian “angel in the house,” a fact that Dickens heavy-handedly emphasizes by a final vision of Agnes pointing upward—no doubt towards higher things, in Dickens’ mind.  But waggish critics have suggested that maybe she is just gesturing toward the bedroom and David doesn’t get it.  Dickens himself went through the type of mid-life crisis that consists of a liberation of shadow energies—he left his wife and took up with an 18-year-old actress.  This of course went viral, and his friends had to convince him that it really wouldn’t do to title the new magazine he was starting Household Harmony.  It was named Household Words instead.  David Copperfield and Charles Dickens, who share the same initials and some of the same biographical details, are twin examples of the midlife crisis in which the male gives up being respectable and begins trying to make up for unlived life.  Goethe’s Faust does it, thrown into life by no less than the devil himself.  It is the plot of Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty (1999) in which Kevin Spacey’s character quits his career, works in a fast-food place, smokes dope in the garage, and gets fixated on a teenaged cheerleader whose life he is luckily, at the last minute, too good a guy to ruin. 

Yeats himself went through such a mid-life “conversion” in a remarkable way.  The timid introvert threw himself into the theatre, into politics, and he transformed his poetic voice, becoming in the process one of the great poets of the 20^th century.  The later voice is bold, and the poetic line cracks like a whip.  He did not handle the change perfectly:  there was occasional posturing, and a political flirtation with fascism.  But his poetry became charged with a new, liberated energy, his voice, like his mentor Blake’s, becoming that of the modern prophet, as in “The Second Coming,” whose lines everybody quotes about the present time in which “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”  Palamabron has allowed Rintrah equal time, and the result is a new energy arising from the integration of the shadow. 

The high voltage of Yeats’s later verse makes most of the poetry being published right now seem flat and insipid, chopped-up prose.  I’m sure this is my own shadow talking, but so much contemporary poetry is intelligent and sensitive, and yet boring.  The language has no vitality or originality, faithful to the conversational rhythms of ordinary life but at a cost.  In terms of content, there is rarely any dramatic tension because our age does not believe in dramatic tension.  The implied philosophy of the kind of poetry that appears in the magazines is that life is anticlimactic, a matter of diminished expectations, ironic skepticism, and resignation.  It is a poetry of low ambition, in both technique and subject matter, in a time when ambition is held to be discredited.  When Wordsworth and Coleridge invented the “conversation poem” at the turn of the 19^th century, it was a revolution, a liberation from the dead artifice of “poetic diction,” the latter a form of false order, a mode of genteel repression.  The conversational was still capable of such liberation in the 20^th century when Robert Lowell relaxed the contortions of his early quasi-Metaphysical style and simply talked, in the significantly titled Life Studies.  And any poem by Walt Whitman or Robert Frost shows that the conversational style does not have to be flat.  But in the mid-20^th century the style was taken up by poets for whom flatness of language and affect were a proof of authenticity, of lack of pretension, of disbelief in all that old, highflown stuff.  When the writing of poetry was institutionalized by MFA programs, such a bland style was institutionalized along with it, in part because it can be written by large numbers of people with no particular gift for language and nothing very exciting to say.  Thus, in such writing, the shadow and its unpredictable energies have been excluded, not by genteel conventionality but by being ironed flat.     

At this point, the discussion has come full circle, from those who have been possessed by the shadow to those who, we might say, have not been possessed by it enough.  The shadow is neither good nor evil, but it may lead to either—or both.  Goethe’s Faust makes a deal with his shadow, projected as Mephistopheles, who is, yes, a devil, but who is the catalyst, the forbidden but necessary energy that jump starts Faust’s dead life.  He leads Faust into doing some very bad things, making him guilty of the horrible death of an innocent girl.  When Faust reaches the end of his life at the age of 100, we say, well, at least he lived rather than merely existed.  Yes, but we could say the same of Henry Kissinger, who recently died at the same age and was a Faustian character if there ever was one.  In the court of conscience, the devil’s advocate may ask whether it had been better if both men had in fact not lived, and request to call the many victims of both men to the witness stand. 

Nor do we know ourselves whether, when we reach the final judgment, it will turn out that we have done more harm than good.  Repeatedly, on his way up the Mountain of Purgatory, Dante astonishes groups of residents by the fact that he casts a shadow:  “You’re still alive!” they exclaim.  As we travel along our way, the shadow that we cannot lose in this life travels with us as a dark but persistent promise.  We are still alive, the shadow’s chiaroscuro allowing us to exist three-dimensionally, as more than a mere outline.  At the last judgment, there will be no doubt of our guilt.  To live is to sin, to fall, again and again.  The question is whether we have lived in such a way that our sins may be forgiven, whether by the traditional God, or by Faust’s Eternal Feminine, which in his case includes his female victim, or by the mystery beyond all images.  If we are found worth forgiving, then perhaps, and only then, we may finally be able to forgive ourselves.   

References

Frye, Northrop.  Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.  Princeton, 1947.

Jung, C.G. “Psychology and Religion.” In Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2^nd Edition.  Translated by R.F.C. Hull.  Volume 11of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung.  Bollingen, 1958.  3-106. 

Jung. C.G. “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious.” In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2^nd Edition.  Translated by R.F.C. Hull.  Volume 7 of The Collected Works of C.G.Jung.  Bollingen, 1953.  123-244. 

Marcotte, Amanda.  Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-Fucking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself.  Hot Books, 2018. 

Von Franz, Marie-Louise.  Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Revised Edition.  Shambhala, 1995.