An important idea in twentieth century psychology is the shadow: the rejected aspects of ourselves.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. When
I was growing up in the fifties, this was one of my father's favorite
dinner-table outbursts.
And the Shadow does know. Often our shadows know what we refuse to know,
because we want to be good, to live well, to be right.
What gets us in trouble is delivered in the very human psychological
phenomenon of projection. In its struggle to suppress what has been
rejected, the psyche will project those aspects onto another.
The Shadow and the Other, indeed, make a convenient, common, and potentially
very dangerous partnership in human psychology.
This is not to say that the shadow is inherently evil; it is not. Not
unlike the ignored child who misbehaves for attention; the shadow denied is
vulnerable to evil in its own bid for consciousness.
Vito Corleone advised his son to keep his friends close, but his enemies
closer. In a sense, he was talking about estrangement from the shadow; when
we project our darkness out of ourselves, we lose the opportunity for
wholeness within and the ability to see clearly without.
We are experiencing the horror of projection; in the minds of many people
on this beautiful planet, we are the Other, the Shadow Other, evil. This is
very dangerous. We must proceed cautiously, warily, like a fox on thin ice,
and we must pin our shadows to our shirts.
In our great country we have built our national character on a moral code
and the rule of law, but we must also live with the tension of the paradox,
to allow opposites to exist within ourselves. The struggle we face is
nothing less than the conflict between good and evil, but if we claim all of
one for ourselves and project the other out of ourselves, we will deny their
humanity and risk losing our own. As we rally 'round the bright beacon of our
flag during these difficult times, let us also be informed by our darkness,
by the truth of our darkness.