Jung's Shadow Concept: The Hidden Light and Darkness within Ourselves

This insightful volume is designed as a series of invitations towards living attentiveness, examining how we all make the “other”, through “projection” (blaming and shaming the other outside ourselves), our enemy with whom we prefer not to dialogue.

All of us are faced daily with individual and collective manifestations of the Shadow – all that we fear, despise and makes us feel ashamed. Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow, emerging as it did from his personal confrontation with the realms of his unconscious self, is one of the most important contributions he made to the understanding of humanity and to depth psychology, that realm where the focus is on unconscious processes. The contributors to this book reframe his concept in the context of contemporary Jungian thinking, exploring how the Shadow develops in an individual’s infancy and adolescence, and its culmination, where collective manifestations of the Shadow are addressed. The book offers a voyage through a series of fundamental Shadow concepts and themes including couples relationships, disease, organizations, Evil, fundamentalism, ecology and boundary violation before ending with a chapter designed to help us integrate the Shadow and hold contra-positions with patience and a tilt towards mutual understanding, rather than being locked in polarities.

This fascinating new book will be of considerable interest to the general public, Jungian analysts, trainees, scholars and therapists both in training and practice with an interest in the inner world.