Half Jester, Half King mask.
Every few years we're blessed with another great artistic example of what happens to those who deny or bury their shadow. This year, it was The Black Swan.
Nina was a good girl. A good girl in a grindingly difficult profession where harsh judgment was the norm. A good girl trying to placate a fragile, frustrated, controlling mother. A good girl trained since early childhood to ignore the complaints and demands of her own body, the needs of her own soul.
Perhaps not since Robert Louis Stevenson woke up from a dream and began writing down The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have we been presented with such a splendid and graphic vision of what happens next -- internally -- to such good girls or boys.
They die.
Maybe not right away, in fine dramatic fashion, like Jekyll or Nina. In fact, maybe you won't even notice their deaths, since most people you know will be doing the same thing: that slow, mute, miserable shrinkage that occurs every day while we dutifully trim our dynamic, multi-faceted pegs to fit into the small round holes of Corporate America. But it will still be death.
Like Dylan said, He who is not busy being born is busy dying.
There's a lot of juice in the shadow. A great deal of creativity.
But ignored, split off, or denied access to consciousness, the shadow turns deadly to its own ego.
As Marie-Louise von Franz (friend and student of Carl Jung's, acclaimed analyst and author in her own right) once put it,
The shadow is not necessarily always an opponent. In fact, it is exactly like any human being with whom one has to get along. Sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love -- whatever the situation requires.
The shadow becomes hostile only when it is ignored or misunderstood.
