Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

26 Shadow Boxing
counseled to go into their fear or depression rather than try to escape
it. “Going into” a mood means confronting it. Don’t identify
with it; rather, give it a name and dialogue with it. The buried
treasure in our moods can only be unearthed by conscious effort.
Personally, in dialoguing with any particular shadow inclination
of my own, I find it helpful, in deciding whether or not to act it out,
to have at least these questions in mind :
1) Is it legal?
2) Could it endanger my life?
3) How might it affect my loved ones?
4) Could I live with the consequences?
A psychological crisis activates both sides of the shadow: those
qualities and activities we are not proud of, and possibilities we
never knew or have forgotten were there. Associated with the former—according
to consciously-held moral values—is a sense of
shame and distaste. The latter may have morally neutral connotations,
but they are often more frightening because if we follow up
on our latent possibilities there is no telling what might happen.
In practice, ego and shadow can either collaborate or tear each
other apart. This is a powerful and widespread archetypal motif. It
is found in the Biblical stories of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael,
Jacob and Esau; in Egyptian mythology there is Horus and Set; in
Christianity, Yahweh and Satan, Christ and Judas. In Freudian terminology
it is known as sibling rivalry. In Jungian psychology it is
called the hostile brothers motif.
One of the world’s oldest surviving myths, the Gilgamesh Epic,
exemplifies this motif. It illustrates not only the initial conflict between
an inflated ego and an instinctual shadow—a conflict we
must all come to grips with in order to have a balanced personality—but
also their cooperative triumphs and what can happen when
one loses the other. The story of Gilgamesh was laboriously chiseled
in stone tablets some seven thousand years ago. Briefly, it goes
like this:
Gilgamesh was a young Sumerian ruler, half man and half god,