The “shadow” refers to aspects of our self that have become disowned, broken off, our pushed into the unconscious. One of the most important goals of healthy integral living is to recognize and reclaim these broken pieces of ourselves, and to reintegrate them back into our total self-system so that we can become less reactive, more responsive, and more fulfilled. In other words, we do shadow work so that we can become whole again, to become more of ourselves, to re-own and reintegrate all those splintered pieces of ourselves that we may have unconsciously pushed away over the course of our lives.
Watch as Ken offers a stunning overview of the psychological shadow, emerging first in the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and then further unpacked by human potential pioneers like Stan Grof and Frtiz Perls. Ken describes several different kinds of shadow — projection, introjection, and retroflection — and how each of these represents a particular breakdown in the subject/object relationship.
We also get into the difficult issue of “collective shadow”, which has become a prominent feature of 21st century politics. We are seeing a massive wave of people who sincerely believe that they are chasing down the collective shadow — from #BlackLivesMatter protesters to anti-maskers to the multiple enclaves of conspiracy theories that been circulating in recent years, so much of the conflict we see in our culture is the result of standing in each other’s shadows. Everyone has a unique perception of what the collective shadow actually is — whether it’s systemic racism, media manipulation, or top-down statist oppression — and when we feel like we are trying to confront that collective shadow, it gives us a sense of righteous purpose which, if we’re not careful, can become its own source of fresh shadow material for us to work with, because in the end it is very difficult to tell where your personal shadow ends and the collective shadow begins. Which means that when we think we are confronting a “collective shadow”, we are oftentimes just projecting our own shadow onto the world around us — our own fear, our own bias, our own powerlessness, our own need for certainty.
And yet, collective shadows are real, because shadow can in fact appear in very different ways in all four quadrants. Ken shines some much-needed light on all this, exploring the different kinds of shadow that can emerge in each quadrant — physiological and behavioral shadows in the UR, institutional shadows in the LR, cultural shadows in the LL, and of course psychological shadows in the UL — all of which allows us to discern and deal appropriately with these different kinds of shadow when we encounter them.
Finally, we have a brief conversation about the relationship between violence, shadow, and social transformation. Is some degree of violence necessary for meaningful social change? As John F. Kennedy said, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. Just how inevitable has violence become? Can we gauge the health of a society by the amount of violence required in order to enact meaningful change? What does “a stronger violence in saner hands” mean, and what role does that stronger, saner violence play while creating genuine worldcentric “anti-fascism” safeguards?
We hope you enjoy this latest episode of The Ken Show!
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| integrallife.com |
Ken and Corey offer a stunning overview of the psychological shadow. Ken describes several different kinds of shadow, how shadow can show up differently in all four quadrants, and the relationship between shadow, violence, and social transformation.
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