Jung and the Shadow: Why You Missed The Juggler
About This Reading
The shadow does not appear to busy people. This is its patience, and its cunning.
The shadow does not appear to busy people. This is its patience, and its cunning.
There is a figure on the Two of Pentacles who is doing fine. He is juggling two coins, two obligations, two versions of himself and he is good at it. Behind him, the sea is rough and the ships are tilting, but he is not looking at the sea. He is watching the coins. As long as he watches the coins, everything holds.
I know this figure. I have been this figure — the state of being perpetually, competently occupied. Moving between obligations with enough grace that no one, including myself, asks what is behind me.
In 1913, Carl Jung was the most successful psychiatrist in Switzerland who was quietly coming apart. He had just broken with Freud, and in the aftermath of that break, the figures came. Inner figures. A voice that called itself Elijah. A beautiful blind woman named Salome. Every morning, he went to the clinic and maintained the persona of the functioning, respectable physician. And every evening, he descended.
He did not call it shadow work. He called it the confrontation with the unconscious. But this is what it was: the deliberate, terrifying willingness to look at what was behind him. To stop watching the coins long enough to turn around and face the sea.
The shadow's first move is not attack. It is waiting. It lives in the unexamined periphery, in the roughness of the water you are carefully not watching.
Jung dropped a coin in 1913. And in the space that opened after the loss, the figures walked in. They had been there the whole time.
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