All people have positive and negative aspects in their personalities, but how to know more about it? In this article we will talk about the concept of the shadow archetype for Carl Jung. But first, let's understand who Carl Gustav Jung was, what analytical psychology is, and what archetype is, according to Jungian psychology.

Who was Carl Jung?

Carl Gustav Jung, or just Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology. He was connected to the human being, mythology, nature and also religions, and questioned them from a very young age. He entered this area of psychiatry and psychology after having experiences with some dreams, as he tells in more detail in "Dreams, memories and reflections", a bookwritten in 1961.

Before creating Jungian theory, he had done studies with word association and studied the unconscious together with Freud. Both talked to each other through letters and studied many clinical cases together. Freud has a significant importance in Jung's life, because it was through psychoanalysis that Jung began to seek to understand and study more about the unconscious.

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Carl traveled a lot during his life, to understand other cultures and to understand how human beings functioned in their individuality, but mainly how the collective could influence a person's life.

Thus, Jung wrote a total of 18 books during his lifetime, stayed in study for a long time, and spent the last days of his life in seclusion in his lake house, where he thought about spirituality and the human being.

What is Jungian psychology?

Jungian psychology, also known as analytical psychology, was created by Jung soon after some divergences of thought with Freud. Jung brings a deeper idea about the unconscious.

For Jung, the psyche is divided into three parts:

• Aware: The part that is possible to access, such as feelings, thoughts, memories and other functions;
• Personal unconscious: It is connected to all the unconscious material that the human being acquires during his life, such as repressed feelings, and is one layer above the collective unconscious, so it can be accessed more easily;
• Collective unconscious: It is the deepest layer of the psyche, very difficult to access because it consists of archetypes inherited from the family and society in which the person lives.

During therapy, the patient speaks more than the therapist. During therapy, drawings and artwork can also be made with play dough, sand, clay, and the dreams that the person brings to therapy, so that this unconscious content can be accessed.

Analytical psychology has as its main goal to make the human being reach the individuation process, which is linked to archetypes and their identifications, and to awakening to the best of himself, and when the human being improves himself, he also improves his relationship with others.

What are the archetypes of the unconscious?

We cannot talk about shadow without first explaining a little about what the archetypes of the unconscious are. Archetypes are within the personal and collective unconscious, the personal being the "easiest" to access. They are connected to the way we store our experiences. Within the unconscious, they manifest themselves in some play, drawing, and especially symbols in dreams. Yes, our dreams about flying green elephants make a lot of sense when we think about archetypes.

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In other words, archetypes are symbols that our unconscious creates. As an example, we can bring the archetype of persona, self, ego - and the main one of this article, the shadow archetype.

What is the shadow for psychology?

The shadow is an archetype that is in the personal unconscious, that is, it is acquired according to our life experiences. The shadow is connected to everything we see in the other; it is what is inside us and many times we don't realize it because it is unconscious.

From this assumption, it is possible to think that the shadow can be a "dark" side of the human being. But what little is known is that in the shadow archetype there are both positive and negative aspects.

Positive aspect of the shadow: When we have admiration for someone and we don't know why. When a person is very brave, we have a great admiration for that person; it could be your shadow showing you that you are the same way and you can't see it.

Negative aspect of the shadow: This aspect is more related to when something in someone bothers us, some very apparent defect. Don't we have this defect and can't see it transferring it to the other?

What you need to do to live well with all of this is, first of all, to accept your shadow, to live with your qualities and, finally, defects, and to understand what is yours and what is the other's.

Does everyone have a shadow?

Yes, everyone has a shadow, but we are often unaware of this because we repress our shadow in our unconscious, and it manifests itself through the transference we make with other people. But the shadow is a very important aspect to enhance the personality of the human being.

So we don't need to be afraid of our shadows, but we can invite them to have a conversation and understand them in a more comprehensive way. When we understand our shadows, we are able to look more properly within ourselves, gaining more self-knowledge and self-love.

How to find my shadow?

To find your shadow you have to pay more attention to details, to the way you see other people and yourself, finally asking yourself: what are the characteristics of that person that I have in me? And understanding them. It is important to understand that we are all individual human beings and that each person is unique.

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Therefore, it is also possible to do further reading on the subject. We recommend the book "Meeting the Shadow", written in 1994 by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams which brings a lot of information about the shadow archetype and how we can identify it within ourselves.

Finally, we don't need to be afraid of our shadows, we need to welcome them. Yes, it is harder to welcome the things we don't like about ourselves than the things we do like. But everyone has positive and negative aspects, just like the shadow.