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SHADOWS BEAR RICH ATTRIBUTIONS of significance in many folk beliefs, expressions in everyday language and literary works. Shadows also accept duty as dream images. The relatively few psychoanalytic studies of shadow dreams have, we believe, not exhausted the dream shadow's worth as an object of psychoanalytic study.
We can anticipate potential meanings of the shadow in dreams by recalling that shadow bears various relations to our sense of our selves. It follows us faithfully, its movements correspond to our movements, and we can control some of its behaviors. Yet other characteristics of the shadow are determined by matters over which we have no control, such as the quality of lighting and the nature of the surface upon which the shadow is cast. We can feel the shadow to be completely apart from our sense of self as place (Schafer, 1968), yet we can also feel it to be part of our sense of self as place. There is yet another quality that constitutes a peculiar property of shadows: They are the products of separations. We detect shadows only on surfaces with a boundary at which light present meets light absent.
In the image of the creation of a shadow by separation, we have an apt introduction to a mental parallel and our thesis in this paper: Shadows appear as dream images at a time the dreamer is weathering a loss that is evoking a painful awareness of personal shortcomings.
The task of demonstrating a regular, symbolic association between some representation and certain other mental contents is not an easy one. As Freud observed, "As a rule the technique of interpreting according to the dreamer's free associations leaves us in the lurch when we come to the symbolic elements in the dream-content." Dream-symbols "… frequently have more than one or even several meanings, and, as with Chinese script, the correct interpretation