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I Have Always Found the shadow the most difficult of psychological experiences (which is rather embarrassing since it is supposed to be the first and so presumably the easiest). The shadow is not difficult to understand conceptually. The idea is based on a model of opposites and Jung's notion of the onesidedness of conscious functioning. What is easy to understand theoretically is practically and experientially much more difficult. Part of the difficulty for me, I thought, had to do with my generation of the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties, in which conscious identifications were uncertain, since consciousness itself was uncertain. The generation Jung addressed was seemingly more solid, still a bit Victorian in its convictions. In that generation there seemed a clear distinction between what the ego embraced and the shadow undid. There was a light, and a darkness of the light. There really were Dr Jekylls and Mr Hydes.
In my generation we were ‘on the road’ with Kerouac, wailing with Elvis, Fats Domino, Little Richard; we also embraced the virtues of science (there was a space race and LSD was a chemical compound); we were idealistic (we marched for racial integration and burnt draft cards).
Now all of this confused emotionality (beatnik, scientific, idealistic) makes of the shadow a complicated entity. First, there is not a shadow but many (as there is not one conscious standpoint but many—all equally serious, depending upon the mood and the moment). Structures of awareness shift. What is relatively conscious at one moment is not so the next. As the source of light shifts, as position or situation changes (as a different light is cast upon things)—so the shadow wanders.
I felt better about this shifting character of my shadow when I came across a passage in Jung. In ‘On the nature of the psyche’, Jung notes that ‘sliding consciousness’, as he calls it, is ‘thoroughly characteristic of modern man’. It is not so unusual after all. Jung goes on to explain why he uses the word ‘sha