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In his fascinating and idosyncratic book about psychotherapy, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him, Sheldon B. Kopp likens the journey of the client to Dante's journey through Hell. He says: “No patient in psychotherapy can recover his own beauty and innocence without first facing the ugliness and evil in himself…The ways in which we live, the experience of our own sinful souls, still is itself our only Hell.”
As clinicians, we sit each day with people who struggle to face their own private Hells, their forbidden desires, their secret shames. We sit with daughters who despise their mothers, and mothers who envy their daughters; fathers who abandon their sons, and sons who plot to murder their fathers. We meet liars, cheaters, rageaholics, drug addicts, and sexual misfits, many of whom look like the most upright citizens to the outside world.
This split between the official self and the disowned self, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde within us all, has been the subject of much discussion in various schools of psychology. Whether it's dubbed as the alter ego, the lower self, the double, or the shadow, it contains a Pandora's box of repressed feelings, thoughts, and behaviours that eventually surface during the course of therapy.
A recent book collects the best work from a wide range of sources on this topic, which together make up a veritable handbook for therapists and their clients. Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature (ed. by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah