“The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.”

What does it mean?

The mainstream reading is that the shadow is an ethical task, not a nickname for one's quirks. Becoming conscious of it takes moral effort because the ego would rather not see what it has pushed aside. A competing reading treats the shadow as a creative fuel one should simply express, which drops the word moral and the effort. The sentence opens the discussion of the shadow in Aion, Collected Works volume 9 part ii, paragraph 14. Self-knowledge, in the next sentences of that paragraph, begins with recognising those dark aspects as real. He is not offering a personality type. He is naming a resistance.

Did Carl Jung really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Hull's English of paragraph 14. Jung wrote in German. The paragraph is the standard citation for the shadow as a moral problem, not a mood of darkness.

Where it comes from

Collected Works, volume 9 part ii, Aion, paragraph 14, R. F. C. Hull's translation

Approximate date: 1951; this English in the Collected Works.

How to use it

When a colleague in a Leeds office irritates you in a way that feels perfectly obvious, ask which part of the reaction you would rather not own. Jung's sentence does not say the colleague is innocent. It says the certainty is not yet knowledge of yourself.

A mindset reading

Effort here is moral, not a technique for feeling authentic. If the exercise only produces a flattering 'dark side', the paragraph has not been met.

Understand the philosophy

Paragraph 14 is the place to start, in Hull's English. The key term is the shadow, the inferior and rejected side of the personality. The next card, from the same paragraph, is the link he draws to self-knowledge. Projection, a little further on at paragraph 16, is what happens when the effort is refused.

Related

• “To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “What is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise harmless natural impulse our enemy.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related bias. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, remember, and accept what supports a view you already like, and to skim past what would hurt it. It is not a claim that every belief is stubborn. It is a pattern in how attention is spent.

Practise the nine skills