![]() Two World Wars and the current escalation of violence testify to the terrible truth of this collective phenomenon. Such projection of the shadow is engaged in not only by individuals, but also by groups, cults, religions, and entire countries, and commonly occurs during wars and other contentious conflicts in which the outsider, enemy, or adversary is made a scapegoat, dehumanized, and demonized. The pervasive Freudian defense mechanism known as projection is how most people deny their shadow, unconsciously casting it onto others so as to avoid confronting it in themselves. The shadow is a primordial part of our human inheritance, which, try as we might, can never be eluded. "The shadow," wrote Jung (1963), is "that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious" (cited in Diamond, p. ![]() For Jung, psychological designations, such as the shadow or the unconscious, were "coined for scientific purposes, and far better suited to dispassionate observation, which makes no metaphysical claims than are the transcendental concepts that are controversial and therefore tend to breed fanaticism" (cited in Diamond, p. But as a physician and psychiatrist, he intentionally employed the more mundane, banal, less esoteric or metaphysical, and therefore more rational, terminology of "the shadow" and "the unconscious" instead of the traditional, religious language of god, devil, daimon, or mana. As a parson’s son, Jung was steeped in the Protestant mythos, digested the rich symbolism of Catholicism, and studied the other great religious and philosophical systems. Especially concerned with those pathological mental states historically known as "demonic possession," Jung’s psychological construct of the shadow corresponds to yet differs fundamentally from the idea of the Devil or Satan in theology.
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