THE SHADOW
Online Jungian Seminar
Limited 15 places available
Saturday 27 AUG 2022, 12pm-5pm UK (GMT+1)
A Certificate and CPD Points will be awarded
Online via Zoom - The Video Recording of the seminar will also be included
A one-day Jungian Seminar - led by Ireland’s leading Jungian Psychologist Jasbinder Garnermann
Workshop Summary:
On a collective scale, the shadow has wrecked civilizations, caused wars and holocausts, inquisitions and the butchery of our fellow-creatures and of nature.
The first step in redeeming the shadow is to own up to it. Instead of laying the blame elsewhere we need to gaze into our own abyss. This abyss contains our lost personal history – of humiliations, rage, frustrations, despair and shame, the bits that we buried at different stages of our lives in order to become more bearable to ourselves and others. The very act of undertaking this painful process leads to the birth of compassion, both for our own mistakes and others’, as it dawns on us that we are all in this together.
We also then discover something wonderful, that at the core of the shadow lies a whole world – a forgotten world of pristine sensations, unsullied emotions and healthy instincts - which provides us with a flow of pure, primal, unhindered libido that we can pour into our present lives, revitalizing all the areas that were previously only sputtering along.
Programme for the day:
The Origin of The Shadow:
The Shadow originates in our primal fears and our hard-wired responses to them. Rage, greed, fear, and panic were crucial to our survival for millennia, when we needed this knee-jerk reflexes to flee a predator or bring down prey. However, as we evolved into social mammals our survival instincts programmed us to separate good from bad, strange from familiar, and friend from foe. Religion gave us the moral framework to develop this into an ethical complex, and our upbringing further activated this programme through parental values and moral standards.
The Super-Ego:
Freud termed this moral complex the Super-Ego, the inner watchdog which monitors our behaviour so that we can live in conformity with our culture. However, this also means that we reject certain aspects of our nature in order to guard against abandonment and rejection and Jung termed these repressed and denied aspects The Shadow.
The Body as Shadow:
Our relationship with our bodies is very much shadow territory.
'But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near' - Andrew Marvell.
Our bodies confront us with our mortality, decay, disease, old age, and infirmity. We want to sculpt, mold, and preserve our bodies in desperate denial of this reality.
Layers of The Shadow:
As we begin to work with The Shadow we realize that it extends far beyond our personal history into the dim and distant past of our evolutionary history. These Shadow layers are - 1: Biological 2: Personal 3: Parental and familial 4: Ancestral 5: Cultural / Collective 6: Archetypal.
Discovering our Shadow:
Even though The Shadow is by definition unconscious, we can identify it through the following: Our projections onto people, animals, and situations. Our dreams. Our Inferior Function / weak spots. Our phobias, anxieties, and superstitions. Our relationship to reality - for example Money, Authority, Technology, Medicine, Strangers, Political Institutions, and Ideologies.
Shadow Dreams:
Sinister landscapes and settings. Negative, Threatening, or disreputable figures from past and present. Wild animals, Decrepit buildings, Liminality and border territories. Conflicts, Riots, and War. Historical, Archetypal, and Mythological motifs.
The Gold in The Shadow:
The Shadow also contains positive aspects of the Real Self that have not found validation but are necessary for self-actualization such as the sexual and aggressive instincts. The boisterous child, the rebellious teenager, that we left behind can retain the confidence and optimism that we may need for a crucial developmental step in our present-day lives.
Healing The Shadow:
Withdrawal of projections. Listening to the Self of the past and of the future. Giving our instincts a place in our lives. Budgeting of libido. Sorting out complexes. A healthy relationship to reality. Accepting our limitations. Gaining perspective. A loving connection with the more-than-human world. Most importantly of all, frivolity and humour.
‘At this very moment in the history of mankind, evolution has put on the spot. If we are not to annihilate ourselves and most other species on the face of the earth, then ontogeny must triumph over phylogeny. There is an urgent biological imperative to make the Shadow conscious. The moral burden of this immense task is greater than any previous generation could have even conceived: the destiny of the planet and our entire solar system (since we now know that we are the only sentient beings in it) is in our hands. Alone among the great psychologists of our epoch, Jung provided a conceptual model which might help to make this ontological triumph possible. In the Shadow concept he synthesized the work of Adler and Freud, and in his demonstration of the actualizing propensities of the Self he transcended them. Only by coming consciously to terms with our nature - and in particular with the nature of the Shadow - can we hope to avert total catastrophe.’ - Archetype: A Natural History of the Self by Anthony Stevens
Register your place now:
- Bookings and fees for Jung Centre Events are non-refundable.
Read Jasbinder's articles on The Shadow:
The Origin of The Shadow
Embracing The Shadow (Published in Network Magazine)
If you’re unable to attend an event that you have booked, we would be very pleased to offer you credit towards any other event of your choice in the future.