Recognizing our Shadow: A method for Conflict Management.

"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people." -Carl Jung

For me, one of the most influential and important psychologists in history was Carl Gustav Jung.  Jung was the reason I decided to major in psychology, so his work has been a tremendous influence on my way of thinking about the human psyche.  As time has elapsed, I have come to embrace many other ways of thinking about psychology (Adlerian, Existential, and Humanistic approaches to name a few), but Jung continues to be a major influence on me and a source of scholarship that I will likely continue to explore for the rest of my life.

One of Jung's key contributions was his exploration of the archetypal shadow.  Jung described the shadow as a part of our unconscious mind that contains repressed weaknesses, instincts, and personal shortcomings.  This is a very, very basic definition that helps to frame this discussion for our purposes, but rest assured that the concept of the shadow, as explored by Jung, is tremendously complex and in-depth, which means my efforts to frame it here will be somewhat incomplete and will in no way do Jung's work justice.  

Jung explored this area of the human psyche because he believed that we were not going to be able to be "whole" persons until we recognized this aspect of ourselves.  We have a tendency to place "evil" and traits that we find undesirable on to other people and reject that these may be in us, as well.  The social psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo conducted research that went a long way in illustrating the lengths ordinary people will go to by either accepting external authority for their actions, or the effects that "roles" play in how we interact with others.  These social psychologists emphasized the external factors that influence our behavior.

Jung was interested in the internal factors (like personality) that can play a role in how we interact with others in the world.  For Jung, it was our own (unconscious) repression of the aspects of ourselves that left us vulnerable to projecting evil onto other people.  Jung wrote in the Introduction to Erich Neumann's book, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, "No-one stands beyond good and evil, otherwise he would be out of this world.  Life is a continual balancing of opposites, like every other energic process.  The abolition of opposites would be equivalent to death.  Nietzsche escaped the collision of opposites by going into the madhouse.  The yogi attains the state of nirvana (freedom from opposites) in the rigid lotus position of non-conscious, non-acting samadhi.  But the ordinary man stands between the opposites and knows that he can never abolish them.  There is no good without evil, and no evil without good" (pg. 16).  For anyone unfamiliar with the term, samadhi is a state in meditation said to be of one consciousness, or beyond any pair of opposites, such as good and evil.  No duality, just oneness with the universe.  The point Jung is driving at here is the importance of our ability to recognize that just as good exists inside us, so does evil, and until we can accept this fact, we are going to continue to try to place that evil exclusively in the outside world, leaving us vulnerable to our own projections and self-delusions.

What does this have to do with our studies in conflict resolution?  When attempting to move from a stage of differentiation to an integration stage, it would be helpful to realize that many of the aspects that we do not like about those who stand on the other side of an issue from us are aspects that we are likely to have within ourselves.  We tend to project the worst onto someone who stands in conflict with something that we want.  We demonize and dehumanize them because it makes us feel as if our position is stronger, more ethical, or justified.  But we would be well served to recognize how we may find ourselves standing in the position of another when trying to reconcile differences.  While a recognition about real differences is a key step in the integration process, we must be careful to separate differences of substance from differences in perception, which may or may not be real.  If there is anything that we learned from the works of people like Milgram and Zimbardo, it is that we may easily find ourselves standing in a place in which we could never have imagined possible.  We are only a few social variables away from being fascist aggressors who are willing to torture someone who stands opposed to what we believe is right.

What do you see?  Angels or Demons? 
Or...Angels and Demons?