On
America’s Collective Shadow
April
16, 2022
I’m currently
working my through the book The Inner Work of Age, Shifting from Role to
Soul by Connie Zweig.[1]
The book has prompted me to do a lot of introspection, but that’s not what I
want to talk about here. Rather, I wish to reflect on a brief Insert into the
book’s text on page 177. It has the title “A National Life Review.” It’s
subject, or at least the most important thing that I got from it, has to do
with our country’s collective unconscious and its shadow. Those things are
concepts from Jungian psychology. I am not a psychologist and have no formal
training in Jungian psychology. I did however receive an introduction to
Jungian psychology over twenty-five years ago, and I saw a Jungian therapist
regularly for over twenty years until his retirement last summer. If the only
psychology you know is Freudian psychology, Jungian psychology can seem odd,
but because Jungian psychology is so important to the brief passage in Zweig’s
book that I want to reflect on here, and because I can’t assume that all
readers of this piece are at all familiar with that psychology, I’ll say a few
words about it before I get to that particular passage.
Carl Jung
(1875-1961) was a Swiss psychologist. Early in his career he was a colleague of
Sigmund Freud (1875-1939), but he came to disagree with Freud about some basic psychological
concepts. He continued his own studies and analysis. He eventually developed a
model of the human psyche quite different from Freud’s. Like Freud, Jung saw
the human psyche as containing both conscious and unconscious elements. He
differed from Freud in the way he understood the unconscious as much bigger and
more complex than Freud did. For Jung, the unconscious was where most of our psychic
activity takes place. Freud spoke of the mind suppressing unwanted thoughts and
desires, mostly sexual ones, into the unconscious. Suppression of unwanted
things into the unconscious was an important concept for Jung too. For Jung,
however, there was much more in the human unconscious than merely repressed
sexual desires, though those can certainly be there too. Two of Jung’s concepts
relating to the human unconscious are important here, namely, the shadow and
the collective unconscious. I will attempt here briefly to explain these
concepts as best I can.
First the shadow.
In Jungian psychology the shadow is the part of the unconscious where we put
things our conscious mind doesn’t want to deal with and therefore suppresses.
The things we suppress into our shadow may be negative things like fears,
angers, resentments, disappointments, guilt, and shame. They can also be positive
things like a talent we’re afraid to or
were prevented from developing, life, educational, or professional goals we
were somehow stopped from realizing, and many other things. The important point
for our purposes here is just to be aware that we all have things both negative
and positive in our shadow. Those things are there, but unless we do proper
inner work we won’t be conscious of them.
Yet the things we
suppress into our unconscious don’t disappear, nor do they cease to be active
parts of our psyche. They come out in unexpected and often destructive ways.
When we surprise ourselves by having an unreasonably strong negative reaction
to something or someone it is virtually certain that there is something in our
shadow that is triggering that response. When we lose our temper and don’t know
why, there is almost certainly a shadow element in play. Things that we
suppress into our shadow affect our behavior in many unexpected and usually
negative ways. The only way we overcome their negative effects on our lives is
to do the inner work of identifying them, then bringing them up into our conscious
mind and doing whatever needs to be done to come to terms with them so we can
be at peace with them.
The other Jungian
concept that is important to us here is the concept of the collective
unconscious. Jung taught that it isn’t just we individual humans who have an
unconscious. Similarities in cultural patterns, myths, and symbols between
cultures that had no contact with each other convinced Jung that humanity as a
whole has an unconscious just as we humans do. He called that unconscious the
collective unconscious. An example is the way the swastika, before it was
forever made unusable by the Nazis, appears in different cultures across the
globe. Another is the presence of hero myths in most human cultures. Entities
smaller than humanity as a whole can have a collective unconscious as well.
Nations and regions of nations have their own collective unconscious.
The collective
unconscious has a shadow just like an individual’s unconscious does. Groups of
people both small and large have things they don’t want to deal with. The group
as a whole suppresses those things into its shadow. The things a group
suppresses into its shadow act just like the things we suppress into our
personal shadows do. They find expression in unexpected and usually negative
ways. The only way to deal with them is the same as the way we can deal with
the things in our personal shadow. The group having shadow problems must address
whatever it is in the group’s shadow that is causing trouble, bring it into the
conscious life of the group, come to terms with it, and be reconciled with it.
That is what Zweig
calls the United States of America to do in the little insert into her text
that I want to consider here. In that insert she writes:
Many voices are now calling for a collective life review, a
social and political accounting of the history of the United States….We can
explore our national shadows, speaking the truth about genocide, slavery,
internment, torture, and immigrant policies that have been committed in our
name. Without this kind of rite of passage, profound shame and grief lie buried
in our collective shadow. Without it, we cannot understand the underlying roots
of privilege and injustice.[2]
Can policies be “committed”? I
guess it doesn’t matter. I wish Zweig had explicitly named the racism of which
every one of the things she mentions is associated. Racism is after all deeply
suppressed in America’s shadow despite the efforts of many people both in the
past and today to bring it to light and, by acknowledging and confronting it,
overcome it.
If our country is
ever even to approximate the land of freedom, justice, and opportunity we claim
to be, we must do collective inner work to neutralize many of the nasty things
we keep in our collective shadow. There are a great many such things. Most of
them have to do with gross income inequality and the racism that is our country’s
original sin. Zweig’s list of horrors tells us some of the things we have
suppressed into our collective shadow though by no means all of them. She first
names genocide. The devastation of Native peoples by white intruders into the
Native’s land does indeed amount to genocide, genocide being an attempt to
eliminate all or a major part of a particular demographic group. Some of that
genocide was unintentional. An enormous number, in some places even a very high
percentage, of Native people died from diseases the Europeans brought with them
against which the Natives had no natural immunity. Yet much of it was a direct
policy and the result of military actions by the US against Native peoples. The
US made numerous treaties with Native nations and violated every one of them,
presumably because at least at an unconscious level we didn’t think of Native
people as people we had to respect as people. Incidents like the massacre at
Wounded Knee, where uniformed American soldiers shot and killed Native women
and children apparently just for what they thought was the fun of it, were far
too common. Adolf Hitler thought the US could not object to what he was going
to do to Europe’s Jews because the US had already done the same thing to Native
Americans. We have suppressed these truths and the guilt and shame they so
properly produce so deep into our shadow that most Americans have no idea that
they are beneficiaries of nothing less than genocide and are outraged and go
into hard denial when they are told that they are.
Zweig next names
slavery in her parade of America horribles. White Europeans brought the first enslaved
Black African people to what became the United States in 1619, a year before
the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. For the next one and three-quarters
centuries the economy of the United States, primarily but not exclusively in
the south, was based and depended upon the enslavement of millions of God’s
people of African origin. This country did not abolish slavery until after a
bloody civil war in which over 700,000 Americans died and in which one side was
fighting for the sole purpose of maintaining the enslavement of Black human
beings. As a nation we bear much guilt for our history of slavery, and I haven’t
even mentioned the horrific history of American racism that came after the
Civil War. We have buried most of the guilt from these truths in our collective
shadow rather than admit it and deal with it in some constructive way. The list
of American horribles could continue with the other things Zweig mentions and
many more besides that we have suppressed into our collective shadow and not
come to terms with, but I trust the point is made. Our nation has an immense
collective shadow. We still need to address and deal with a great many things
in that shadow.
So what is
happening in this country today with regard to dealing with our collective
shadow? Some good things are happening. Some people are trying to get us to
deal constructively with the junk we have stuffed in there. The Black Lives
Matter movement is trying to get us to address institutional racism, which of
course is a manifestation of our psychologically suppressed national racism.
The Me Too movement is trying to get us to address our shadow element of sexism
and misogyny. The environmental movement is trying to get us to deal with the
environmental crisis we have created and packed our responsibility for into our
shadow. Many good things are happening among us with regard to our collective
shadow.
Tragically
though, so are some very bad things. Huge numbers of people fall for the bogus
scientific claims of the far right that there is no environmental crisis, or if
there is it’s not our fault. Our criminal law system (I won’t call it a
criminal justice system because it has a great deal to do with law and very
little to do with justice) continues to imprison Black people at a grossly
disproportional rate compared to white people. The statistics continually show
that courts impose heavier sentences on Black than on white defendants for the
same crime.
Perhaps most
alarmingly, many of our states led by Republican governors and legislatures are
taking actions against efforts to deal with elements of our collective shadow. Texas
and other states have banned critical race theory from public schools though
critical race theory is nothing but an attempt to come at last to an honest
depiction and understanding of our sinful history of racism. These same states,
and others, are hellbent on eliminating women’s reproductive freedom recognized
by the US Supreme Court in 1973 in the Roe v. Wade decision. That
freedom is something we need if we are every going to overcome our shadow element
of racism and misogyny. Moreover, many people expect today’s Supreme Court,
which Republican presidents have packed with jurists who rule on the basis of
their personal preferences rather on the law and the wellbeing of the American
people, to overturn Roe v. Wade in the near future. Florida has enacted
a “Don’t Say Gay” law that aims to end honest discussion of sexual orientation
and gender identity in the state’s public schools. Yet a free and open
discussion of those things that are so central to human life is essential if we
are ever to overcome our shadow element of homophobia and discrimination
against people of minority sexual orientation and gender identity.
Social progress
always produces a backlash, and the backlash against the social progress we’ve
made in recent decades is strong and getting stronger in parts of our country.
Efforts to bring shadow elements into the light of consciousness always produce
the response “No! Those things don’t exist! Or it they do, for God’s sake keep
them down and out of sight so we can continue to ignore or deny them.” Yet
ignoring or denying the reality of the bad things we have hidden in our
collective shadow is nothing but dangerous. Suppression of our history of
racism has in the past broken through in riots and violence by both Black and
white people. If we continue to suppress it, it will do so again, to cite just
one example.
Stuffing social
ills and the guilt and shame we feel around them away in a collective shadow
never makes them go away. It just makes it impossible for us to deal with them.
Social reaction is strong among us today. Efforts to keep our shadow dark and
hidden are strong among us too. May we at long last have the wisdom and the
courage to face the many negative aspects of our country’s past and of our
present. Only by addressing the shadow can we overcome those negative aspects
and perhaps make this nation a bit more the land of the free and the home of
the brave that we claim we are. May it be so.
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