The Body As A Manifestation Of The Shadow

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

[Translated by JOHN P. CONGER ‘THE BODY AS SHADOW’ from Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature]

“We do not like to look at our shadow sides, therefore many people in our civilized society, who have lost their Shadow, have lost their third dimension, and along with this loss, as a rule, the body is lost. The body is a dubious friend because it does things that we don't always like; many of these things have to do with the body itself embodying the shadow aspects of the ego. Sometimes it is like a skeleton in a closet that everyone naturally wants to get rid of. Indeed, the body can become the space of the Shadow, since it reflects the tragic story of how the source of spontaneity, energy and vitality was once destroyed and rejected, as a result of which the body turned into a dead object. The victory of the rational is achieved at the expense of more primitive and natural vitality. Those who can read the body see traces of rejected parts in it, which express what we dare not talk about and show our current and past fears. Considering the body as a manifestation of the Shadow, one can mainly speak of the body as a manifestation of character. The body is like a bundle of bound energy, unrecognized and unused, unconscious and inaccessible.

Strictly speaking, the shadow represents a repressed or denied part of our Ego and contains everything that we cannot accept in ourselves. Our body, hidden under clothing, very often expresses exactly what we consciously deny. By presenting ourselves to others, we do not want to show that we are angry, anxious, sad or constrained, that we are experiencing a depression, or that we need something. Back in 1912, Jung wrote: "We have to admit that, with special emphasis on the spiritual component, the Christian tradition, thus, completely devalues the physical side of a person and, therefore, creates a kind of rainbow and caricatured image of human nature." In a lecture that Jung gave in 1935 in England, where he spoke about the general principles of his theory, he also mentioned along the way how the shadow side can manifest itself through the body: “We do not like to look at our shadow sides, therefore many people in our civilized society who lost their Shadow, lost their third dimension, and with this loss, as a rule, the body is lost. The body is a dubious friend because it does things that we don't always like; many of these things have to do with the body itself embodying the shadow aspects of the ego. Sometimes it is like a skeleton in a closet that everyone naturally wants to get rid of."

Indeed, the body can become the space of the Shadow, since it reflects the tragic story of how the source of spontaneity, energy and vitality was once destroyed and rejected, as a result of which the body turned into a dead object. The victory of the rational is achieved at the expense of more primitive and natural vitality. Those who can read the body see traces of rejected parts in it, which express what we dare not talk about and show our current and past fears. Considering the body as a manifestation of the Shadow, one can mainly speak of the body as a manifestation of character. The body is like a bundle of bound energy, unrecognized and unused, unconscious and inaccessible.

Although Jung himself was an active, tall, well-built man, he did not talk very much about the body. When he built his tower in Bollingen, he returned to a more primitive lifestyle - he himself took water from a well and chopped wood himself. His physical strength, spontaneity and charm indicated that he was in tune with his body. From several of his casual statements, one can draw a conclusion about his attitude to the body, which corresponded to the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, but was more detached, more metaphorical.

Reich taught us to observe and work with the body; he spoke directly and concretely. He viewed mind and body as "functionally identical."Reich worked with the psyche as an expression of the corporeal and offered a brilliant alternative to the complex analytical system of Viennese psychoanalysts, who, at least in the early days, did not place much emphasis on corporeal manifestations in analysis. Reich was by nature assertive, somewhat tough, not particularly tolerant of the play of the metaphysical, literary mind. He was a scientist and based his beliefs on what he saw, taking an irreconcilable position in relation to everything "mystical", which he considered from the very beginning and the views of Jung, as soon as he entered Freud's circle in the early 1920s. Later, in his work Ether, God and the Devil (1949), Reich wrote: “Functional identity as a principle for the study of orgonomic functionalism has never received such a brilliant expression as in the unity of the psychic and the somatic, emotions and arousal, sensations and stimuli. This unity or identity as a basic principle of life excludes once and for all any transcendentalism or even any autonomy of emotions."

Jung, on the contrary, was influenced by Kant's theory, which directed him, first of all, to study the psyche as a scientific phenomenon, empirically, not being limited only by knowledge that can be gleaned from reality. In his essay On the Nature of the Psyche, Jung wrote: “Since psyche and matter are contained in the same world and, moreover, are in continuous contact with each other and are ultimately based on unimaginable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible, but it is even very likely that psyche and matter are two different aspects of the same phenomenon."

While there are striking similarities between the ideas of Reich and Jung, their approaches are radically different. Reich and Jung neither spoke to each other, did not correspond or communicate at all. Only a few remarks made by Reich indicate that he was aware of Jung's existence, and his opinion of Jung seems rather biased and superficial. On the other hand, there is no mention of Reich in Jung's writings. But both Reich and Jung turned to Freud again and again to compare their ideas with Freud's. In this unexpected way, it is possible to establish a relationship between the theories of Reich and Jung.

In an article he wrote in 1939, Jung compared the Shadow to Freud's concept of the unconscious. "The shadow," he said, "corresponds to the 'personal', the unconscious (which corresponds to Freud's concept of the unconscious)." In the preface to the third edition of The Psychology of the Masses and Fascism, which he wrote in August 1942, Reich wrote that his concept of a "layer of perverted secondary drives" was consistent with Freud's concept of the unconscious. Reich explained that fascism arose from the second layer of the biopsychic structure, which includes three levels that function autonomously. "Restraint, politeness, compassion, responsibility, conscientiousness are characteristic of the superficial level of the average person's personality." This surface layer of a person's personality is not in direct contact with the deep biological basis of individuality; he relies on a second, intermediate layer of character, which consists exclusively of impulses of cruelty, sadism, voluptuousness, greed and envy. This layer represents the Freudian "unconscious" or "that which is repressed."

Since the Shadow in Jung's understanding and the "secondary layer" in Reich's terminology correspond to Freud's concept of "unconscious", we can recognize the existence of at least a very rough connection between the two theories. Reich saw manifestations of the secondary layer in the body in rigid, chronic muscle clamps, which serve as a defense against possible attack both from the inside and from the outside. Such clamps become a kind of deadbolt that prevents energy from flowing freely in the affected body. Reich worked directly with the bodily "armor", thereby releasing the displaced material. Thus, the shadow aspect of the body manifests itself in the creation of this kind of armor.

In Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Shadow", the shadow manages to disconnect from its owner, the scientist. The scientist manages to cope with this situation, he develops a new, somewhat more modest shadow. Several years later, he meets his former shadow, which has become rich and prosperous. When about to marry a princess, the shadow has the audacity to try to hire its former owner as its own shadow. The scientist wants to expose his shadow, but the clever shadow made it so that he was imprisoned, convincing his bride that her shadow had gone mad, so that then simply to remove from the path the person who threatens his love. This tale tells us how the dark and rejected aspects of the ego can find a completely unpredictable and unforeseen way to unite and present themselves in such a powerful way, seize power and completely change the balance of power. From Reich's point of view, this tale tells how the armor is formed.

In the most general sense, the body as a shadow represents the body as an armor, expressing what has been repressed from the Ego. We can also assume that Jung's concept of Personality corresponds to Reich's “first layer”. Let us quote this fragment again: "Restraint, politeness, compassion, responsibility, conscientiousness are characteristic of the superficial level of the average person's personality." Jung wrote: “A persona is a complex system of relations between individual consciousness and society, a kind of tailored mask, which, on the one hand, was created to make a certain impression on others, and on the other hand, to hide the true nature of the personality.

Although the Persona in Jung's understanding functions in a more complex way than the "first layer" of Reich, it can be recognized that there is some similarity between the two concepts. Jung saw in Persona the function of creating a balance between the conscious and the unconscious, a compensatory function. The more a person plays the role of a strong person in the external world, the more intense feminine weakness is in his internal world. The less he admits his feminine aspects into his consciousness, the more likely it is that he will project a primitive anima outside or will be subject to sudden mood swings, paranoia, and hysteria. Reich tended to regard the surface layer as irrelevant, while Jung paid particular attention to this interaction between our social mask and our inner life.

For Reich, the path to the human base layer was to challenge the secondary shadow layer. The tension in the body became a kind of signal for Reich, indicating the location of the armor and indicating the point of passage to the deep layer. "On this basis, under favorable conditions, a person is usually a sincere, hardworking, cooperative, loving and, if motivated enough, rationally hate creature." Jung saw the Shadow as an integral part of natural nature that underlies the image of God in the human psyche. The dark side allows us to see the denied part of a person's life. But for Reich, evil is a pathological manifestation that takes away vital energy and prevents the manifestation of the spontaneous, biological basis of a person. The devil never reaches a deep level, but is the embodiment of a limited secondary layer.

After many years of work, Reich began to share Freud's therapeutic despair. He tried to free people from the armor on a society-wide basis through enlightenment and on an individual level in personal therapy. His three-layer model does not recognize the value of the material contained in the secondary layer, which is almost impossible to remove completely. Nowadays, it is recognized by practicing specialists that everyone, without exception, one way or another, needs some kind of protection in the form of armor. The goal of therapy is not so much to get rid of armor as to increase the flexibility in the use of defense mechanisms and the awareness of their choice.

While the biological concept of armor is well suited for working with the body at the level of unblocking energy, the Shadow as a functional equivalent at the psychic level emphasizes its versatility and is suitable for describing the psychological function of the body. In the Shadow are forces that have been rejected. The shadow cannot be removed completely, just as it is impossible to completely and irrevocably reject it. The shadow needs to be appropriated and integrated, while recognizing that we can never tame any deep core part of it. The shadow contains not only the "scum" of our conscious life, but also our primitive, undifferentiated life forces that are important for our future, through which we learn to better understand ourselves and become stronger, withstanding the tension created by opposites.