Collective Shadow

The collective shadow is the portion of the shadow that belongs to a group rather than to an individual — the rejected contents a culture, nation, or institution refuses to own and therefore projects outward onto a convenient carrier. It is not the sum of the personal shadows of a group’s members; it is an archetypal formation in its own right, with its own energetics and its own characteristic carriers.

Jung’s clearest handling is in The Undiscovered Self (1957): “the accumulation of individuals who have got into this critical state starts off a mass movement purporting to be the champion of the suppressed. In accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes” (Jung 1957, §558). The mass movement is the collective shadow in motion, locating its own repressed material in an external enemy and moving to destroy it.

erich-neumann makes the mechanism structural. “The very anonymity of the individual in the mass intensifies the action of the shadow side. It is a significant fact that, in order to carry out their sadistic executions, the Nazis were obliged to remove the assassin from his own group. It is very much harder, if not actually impossible, for a village community to liquidate its own Jews” (Neumann 2019 [1949]). The face-to-face group — where the shadow is carried under the eyes of neighbours — restrains what the atomized mass releases. The pathology of the mass is precisely the loss of the restraining group.

edward-edinger, in the Mysterium Lectures, demonstrates how collective shadow operates historically: “Mani has been a major collective shadow figure for Western consciousness. Ever since Augustine… Mani has been saddled with the projection of evil” (Edinger 1995). To track a culture’s collective shadow is to track its heretics, its scapegoats, its declared enemies — what a civilisation decides to disown is the negative imprint of what it claims to be.

The collective shadow is therefore the concept through which analytical psychology reads mass politics, the scapegoat, the enemy-figure in propaganda, and the periodic eruptions of historical violence that cannot be accounted for by individual pathology alone.

Relationships

• shadow
• projection
• scapegoat
• trickster
• shadow-projection-and-the-political

Primary sources

• the-undiscovered-self (Jung 1957, §§558, 573–574)
• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)
• edinger-mysterium-lectures (Edinger 1995) — Mani as collective shadow figure