Dark Side

The term ‘Dark Side’ occupies a charged and contested position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a mythological image, a psychological category, and a moral-metaphysical claim. The tradition ranges from Bly’s literary-poetic celebrations of the ‘positive dark’ as necessary psychic substance, to Schoen’s invocation of ‘Dark Side’ as a Star Wars-coded modern myth for archetypal evil—a transpersonal force pitted against the ‘Force’ of goodness that recruits human beings into its service. Kalsched’s index entry linking ‘Osiris/Seth’ as ‘light and dark sides of Self’ situates the term within the coniunctio oppositorum, where the dark side is ontologically inseparable from the light. Hillman’s treatment of the daimonic and demonic in Hitler points toward a dark side that is not shadow-as-potential but something closer to privatio boni—an absence of soul, cold and hollow. Von Franz maps the dark side onto fairy-tale figures such as Baba Yaga and the malevolent skull, where the dark side of nature is simultaneously destructive and generative. Peterson, following Jung, frames the dark side as a psychological law: the intensification of the Christ-image necessarily constellates its unconscious complement. The central tension in the corpus concerns whether the dark side is integrable, transformable, or—as Hillman insists—irreducible, something that can only be ‘held at bay.’ This irresolvability is what gives the term its enduring diagnostic and therapeutic weight.

In the library 12 passages

many other species—are caught between the transpersonal warring energies of the Force and the Dark Side. Star Wars is very much a modern myth, reconfiguring the same archetypal elements of Lucifer and the fallen angels

Schoen reads the Star Wars ‘Dark Side’ as a contemporary mythological vehicle for Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil, continuous with the Lucifer tradition and reflecting transpersonal forces that enlist human beings in their cosmic war.

Schoen, David E., The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis

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Even Eugene McCarthy later on, who had a little more of the dark side, seemed to me a swallow, unable to find mud… I felt the positive dark come in again.

Bly rehabilitates the dark side as a necessary, generative psychic substance—‘positive dark’—whose absence from public life produces a thin, disembodied consciousness incapable of real rootedness.

Bly, Robert, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988thesis

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In Corbett’s section on the dark side of the self, he indicates that ‘Jung believed that the power of evil is more than simply human… that occurrences such as the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima… [were] of such magnitude… [that they] are far too terrible to be of purely human origin.’

Schoen, via Corbett, frames the dark side of the Self as exceeding the merely personal shadow, invoking Jung’s conviction that certain historical catastrophes require a transpersonal, archetypal register of evil.

Schoen, David E., The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis

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every intensified differentiation of the Christ-image brings about a corresponding accentuation of its unconscious complement, thereby increasing the tension between above and below.

Peterson, following Jung, articulates the dark side as a psychological law of compensation: the more luminous the conscious ideal, the more powerfully its dark complement accumulates in the unconscious.

Peterson, Cody, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting

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Archetypal evil can neither be cured nor integrated nor humanized. It can only be held at bay.

Hillman insists that the dark side in its archetypal form surpasses integrative possibility, demanding a stance of containment rather than transformation—a direct challenge to standard Jungian shadow-work.

Hillman, James, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967supporting

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Hitler knew the shadow all too well, indulged it, was obsessed by it, and strove to purge it; but he could not admit it in himself, seeing only its projected form as Jew, Slav, intellectual, foreign, weak, and sick.

Hillman argues that the dark side becomes catastrophic not through ignorance of shadow but through its radical projection outward, driving genocidal purification rather than interior acknowledgment.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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it is her own life that is at stake requires of her the recognition that the sins of the parents… cannot be assumed in the form of her own unconscious guilt. Rather she must open her eyes to the darkness within her and assume the responsibility for her own shadow.

Woodman identifies the dark side in its personal-shadow register as the unconsciously absorbed darkness of the patriarchal father, which the woman must consciously reclaim as her own rather than carry as guilt.

Woodman, Marion, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting

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Like the ice man, he comes out of nowhere, does his killing work, then disappears, dissolves into nowhere, leaving no trail. This story… leaves us an excellent clue: if you feel you have lost your mission… look for the Devil, the ambusher of the soul within your own psyche.

Estés maps the dark side onto the mythological predator-figure—devil, ice man, complex—characterised by its sudden, vanishing attack on the soul’s vitality and purpose.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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The Black Man is also Thanatos… the inhabitants of the netherworld in Egypt were black, and in Rome they were called injeri and umbrae.

Hillman traces the dark side through the archetypal figure of the Black Man as Thanatos, connecting the colour symbolism of darkness to death, the underworld, and the chthonic dimensions of the psyche across cultures.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

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she is a goddess of day and night, of life and death, and the great principle of nature. Also she is a witch… She goes around in a mortar with a pestle, which makes her resemble a great pagan corn goddess such as Demeter.

Von Franz presents the dark side as embedded within the Great Mother archetype—Baba Yaga as death-goddess—where darkness is not evil but the necessary nocturnal face of nature’s totality.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside

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Breaking all commandments frees you from human bondage, opening a door to a suprahuman condition where devil and divinity are indistinguishable.

Hillman notes how radical antinomian and transgressive practices deliberately invoke the dark side as a route to the suprahuman, collapsing the distinction between devil and the divine.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside

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