Jung used the term shadow to signify and sum up what each man fears and despises in himself. The shadow also expresses that for mankind as a whole, or for a particular culture at a particular time. While it is possible for the ego to become conscious of what is located in the shadow, this can never be a total consciousness. The paradox is that making something conscious also constellates unconsciousness because the one is always in relation to the other. When ego-consciousness illuminates something, what is on the periphery is in darkness. Jung put it thus: we come to the paradoxical conclusion that there is no conscious content that is not in some other respect unconscious, (quoted in Hillman, 1979b, pp. 12-13) It follows that the more differentiated the ego, the more problematic the shadow. Indeed, for one with a high level of ego-consciousness, the shadow may take the form of the unconscious itself. Pathology results from what could be healthy elements of the ego remaining unconscious, and hence operating in a distorted way, or in projection. This last possibility, projection of the shadow, interferes with close relationships on the personal level and, on the communal level, with harmonious living. In both instances, it is tempting to shove what is not wanted outside where it can be condemned at leisure. Beams and motes, in other words. Jung went on to stress that the shadow should not be regarded as a 'bad thing'. The dark side of man is, after all, a side of man. So there is a compelling moral aspect to integration of the shadow: to unblock personal and communal relationships and also to admit the inadmissible, yet human. The aim of such an integration is greater psychological wholeness (meaning completion not perfection). The designation shadow is not the same as that of sin. In fact, Jung asserted that everything of any substance or solidity (hence of value) throws a shadow.
— Andrew Samuels
Jung's formulation that everything of substance throws a shadow is not consolation — it is a description of how value works. The more developed, the more refined, the more genuinely built-up a person becomes, the more precisely their shadow acquires definition. There is no way around this arithmetic. Growth does not reduce the shadow; it sharpens it.
What Samuels draws out from Jung is the structural paradox: illumination and darkness are not opponents, they are co-constitutive. Every act of ego-consciousness casts a corresponding periphery into night. The person who imagines they have worked enough, integrated enough, become transparent enough to themselves — that is exactly the person whose shadow is operating most efficiently out of sight, typically through projection, which always feels like perception. You are not seeing your own material; you are seeing someone else fail to contain yours.
The moral weight Jung places here is worth sitting with. Admitting the inadmissible is not therapeutic strategy, it is the condition for genuine relationship — personal and communal. Where it fails, what gets shoved outside tends to be condensed, demonized, condemned with the peculiar confidence that belongs to disowned things. Beams and motes is exactly right. The energy of condemnation is almost always proportional to the intimacy of what is being refused.
Andrew Samuels·Jung and the Post-Jungians·1985