New Ethic and the Shadow

Neumann’s extension of Jung on the shadow is not primarily psychological but ethical. Depth Psychology and a New Ethic and the concluding chapters of The Origins and History of Consciousness argue that the old ethic — the identification of conscience with collectively sanctioned values — is the very mechanism that produces the collective-shadow and requires the scapegoat.

The old ethic operates by exclusion: what the collective declares good must be affirmed, what it declares bad must be expelled. The expulsion is achieved through projection onto an external carrier — the outsider, the heretic, the racial or national enemy. So long as the ethical frame is the collective’s own verdict on itself, the shadow is structurally guaranteed to accumulate and periodically to discharge through mass violence.

Neumann’s analysis of the mechanism is pitiless: “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. Not so much because of the group’s greater humanity… but because the individual must do his deeds under the eyes of the group” (Neumann 2019 [1949]). The face-to-face group restrains the shadow; the atomized mass releases it. Modern urban life, which has replaced the group with the mass, is the ideal carrier medium for collective shadow formation.

The new ethic — the ethic commensurate with a depth-psychological knowledge of the unconscious — requires each subject to carry their own portion of the collective darkness rather than participating in its projection. It is an ethic of shadow-ownership, and it runs against the grain of every group’s instinctive ethical formation.

Jung’s The Undiscovered Self (1957) is the Jungian parallel to Neumann’s ethical text: the individual who has not metabolized the shadow becomes the reliable recruit of mass movements.

Sources

• erich-neumann (Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949): old ethic produces collective shadow; new ethic requires shadow-ownership; anonymity of mass intensifies shadow
• carl-jung (The Undiscovered Self, 1957): split personality as fuel for mass movements