Shadow and its Classical Precedent

The Greeks had no single word that translates the Jungian shadow. This absence is itself informative. Where Jung names one psychic region, the classical imagination names many: the appetitive part of the tripartite-soul, the Erinyes, ate, nemesis, the shades of the underworld.

plato‘s appetitive part, as Lorenz reconstructs it in The Brute Within (2006), is not identical to the shadow but occupies an analogous structural place: it is the part of the soul that reason must govern if the person is to be whole, and which, ungoverned, becomes the source of the soul’s disorder. What Jung will call the integration of the shadow, Plato will call the subjection of the appetitive to the rational — a different ethical architecture with a shared diagnostic concern.

Padel‘s Erinyes are closer still. They are “outside and inside phrenes… Erinys was all at once: of and in phrenes, ‘psychological’ and external” (Padel 1994, pp. 186–187). They attack the killer who has shed kindred blood; they drive the madness that follows transgression; they are the daemonic figuration of what the Jungian will later call the archetypal shadow. ate, the blinding ruin, rides in their gift (Padel 1994, p. 164). Nemesis — the divine allotment that falls on hubris — belongs to the same constellation (Konstan 2006).

bruno-snell‘s reading of the Homeric psyche in The Discovery of the Mind (1953) confirms the prehistory. Before the unified ego there is no shadow, because there is no single light the shadow could cast. The Homeric agent is a plurality of faculties — thumos, phrenes, noos, kradiē, ētor, kēr — none of which stands in the relation of “self” to “not-self” that the shadow concept requires. Caswell‘s more recent philological work on thumos extends the same finding.

The shadow is therefore not a primitive category rediscovered by Jung. It is the correlate of the unified, Cartesian consciousness. It names what appears to that consciousness as other, because it has first refused to know itself as plural.

Sources

• plato / hendrik-lorenz: appetitive part of the tripartite soul (Lorenz 2006).
• ruth-padel: Erinyes as simultaneously inside and outside the phrenes (Padel 1994, pp. 164, 186–187).
• bruno-snell: the Homeric plural self as the precondition for (and absence of) the shadow (Snell 1953).
• caroline-caswell: thumos as one faculty among many in the pre-unified self (Caswell 1990).
• Konstan, David: nemesis as divine censure of the hubristic ego (Konstan 2006).