Shadow Projection and the Political

The thread that runs from carl-jung‘s clinical observation of the personal shadow to his diagnosis of twentieth-century mass politics is among the most consequential moves in the whole depth tradition. What began as a theory of the self-rejected self became, in Jung’s late work, a theory of how nations and factions produce their enemies.

Jung’s key move is to refuse the inside/outside distinction as ultimate. The shadow is located within the individual, but its contents are experienced without through the mechanism of projection. When the individual will not integrate the shadow, it does not disappear; it is externalized. When the collective will not integrate its shadow, the externalization takes political form: the heretic, the class enemy, the racial other, the ideological foe.

“We can now point a finger at the shadow. He is clearly on the other side of the political frontier, while we are on the side of good and enjoy the possession of the right ideals. Did not a well-known statesman recently confess that he had ‘no imagination for evil’?” (Jung 1957, the-undiscovered-self, §559). Jung marks the refusal of the imagination for evil within as the precise condition that makes the evil without perceivable in such sharply moralized form.

The thread has a classical antecedent. Padel‘s analysis of the Erinyes shows a Greek imagination that refused the inside/outside split as ultimate: “Erinys was all at once: of and in phrenes, ‘psychological’ and external” (Padel 1994). The Erinys attacks from within the phrenes and from without as a daemonic presence; she is not a projection, because her reality is not divisible in those terms. Jung’s doctrine of the objective psyche recovers — against a modern psychology that had made the inside/outside split dogmatic — precisely this ancient phenomenological truth.

The thread matters for the Seba lineage because it warrants the tradition’s public, rather than merely private, vocation. The diagnosis applies not only to the individual in analysis but to the nation that refuses its history, the faction that refuses its complicity, the community that refuses its scapegoat.

Sources

• carl-jung: the political shadow as simple reversal (The Undiscovered Self 1957, §§558–559).
• ruth-padel: Erinyes as simultaneously of and in phrenes and external daemon (Padel 1994, pp. 186–187).
• paul-radin: the trickster as collective shadow in mythic form (Radin 1956, Jung’s commentary).