The Shadow of a Figure of Light

The Shadow of a Figure of Light is a work by Cody Peterson (2024).

Core claims

• Peterson does not merely map the Twelve Steps onto individuation; he identifies a new archetype—the Alcoholic—as a coniunctio oppositorum that accomplishes what the Christ-symbol structurally cannot: holding light and shadow in a single numinous image capable of catalyzing psychic transformation.
• The book’s most radical historical claim is that Jung’s personal myth—the experiential substrate that made his later psychology possible—was midwifed not by a fellow analyst but by a “live to die drunk” anthropologist named Jaime de Angulo, reframing the Jung-Wilson lineage as routed through shamanism and indigenous encounter rather than clinical theory.
• By reading Bill Wilson as an unconscious mythmaker who split the God-image in “Bill’s Story” yet reconstituted it through the shadow figure of the Anonymous Alcoholic, Peterson offers a Jungian hermeneutics of the Big Book that treats its inconsistencies not as defects but as psychologically necessary enantiodromia.

Related questions

• How does Peterson’s archetype of the Alcoholic as coniunctio oppositorum compare to Erich Neumann’s account of the hero’s confrontation with the shadow in The Origins and History of Consciousness, and does Neumann’s developmental schema leave room for an archetype that is simultaneously pathological and redemptive?
• Peterson claims that Wilson unconsciously split the God-image in the Big Book in a manner analogous to what Jung diagnosed in Aion regarding the Christ-symbol and its Luciferian opponent. How does this reading intersect with Edward Edinger’s analysis of the Incarnation myth in The Christian Archetype, particularly Edinger’s treatment of the crucifixion as ego-Self separation?
• Peterson positions Jaime de Angulo as a wounded-healer figure whose shamanic connections catalyzed Jung’s personal myth. How does this claim relate to Joseph Campbell’s treatment of the shaman as proto-mythmaker in The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, and what does it suggest about the role of indigenous knowledge systems in the formation of analytical psychology?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/peterson-shadow-figure-light/

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