Carl Jung's Shadow: How to Become Who You Are | #70

In this episode, best mates Ollie and Lukas sit down to discuss all things Carl Jung and psychoanalysis.

We begin by talking about the Jungian shadow, the repository of our subconscious where we dump all those things we don’t like about ourselves, or don’t identify with: our anger, our shame, whatever it might be. The shadow is hard to recognise, precisely because we repress it into our subconscious. Not being aware of this, though, can lead to shadow projection: to imagining that the traits we fear in ourselves are only located in others. Through a psychoanalytic process of identification, we can bring it to the forefront. The key, then, is to integrate the shadow: to make the unconscious and conscious come together. This is what allows us to ‘individuate’, to ‘become who we are’.

We move on to discuss dreams, and dream interpretation. Jung’s theory of dreams takes a lot from Sigmund Freud: the basic belief is that dreams are constructions of the unconscious which we can interpret to understand our own subconscious better. Jung is much more open than Freud though, and doesn’t think that psychoanalysis boils down to sex and aggression. Instead, dreams are repositories of symbols which can be read much like one reads metaphors in a book. They also have a homeostatic function: they act like a pressure valve, bringing repressed thoughts back up to the conscious level. If we can learn to read our dreams, perhaps we can learn to understand ourselves better.

Finally, we discuss Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes. For Jung, an archetype is an image, concept, or symbol which resides in the collective unconscious. That is, basic structures of thought which we all share in our unconscious: the self, the hero, the mother, the child, and so on. These archetypes shape the way we interpret everything around us. Individual mothers live up, or don’t, to the archetype we share of them. Recognising this can help us understand the structures of our own thought, and how biases might be built into our way of seeing. For example, by analysing how our archetypes might be shaped by patriarchal ways of seeing and thinking.

Lukas and Ollie, most of all, talk about how all of this can help us think in our own lives. Stick around for more of that. We’re here to learn how to think, not what to think.

00:00 - Jung's Concept of the Shadow

06:26 - Dreams and the Unconscious

10:45 - Dream Analysis and their Significance

20:00 - Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

26:14 - The Personal and Cultural Role of Archetypes