“Those inferior personality traits submerged in unconsciousness Jung called the shadow, “the thing a person has no wish to be”, “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities” from which one attempts to hide. The shadow, that which we reject in ourselves, may contain elements of evil and also highly positive elements. However, when the negative is not acknowledged, the shadow can develop a life of its own as a sub-personality and be unconsciously projected onto an object or person in the external world. The failure to own one’s shadow is demonstrated in a case where, for example, a pastor outwardly shows vehement disdain for pornography, fighting to rid the world of such “filth”; yet this same individual may simultaneously be fantasizing about pornography or having a secret affair. While certainly not denying the reality of evil or the right of individuals to protest against it, Jung was concerned when someone obsessed about what he or she saw as particularly “wrong” behaviour. The question arises: What evil do we deny in ourselves as we come to see it with such clarity in another? According to Jung, “everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. This psychological phenomenon highlights the importance of considering the “beam” in one’s eye before addressing the “speck in another’s (Matthew 7:3).”
– excerpted from “The Living God and our Living Psyche: What Christians can learn from Carl Jung” by Ann Belford Ulanov and Alvin Dueck, pages 15-16.
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