Self-Deception and the Shadow
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“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“What our age thinks of as the “shadow” and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative.”
“Most men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes - but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”
“You can completely lose track of incredibly positive things about yourself - your beauty, goodness, strength, and virtue ... the so-called Golden shadow.”
“And in short, a man must learn a great deal to enable him to pass a correct judgment on another man's acts.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Wholeness includes brokenness
Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection — it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.
PrincipleThe shadow and repressed drivesCharacter and moral integrity2 more related links
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Modules
“We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?”
“In the darkness of the unconscious a treasure lies hidden, the ... “treasure hard to attain” ... the fight against the paralyzing grip of the unconscious calls forth man’s creative powers ... it needs heroic courage to do battle with these forces and to wrest from them the treasure hard to attain. Whoever succeeds in this has triumphed indeed.”
“But whether easy or difficult, Alcibiades, still there is no other way; knowing what we are, we shall know how to take care of ourselves, and if we are ignorant we shall not know.”
“To “give style” to one’s character - a great and rare art. It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.”
“With all that which a person allows to appear, one may ask: what is it meant to hide? What should it divert the eyes from? ... How far does he deceive himself in this action?”
“The difficulties of our psychotherapeutic work teach us to take truth, goodness, and beauty where we find them. They are not always found where we look for them: often they are hidden in the dirt or are in the keeping of the dragon.”
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye?”
“The impetus that makes you fly is our great human possession. Everybody has it. It is the feeling of being linked with the roots of power, but one soon becomes afraid of this feeling ... That is why most people shed their wings and prefer to walk and obey the law.”
“If a person does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either.”
“This state of inner attunement is not always joyful or serene ... Sometimes it involves feeling with devastating intensity the conflicts, the rages, the intimations of mortality we have been trying to deny ... Yearnings, rages, jealousies, dependencies, and estrangements can be safely lived through when the persons upon whom we might wrongly (or dangerously, or foolishly) unleash them are absent.”
“Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.”
Plato's chariot allegory of the tripartite soul
Plato pictures the soul as a charioteer (reason) governing two horses (spirited thumos and appetitive desire); only when reason harmonises all three into one unified, self-controlled person should one turn outward to wealth, bodily care, politics, or business.
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”