Last week’s post looked at the uncanny, and how it resides within ourselves. Today, I will move on to exploring ways in which we can confront these aspects of our inner world, often termed our ‘monsters,’ or our ‘demons.’

• The Struggle To Face Our Inner Demons

Ghost – Mario Sironi. Wikimedia Commons.

“No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”

Freud. From Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1905

Facing our dark side, or our shadow side as Jung termed it, is far from easy. Jung’s shadow is akin to Freud’s ‘unheimlich,’ which describes parts of the personality of which we may be unaware. If we remain in denial about the existence of our own shadow, we will tend to project that darkness onto others.

Such paranoid ways of thinking involve unconscious projection onto the other of one’s own unwanted or unacceptable fears. This involves the mechanism of splitting, of black and white thinking, where the world is divided into people who are wholly good, (often great, powerful leaders), and the utterly evil, who will be vilified and scapegoated as outsiders.

Some people are very threatened by the notion of the unconscious. They deride it as ‘gobbledegook,’ or ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ The threat is that they might have to face aspects of the self that they do not like, the dark side, the ‘shadow’ side. That is why it has to be deeply buried. The degree to which this happens varies according to each person’s openness to the inner workings of their psyche.

Condemnation of another, or an ethnic group, as dishonest, grasping or lazy might, for a short time at least, leave one feeling smugly virtuous. However, the negative feelings inside, unresolved and ignored, will return, ready to be projected out onto some other unwitting victim.

Léon Spilliaert. Self-Portrait With Mirror. 1908. Wikimedia Commons.

“I’m not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I’m afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.”

Walter Jon Williams

Projecting feelings onto others can be a sadistic process. Labelling and vilifying other people, spreading nasty rumours and half-stories about them to make oneself feel ‘good,’ can be a cruel tactic to offload unconscious inner hatred, envy and dissatisfaction with one’s own life.

“Rather than living our lives, we are ”lived” by unknown and uncontrollable forces.”

 Sigmund Freud

The Monster. Odilon Redon.Wikioo.

“We all hold a monster inside. The only difference is what form it takes when freed.” 

Mary Lindsey.

If we are unaware of the ‘monster inside,’ of our own potential to be cruel, murderous, evil or sadistic, then, inevitably, we will search for others to label as monstrous, thus avoiding facing our own darkness, our own shadow side. The energy that needs to be used to facilitate facing the monsters inside is instead redirected onto others.

This way of thinking develops into one that abhors difference, hates, yet needs, ‘the enemy.’ Then we are unable to see the self in the other, cannot recognise that in all of us lies the potential for evil.

In his highly recommendable book, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, Kearney states:

“The demonising of strangers by individuals or nations may thus be interpreted as a harking back to past repressed materials which recur in the present – often with obsessive compulsion – in the guise of something threatening and terrifying.”

Devil – Jan Matejko. Wikioo.

“But, ironically, what we most fear in the demonised other is our own mirror image: our other self. The ‘uncanny’, concludes Freud, “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and of old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”

Kearney.

There is an old saying which urges us to remember that ‘when you point the finger at someone, remember that there are three fingers pointing back at you.’

“The world is full of lots of people play acting and hurling stuff about, unconscious of the effects.”

Jay Woodman

Acting out is often what occurs when feelings cannot be expressed openly; in this case, we express our feelings indirectly through our behaviour. For example, a person in psychotherapy may be angry with the therapist, but perhaps finds this difficult to express. They may then be late for a session, or miss it entirely.

The psychoanalytical psychotherapist’s task is to help them understand such behaviour, its links in the transference to the therapist and also to past experience.

On a global scale, it could be said that war and fighting represents an acting out of people’s unconscious rage and violence. In psychoanalytical terms, war may understood as regarding the other as malign and negating the hidden, unknown, ‘monstrous’ part of the self.

“Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.”

Jung

 

• Getting There- Becoming More Whole.

 

 

Division-Unity. Wassily Kandinsky. Wikioo.

How can we try to resolve tall this? If we can first make a connection between the various inner aspects of ourselves, start to admit into consciousness thoughts and feelings previously repressed and denied, then we might get in touch with the ‘monster’ inside, the part of ourselves hitherto unconsciously regarded as ‘alien.’

Psychotherapy may be necessary to help us connect with aspects of our unconscious self in this way. Then we will, hopefully, learn to withdraw our projections and begin to treat others, who might think differently from us, with kindness and empathy, having come to terms with our own ‘unheimlich’ parts.

This is the meaning of being ‘got-together,’ unified, whole, as aware of our inner selves as we can, in order to be more integrated.  Self-knowledge means that we will recognise and explore many parts of ourselves, including the ‘darker’ ones, and this will free us up to be able to relate to others and the world more openly.

Unknown 1916. – Juan Gris Wikioo

“The fewer unknown spaces, the less fear. The less fear, the more we can allow the porousness necessary for listening.”

Mary Jo Peebles

This quotation is crucial and highly instructive. It graphically shows us that ‘unknown spaces,’ that is, the areas of ourselves that we might reject, deny, or shy away from can produce fear and an inability to be available for others.

We have the choice to think differently about these parts of ourselves, to realise that we all have a shadow-side, and to begin to appreciate that ‘making friends’ with our darker side can produce feelings of wholeness and calm. Unless we face these inner monsters, we will never be able to tame them.

If they are unknown to us, they will run riot. If we experience, for example, shame and distress because we have a lot of anger inside, then we will lack self-compassion. A lack of compassion and acceptance for ourselves will mean that, in turn, we will not be able to give care to others.

Only when we have faced and accepted the existence of our ‘demons,’ will we have some control over the ‘unheimlich’ side of ourselves. We need to learn, deep inside, that, as human beings, we are all a mass of paradoxes and contradictions, that we are both light and darkness, angels and devils, we are both accepting and angry, we love and we hate. Only then will we gain a sense of resolution and peace….

I Am The Abyss And I Am Light – Charles Henry Sims. 1928. Wikioo

“We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.”

Rachel Hartman

© Linda Berman.