F I V E:

S H A D O W ' S   S H A D O W​

t h e   h e a t h   a n d   j u n g ' s   t r a n s c e n d e n t   f u n c t i o n

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a n   e s s a y

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Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble…

 

And now about the cauldron sing,
Live elves and fairies in a ring,
Enchanting all that you put in.

 

The Tragedy of Macbeth

 

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Introduction: Upon the Heath

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Shakespeare knew well that it is in the untamed margins, the heaths and fens of the soul, where we are most apt to feel the archetypal stirrings of the unconscious. Outside the city walls, beyond the cultivated fields, dwells the magical and the uncanny. The heath is a place of vitality and trouble, beauty and deception, of allurement and terrors. If we do not have our wits about us, as the hitherto noble Macbeth surely did not during his fateful encounter with three witches upon the heath, individuals and groups can become what C.G. Jung termed ergriffen, “seized” by powerful archetypal forces that override and overwhelm ego consciousness (Jung, 1936/). As the religious, social, and cultural institutions that have, broadly speaking, canalized the flow of the human psyche for centuries enter increasingly into a state of flux, more and more people have found their way, purposefully or not, out of the places that had hitherto provided a coherent and comprehensive view of reality and into the heathland of the soul with all of its attendant confusion, promise, and peril.

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Gaps and Spirals: Round about the Cauldron Go

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The heath is a place of ambiguity and blurred edges. Yet the ego craves certainty and fixity, just as Macbeth could not bear the witch’s shadowy insinuation that he would be king and instead took it upon himself to actualize and literalize their prophecy. While engaging with the complex material and imagery of Shadow’s Shadow, two questions repeatedly emerged. In my scholarship and creative work, how do I move about an increasingly nuanced, ambiguous inner and outer landscape without falling victim to the incessant, polarizing siren’s call that is the claiming of certainty? And how can I suitably and confidently express the fruits of research or creative work if uncertainty is an irreducible part of the whole?

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Robert Romanyshyn’s meditation on the application of depth psychology to research, The Wounded Researcher, speaks directly to these difficulties. Drawing upon Jung’s On the Nature of the Psyche, Romanyshyn asserts that the hypothesis of the unconscious has radical implications for epistemology because all knowledge and every worldview can only be provisional if some part of the psyche is inherently unknowable (p. 26). He continues:

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A provisional way of knowing requires the ego not only to balance the tension between conscious and unconscious perspectives, but also, and more importantly, to hold off the allure and comfort of being a true believer by falling into either/or ways of thinking. (p. 27)

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To strike this balance, Romanyshyn stresses the importance of a “metaphoric sensibility” to “inoculate[] one against the temptation” of falling into alluring certainties (p. 27). There will always be a gap between the conscious and unconscious perspective, and it is the symbol that both emerges from and has the capacity to mediate the gap, as Jung described in the essay “The Transcendent Function” (p. 27). They symbol, in Jungian terms, points to something beyond itself: it has one foot in the world of manifestation and one in the archetypal realm. It is a both/and through which meaning and psychic energy (libido, in Jung’s sense of the term) can flow between consciousness and the unconscious.

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In analyzing Jung’s unique and multi-voiced writing style, Susan Rowland posits that Jung structurally enshrined the space between consciousness and the unconscious, Romanyshyn’s “gap”, at the very center of some of his works (2010/2020, p. 32). In these writings, which Rowland terms spiral essays, Jung moves continuously around the “hole”/“whole” at the center of the work, “de-centering rational logos knowledge” in order to “reconnect reason to the rest of the psyche” (p. 33). Rather than come directly at his topic with a single, authoritative voice, Jung takes a “twisting and pivoting” path, drawing upon multiple perspectives and rhetorical styles to draw the reader ever closer to the unconscious Other at the heart of the work. In the spiral essay form,

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the unconscious is revealed as a source of previously unknown in-sight yet always remains mysterious, partially unknowable. In this style of writing, it is the creative psyche that orients the reader, not the rational ego’s logic. (p. 34)

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Round about the cauldron go. In creating Shadow’s Shadow, I drew from both Romanyshyn and Rowland by conceiving of this Jungian Arts-Based Research project in its entirety as spiral in form. It is creative work as witch’s brew, a bubbling concoction of image, text, dream, music, memory, association, and emotion, simmered and stirred until “the charm is full and good”. The work as a whole is comprised of six interwoven parts: introduction, dream, active imagination, film, paratext, and essay. The stirring motion gets the ingredients of the piece interacting with one another in unpredictable ways and creates the spiralic form that “enacts its matter: the centering of the psyche on mystery” (2010/2020, p. 32). The short film, composed in an improvisational, bricolage style, most closely approaches the churning vortex of the unknown at the work’s axis, and it was from this charged and proximal place that new symbols, knowledge, and insight emerged.

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“Trickster is a Bricoleur”: Art Upon the Heath

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Romanyshyn argues that “a place needs to be made for dreams, feelings, intuitions, symptoms, and synchronicities” in order to invite the researcher’s unconscious into a participatory relationship with the inquiry (2013/2021, p. 260) How does one incorporate such an array of elements, to say nothing of the quantitative and qualitative nuts and bolts of scholarly research, while still striving to produce coherent work? A good rule of thumb of analytical psychology: when two or more seemingly ill-fitting or even contradictory elements need to be held together, look to the trickster.

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“Trickster is a bricoleur,” asserts literature scholar Randy Fertel, referring to the French term which means, essentially, “a tinkerer” (2015, p. 225). Bricolage is the art of creating with “the limited range of things that happen to be available,” particularly forgotten, disregarded, or undervalued items (p. 225). Bricolage is by its nature improvisational, jazzlike. Rather than being “characterized by being rational, instrumental, [and] goal driven,” bricolage “orient[s] towards joy: the pleasure of knowing, experiencing, embracing the world, riding at the present moment’s edge” (p. 226). By assembling and reassembling disjointed, discarded, and even stolen elements in novel ways (Hermes, Fertel’s bricoleur par excellence, was also the god of thieves), the bricoleur composts waste products into fertile soil. “The value is created in and by the new context, established by the bricoleur” (p. 230).

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Film is a particularly rich medium for bricolage because it allows for nearly any audio, visual, or textual element to be included and “tinkered” with and combined and juxtaposed with other elements in novel ways. Early in my experimentation with filmmaking, I developed a penchant for working in a rapid, improvisational, and unpolished style, “riding at the present moment’s edge”. Because my film work is primarily a personal practice aimed at personal and psychological growth and not intended for a wide audience, I leave an offering at Hermes’ shrine at the crossroads and freely incorporate and manipulate all manner of copyrighted media (film clips, songs, visual art). I find that this freedom and immediacy is often an important factor in keeping the mediation through symbolic imagery between consciousness and the unconscious humming.

Bricolage filmmaking, particularly when coupled with the practice of conscientiously respecting the “gap” at the center of the work, often deepens and amplifies the symbolic power of the germinal images of the work. Two examples from Shadow’s Shadow exemplify this tendency and highlight how the unconscious participates in the creative process.

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The day after working with the dream images of Part One during an active imagination exercise (recorded in Part Two), my wife and I began watching Joel Coen’s 2021 film The Tragedy of Macbeth. The tense, moody atmosphere and the black and white aesthetic of the film were resonant with the dream and the active imagination, so I quickly recorded ten seconds of film in which three crows circle slowly overhead (the crows are soon revealed to be the three witches Macbeth and Banquo meet upon the heath). The circling crows thus reinforce the spiralic quality of Shadow’s Shadow while also evoke three powerful if unseen additional characters: the three witches stirring away at their cauldron. Further into the Coen’s film, I intuitively decided that Denzel Washington’s Macbeth would “play the role” of the general of the West in Shadow’s Shadow. Washington’s Macbeth presents (or perhaps reveals) the general of the West as a symbol much more depth and ambiguity. Macbeth makes the West’s shadow, not immediately evident in the dream, plain for all to see while still preserving the “shadow’s shadow’s” noble bearing.

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After having nearly finished the film, a curious and seemingly unrelated event occurred (this is covered in greater detail in the paratext section). While cooking one evening, I played the song “Edelweiss” for my two young daughters. The song had an enormous, and totally unexpected, emotional impact upon me. After recognizing the song stirred up powerful memories of childhood, I also sensed that the incident had something to do with Shadow’s Shadow. I began to incorporate the song, as well as the memories and emotions it conjured for me, into the bricolage. Days later I recognized that the “gap” had given rise to another symbol, the “noble white” flower to compliment, mirror, and dialog with the black flower that had arisen during my active imagination exercise. I realized the film needed this symbol in order to be whole, and thus the credit sequence of the film was created in response to this need. Upon finishing the film, I reflected upon Joseph Coppin and Elizabeth Nelson’s words (as well as James Hillman’s, whom they quote) from their book The Art of Inquiry: A Depth Psychological Perspective: “From the moment the inquiry begins until the day it ends, nothing is dismissed as meaningless, random, or inconsequential. On the contrary, “all things, every object and every action, take on a significance to soul’” (2017, p. 178).

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Shadow’s Shadow: Ergriffenheit, Nostalgia, and Polarization

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As a creative work that draws largely upon dream and active imagination for its central imagery, Shadows’s Shadow touches against many themes but in an oblique, phantasmal way. Furthermore, the creative relationship between the conscious and unconscious psyche often develops a symbolic language of its own that is highly specific to the individual, and Shadow’s Shadow is no exception (to note but two examples, the octopus often arises for me as an image of the Self, and the alder borer beetle evokes the koshare, the sacred trickster clown of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico). It is therefore important to spend some time elaborating upon the psychic context in which Shadow’s Shadow emerged, not with the intent to “explain” the work but to invite the reader and viewer into a deeper relationship its images and themes.

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For years, I have been among the many watching the rising tide of antisemitism, neo-Nazi  and ethnonationalist movements, and all-consuming conspiracy theories like QAnon with growing unease. In the months prior to working on Shadow’s Shadow, the tide rose uncomfortably close to home when I learned that the twenty-five-year-old son of a close friend had fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy, misogyny, and idealization of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. A sensitive, thoughtful, yet deeply unhappy young man, he had wandered into the heathlands of the dark web and was seduced by forces that still hold him firmly in their grip.

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In these unsettled and unsettling times in which trust in government and legacy media has eroded, misinformation and disinformation abounds, and charismatic figures populate the so-called attention economy, it behooves us to inquire with a depth psychological lens into the phenomenon of people becoming Ergriffenheit by a the archetypal forces animating a bewildering array of movements and ideologies. Jung conducted just such an analysis in his 1936 essay “Wotan”, in which he suggested that Hitler had been possessed by an archetypal force exemplified by the mercurial Germanic god of wind and storm, bringing much of the German populace with him, “sucked like dry leaves into the roaring whirlwind” (Jung, 1936, p. 198). Central to Jung’s point in “Wotan” is that it was precisely because the West had thought of itself as so rational and civilized that it was left vulnerable to the irrational, immensely powerful archetypal forces of the unconscious that would send it into the calamity of war. As a stunned world watches war rage in Ukraine in our present day, Jung’s opening words in “Wotan” about the European mindset in 1914 hit uncomfortably close to home: “We were even beginning to regard war between civilized nations as a fable, thinking that such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organized world” (p. 179).

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It would be a mistake to regard Vladamir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as driven purely or even primarily by rational realpolitik. Aleksandr Dugin, one of Putin’s primary strategists and key architect of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, is steeped in the esoteric Traditionalist School initiated by French Sufi mystic Rene Guenon and later articulated by thinkers such as the Italian Fascist philosopher Julius Evola. The Tradionalists posit that all contemporary religious systems are degradations of an ancient ur-religion (Hinduism, being the oldest of the major religions, is revered as the closest living ancestor) and that the world progresses through four progressively inferior ages (yugas) of cyclical time. Teitelbaum (2020) details how the Traditionalist School has animated figures of the far-right from Heinrich Himmler and Julius Evola to Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin. Jung crossed paths and even collaborated with several figures who were attracted to Traditionalist beliefs, such as the German professor of Sanskrit Willhelm Hauer (later founder of the “German Faith Movement”) and the Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano (an fascist esotericist who believed that Hitler was a spiritual adept sent to save Earth and had survived World War II by fleeing to Antarctica).

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One of the through-lines connecting youth radicalized online and leaders of nuclear powers under the thrall of Traditionalist School beliefs is the inadequacy of rationality alone to explain let alone understand the complex dynamics at play in this third decade of the 21st century. Another is a deep sense of nostalgia for an simpler, purer, idealized age. Teitelbaum notes that we even hear echoes of the Traditionalist’s anticipation of a return to the satya yuga (golden age) in the slogan “Make America Great Again”.

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One of Jung’s great contributions was to undertake immersive field research upon the heath (particularly during what he called his “confrontation with the unconscious”), to engage with all that he encountered there, and to return to the towns and cities of consciousness to relay his experience and insight. His great concern was the potentially catastrophic combination of modernity’s immense technological power coupled with its naïveté with regard to the unconscious forces of the psyche. He also foresaw that the waning power of the great religions, the destabilizing effects of technological advancement, and the loosening of traditional social bonds would increase traffic in the heathlands as people would inevitably and often unconsciously seek a revitalized relationship with the archetypal realm (or, conversely, the archetypal realm might seek them). “Instinctively the modern man leaves the trodden ways to explore the by-paths and lanes, just as the man of the Greco-Roman world cast off his defunct Olympian gods and turned to the mystery-cults of Asia” (Jung, 1933, p. 218).

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It was in this context – one year after the storming of the U.S. Capitol building, weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in the midst of a deepening atmosphere of political and cultural polarization and proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy-oriented rhetoric – that a dream from four years ago re-entered my conscious awareness.

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The dream, related in full in Part One of Shadow’s Shadow, depicts “The West” and “The East” on the brink of war. The head generals of West and East conduct a clandestine meeting to explore the remote possibility of peace. Their encounter is an archetypal encounter of opposites: The West is male, white, and clad in white armor. The East is female, Asian, and armored in black. These two figures are in the unenviable position of holding the tension of the opposites at the pivot point between increasingly polarized and antagonistic forces.

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Kestrels, flowers, and Jung’s Transcendent Function at Work

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It is only now that the drama and the significance of Shadow’s Shadow, which required dream, reflection, active imagination, creative bricolage, synchronicity, the process of researching and writing this essay, and, perhaps most importantly, time in order to unfold, has begun to reveal itself to me. Shadow’s Shadow is portrait in miniature of Jung’s transcendent function at work.

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Jung first wrote of the transcendent function in 1916 essay of the same name while he was still deep in the trenches of his own confrontation with the unconscious. Here Jung dedicated twenty-five pages to the topic, but Daryl Sharp’s succinct definition gets to the nub of it: “A psychic function that arises from the tension between consciousness and the unconscious and supports their union” (1991, p. 83). Jung referred to this function as “transcendent” because “it makes the transition from one attitude to another organically possible” (1916, p. 73). The transcendent function, in other words, serves to “unstick” the psyche when its conscious and unconscious perspectives are at loggerheads, thus allowing psychological movement and development to resume. In his 1916 essay, Jung – cautiously – recommended active imagination as a means by which to facilitate the transcendent function. Through active imagination, the conscious and the unconscious have an opportunity to directly relate with one another. But this first “depends on becoming aware of unconscious material” through dreams or fantasies (p. 73). Jung continues:

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Once the unconscious content has been given form and the meaning of the formulation is understood, the question arises as to how the ego will relate to this position, and how the ego and the unconscious are to come to terms. This is the second and more important stage of the procedure, the bringing together of opposites for the production of a third: the transcendent function. At this stage it is no longer the unconscious that takes the lead, but the ego. (1916, p. 87)

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With this in mind, it becomes clear that the turning point in Shadow’s Shadow is the moment in which the general of the West (symbolizing the conscious attitude) recognizes the gravity of the situation and raises his arm to the heavens. Here, the psyche produces another symbol, the white kestrel. The West’s act of calling his bird of prey down from the sky, like a military unilaterally declaring a no-fly zone on itself, is the action that prompts a conciliatory response from The East and the arrival of yet another symbol, the black flower with its golden center.

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When The West imitates The East’s gesture by putting his hand upon the ground, he is not only transformed (by turning black himself) but nearly overwhelmed. This is a perilous moment and The East must intervene. Notably, The West’s own flower, the edelweiss which would symbolically create a new yin/yang-like balance between the opposing sides, only emerged days later under quite unexpected circumstances.

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Ultimately, the transcendent function can free up psychic energy by enabling the conscious and unconscious to work in greater concert with one another. Jung calls this “a process not of dissolution but of construction, in which thesis and antithesis both play their part… The standstill is overcome and life can flow on with renewed power towards new goals.”

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Conclusion

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I have little doubt the meaning and significance of Shadow’s Shadow will continue to unfold slowly over time. Jung famously stated that he spent nearly five decades of his long life unpacking and making sense of his confrontation with the unconscious. What has been offered through this project, however, is a deep and personal experience that exemplifies the difficulty, the importance, and the unexpected grace that can come from honoring the unconscious and holding the tension of the opposites. In subtle ways, I know I have been transformed through the process of creating Shadow’s Shadow. It has given me a deeper appreciation for the beauty and elemental power of the heath even as it has heightened my awareness of its dangers. And it has deepened my regard for Hermes, god of thieves and crossroads. God of the heath.

 

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References

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Coppin, J. & Nelson, E. (2017). The art of inquiry: a depth-psychological perspective. Thompson, CT: Spring.

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Fertel, R. (2015). A taste for chaos: the art of literary improvisation. New Orleans, LA: Spring Journal, Inc.

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Jung, C. G. (1967). Wotan (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 10, Civilization in Transition (2nd ed., pp. 1–119). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1936)

 

Jung, C. G. (1966). The transcendent function (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 8: Structure and dynamics of the psyche. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1916)

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Romanyshyn, R. (2013/2021), The wounded researcher: research with soul in mind. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Rowland, S. (2010/2020), C.G. Jung in the humanities: taking the soul’s path. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Rowland, S., and Weishaus, J. (2021). Jungian arts-based research and “the nuclear enchantment of new mexico”. New York, NY: Routledge.

 

Shakespeare, W. (1998) The Tragedy of Macbeth. Eds. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare.

 

Teitelbaum, B. (2021). The war for eternity: the return of traditionalism and the rise of the populist right. London: Penguin Books.

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