THE SHADOW ARCHETYPE: CASTING LIGHT ON EVIL

One of the greatest contributions to the understanding of the phenomenon of evil, a phenomenon that has plagues humanity since its beginnings and intrigued the minds of the greatest thinkers in history, has been provided by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. In his theory of the collective unconscious, where the archetypes reside, Jung devoted particular attention to the archetype of the Shadow, one that actualizes the issue of evil more than any other archetype. All archetypes (and other concepts in Jung’s theory in general) undeniably operate on a continuum of polarities, ranging from saintly good to pure devilish, yet the Shadow is most readily recognized as the one most directly associated with evil. This paper is going to present, first, a historical overview of the development of the idea of the origin of evil, followed by a definition of the Shadow archetype as well as the psychological mechanisms that contribute to the formation of the personal and collective Shadow in order to aid the understanding of both the psychological creation of our notions of evil and the most acceptable ways of understanding and dealing with it. Finally, we are going to present the most famous actualizations of the Shadow archetype in English literature.