The Road to Individuation

It is easier to live in a comfortable illusion and believe that people are basically good, and that you are too. Taken to an extreme, this can become pathological. The person that does not want to see reality for what it is does not solve their problems, but only compounds them.

Where bad eyesight can no longer see the evil impulse as such, on account of its refinement,-there man sets up the kingdom of goodness ; and the feeling of having now gone over into the kingdom of goodness brings all those impulses (such as the feelings of security, of comfortableness, of benevolence) into simultaneous activity, which were threatened and confined by the evil impulses. Consequently, the duller the eye so much the further does goodness extend ! Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the populace and of children ! Hence the gloominess and grief (allied to the bad conscience) of great thinkers. –Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Your shadow is the dark repressed side that dwells within your unconscious. It represents the part of you that you have, knowingly or unknowingly, refused to acknowledge.

“The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly—for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible tendencies.” –The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Carl Jung

The Persona

Transcending your persona is very difficult. Jung identified two ways in which your persona manifests. The first is by unwittingly mimicking the behavior of your same-sex parent. The second is by identifying fully with your profession or social role.

You start out as a blank canvas, and with time, society pressures you into crafting a persona – a mask that you wear that allows you to behave in ways that converge with the expectations of others. And this process involves several stages of iteration, until eventually, the persona that you have created dominates your identity – at the expense of the socially unacceptable parts of your nature.

*Read The Dichotomy of the Self *

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Related posts:

1. Is Manipulation Wrong?
2. A Pending Response to Time Will Tell
3. The Ego Death
4. What is Happiness?