What if you’ve got it all wrong: the whole idea of who you are, your identity and how you want to be seen. What if there’s more to your personality: another dimension maybe, or even a caliginous shadow, harbouring in it the nasty demonic tendencies of your very being? While this idea may seem bizarre, the truth of it is hard to deny. There lies in all of us a mysterious unconscious realm seated within the deepest recesses of our personality. This is the Shadow archetype, the Id, or the dark side. Devoid of the conscious light, it is in this tenebrous side where thrives the primitive, malicious, even creative aspects of our being that have long been repressed by the Freudian Ego. Engulfed in obscurity, the Shadow largely remains hidden from the understanding of the Self, making us live in pretence and deception.

Propounded by the very renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the concept of the Shadow operates on the Pleasure Principle. Subdued ideas, primitive instincts, desires, drives, abjections, fears, all are encompassed by this concept, which further mirrors the latent, unknown and dark aspects of the psyche that the conscious Ego fails to resonate with. The Shadow is of two types: the personal and the collective. While the personal Shadow pertains to the individual psyche, the collective Shadow emanates from a united unconsciousness of society-members, a projection of which has resulted in the greatest of evils, in the form of prejudice advanced by society against other communities to conceal their own weaknesses.

Lying under unfathomable depths, the Shadow develops alongside the Ego and Persona. As a child gets culturally conditioned to differentiate between good and bad, certain possessed behaviours and qualities are evaluated by them as deplorable and, ultimately, despised and rejected. In the whole process of growing up, humans also tend to masquerade their identity and don on a façade to gain greater acceptance in society. This is known as a Persona. But the Persona only hides the Shadow, it doesn’t eliminate its gestating potency to unleash the worst in human beings.

It is essential for one to accept the Shadow rather than seeking validation in the Persona. For a harmonious universe, the intermingling of both the aspects of good – bad, order - chaos, the yin and yang, becomes necessary. Likewise, for a balanced personality, one needs to unearth the dark aspects of one’s soul from the dreary suppressions of the Ego and integrate them with their conscious side. This is extremely important, for the very reason that each time your Ego represses a part of you, your Shadow gets denser, sprouting in it the destructive potential to completely overshadow your conscious light and cast on you a dark cloud of gloom for the rest of your life. A convenient trick is to think like the antagonist or villain in books or movies, learning to work with the people one hates or feels irritated around, and identifying the lies that they can unravel to challenge ‘the good’―both in society and in themselves.

The point of exploring one’s Shadow is not to bring forth some inner Machiavelli. It is about ensuring one truly understands oneself and accepts that there is a very horrible, unspeakable side to one’s own psyche. Without such knowledge and such humility, one is bound to remain a Nietzschean Last Man, afraid of life and it’s problems, driven not by a sense of true purpose but primal instincts. However, by overcoming the Shadow and directing its destructive forces on the right path, one can achieve true inner peace and the ability to fully realise oneself as The Super Man―thereby taming the demon within to achieve inner peace.