Shadow, Projection, and the Limits of Loving-Kindness

The "split" in our larger culture mirrors our own internal psychological split, and can leave us oscillating between rage and depression. Compassion isn't enough: we are called to deeper work now.

“As we have seen, negative projections cause mainly venomous or rancorous speech that strikes each other like arrows; the tongue is the instrument for lies and slander— and not alone for such malicious attacks but also for every possible idealistic, intellectualistic nonsense, disseminated as it is by means of slogans like ‘welfare,’ existence,’ ‘security’… Evil often hides behind idealism— and behind -isms in general, which are often as not simply labels disguising a very unspiritual doctrinairism…Behind such -isms are the projections of our own inner unrealized problem of the opposites. Insight into this problem, however, seems as yet impossible for many people.”

—Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology

Australian artist Natasha Walsh, Dear Brett (the blue room), 2022

A few years ago, I got up from my meditation cushion, where I’d spent half an hour doing loving-kindness meditation. “May all beings have happiness, and the causes of happiness,” etc.

Within minutes, on my 10-minute commute to work, I found myself in a two-way road rage incident that ended with us both arriving at the yoga studio together… where the other driver was disgusted and further enraged to find that I was the person who was about to lead her yoga class (“IT’S YOU!!” she said, with disgust).

Needless to say, she left and never came back.

Humiliating as this was, it was also an incredibly funny case of synchronicity that taught me a lesson I can never forget. I was forced to face my hypocrisy: that all the loving-kindness and compassion I’d been trying to cultivate wasn’t enough to eradicate my shadow. At the slightest provocation, I was full of self-righteous rage, and a bitter hatred that I was not able to acknowledge consciously.

The reality is that I am an empathetic, generous, loving person. I am also a cranky b*tch who is struggling, just like everyone else, to love her neighbor. And no matter how good it feels to polish that “compassionate Buddhist” persona, I have to look honestly at all the pieces of who I am if I really want to do no harm.

We contain multitudes

“Splitting” is the psychological term for this— the way in which we silo off these parts of ourselves. If it weren’t for that confrontation at the studio that day, the road rage would have arisen during the drive and then slipped down out of consciousness again, so that I could continue to “be” the peaceful, loving yoga teacher persona I wanted to show the world.

I remembered this incident last week, after the death of Charlie Kirk, which is further “splitting” our country. Though I had never heard of the man, it quickly became aware that here was a man who (like all of us) held in himself what Jungians often refer to as “the opposites;” many of us experienced him as a motivational Christian speaker who held values we share. Others of us experienced him as a racist, white supremacist advocate for violence. As a nation, we are unable to reconcile the “opposites” in this man, just as we are unable to reconcile them collectively in ourselves. Not only is this tragic, it’s becoming increasingly dangerous.

The natural response from many respected spiritual leaders (and well-intentioned yoga teachers, etc.) has been to urge compassion and loving-kindness. These are critical qualities, but they don’t go far enough. Parties on both sides of the aisle are applying meditation, prayers, and compassion. And if you think that the other party isn’t doing it right, or going far enough in their personal work— well, that may be evidence enough of just why this work is insufficient. We must find in ourselves— and learn to see in others— the complexity of the opposites.

Jung said famously,

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

He also added:

“The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

Loving-kindness, compassion, and prayer practices, if not balanced with thoughtful exploration and understanding of our own innate tendencies toward evil, aggression, can actually serve to further entrench and solidify our ideas about our own self-righteousness and the Other’s evil nature.

Or, as Matthew 7:3 says,

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Real “Shadow Work”

The splitting of our culture can feel unbearably heavy, paralyzing, depressing. I often feel defeated and powerless. But we each have more agency within ourselves than we know: we can reclaim the parts of ourselves we’ve cut off. We can recognize ourselves in the Other.

“Jung often maintained that if one had in himself only 3% of all the evil one sees in the other fellow or projects onto him, it would still be wiser to look one’s 3% in the eye… because it is only in oneself that one can change anything.”

—Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology.

Barbara Hannah quotes Jung as saying that World War III might be “just barely” diverted: “I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves,” he said. Each of us holds the seeds for peace and for violence. How we each deal with our own unresolved psychological material is key to the world we want to live in. What you do matters.

As one of my mentors,

Satya Doyle Byock

has said, “Weapons are always literalizing something that is symbolic… the potential of really understanding the work of Jung’s psychology is that we catch this material earlier and earlier so that it doesn’t need to be literalized and it doesn’t need to be created in such a crude and violent manner externally.”

What am I projecting onto others that I am ignoring in myself? What really stops me from understanding and loving the Other? Where am I contributing to a lack of real compassion and love in our world? What am I failing to own or acknowledge in myself-- good or bad-- that keeps me from connecting authentically with others?

The opposites in the “Other”

At the risk of writing more than anyone wants to read, I want to share one more piece that I am struggling with personally.

I received a Substack email yesterday from Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist and philosopher that has been incredibly influential in my thinking about the left and right hemispheres of the brain and their relationship to both modern culture and archetypal masculine and feminine ideas. I was flabbergasted— speechless, even— to see that he was sharing what he called a “brilliant” post from an ultra-conservative, anti-trans psychologist.

How do I reconcile his support of what feels like one-sidedly harmful rhetoric with the wit and wisdom I’d respected so far? I felt absolutely sick. The temptation is to write him off; to (at least internally) “cancel” him. But this morning, with a little more emotional distance, I can see that what was most painful to me in receiving this email was a feeling that this man isn’t on my side. That I felt betrayed because I, in some way, expected him to be “one of us”— another way of polishing my persona and shoring up my own one-sided identity of self-righteous “isms,” as von Franz says. In fact, if I’m honest, the post he shared had some valid points about liberal one-sidedness (though it failed to acknowledge that the same is true of conservatives).

In some ways, this is the same thing I’ve been saying since January, when I began losing clients and readers for saying, "I don’t know how to hold these opposites.” But literally every day is a chance to practice this work; to try to metabolize more than we thought we were capable of. I can’t help but improve if I keep trying.

In my own body, it makes me literally sick. As I write this, I feel nauseous. My body, holding this tension, experiences it as literal digestive distress. It is not easy, it’s not comfortable. But there is a sense of choice; of growth; of embodied resistance. Given the external circumstances, that’s enough for me right now.