THE BODY AS THE SHADOW “Man’s body is a problem to him that has not been explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Man’s very insides—his self—are foreign to him.” Denial of Death, Ernest Becker, “Most of the time, violent sensations seemed to rampage through muscle and vein to impel him to crude actions. His body was taut and tense as if to feel that in this way he could control these violent sensations. Feelings of weakness and helplessness make autistic children feel that they must be in control… Work with these children has made me realize that sensations are the beginnings of psychic life. To paraphrase Freud, the “body ego” is “first and foremost” a “sensation ego”. We have all used “sensation objects” and “sensation shapes”. It is when these become compulsive and addictive, and are used inappropriately to the exclusion of more socialized ways of dealing with sensation-driven impulses, that they can be called “autistic sensation objects” and “autistic sensation shapes”. As a result, such children’s sensation life has gone awry. It has become perverse. From time to time, Denis feels that he spills, spits out, throws, or stares the violent sensations out of him to a comer of the room, where they form a shadow on the wall, of which he is then frightened (the beginnings of projection). At this stage the Jungian image of “the shadow” seems a potent and pertinent one. It is formed from the stormy sensations of his violent impulsions… An important difference between the violence of autistic children and that of mass murderers is that …autistic children do not have proper fantasies. It is a progress when they begin to do so.” Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients by Frances Tustin JUNG AND REICH: THE BODY AS SHADOW John Conger Strictly speaking the shadow is the repressed part of the ego, and represents what we prefer or are unable to acknowledge about ourselves. The body which hides beneath clothes, often blatantly expresses what we consciously deny. In the image we present to others, we often do not want to show our anger, our anxiety, our sadness, our constrictedness, our depression or our need. In 1935 Jung lectured in England about his general theories in the Tavistock lectures, (Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice, p. 23) and in passing indicated how the body might stand as the shadow. He saw that often the body is the “personification of this shadow of the ego.”

We do not like to look at the shadow-side of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized society who have lost their shadow altogether, have lost the third dimension, and with it they have usually lost the body. The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing.

Indeed the body is the shadow insofar as it contains the tragic history of how the spontaneous surging of life energy was murdered and rejected in a hundred ways until the body becomes a deadened object, the victory of an over-rationalized life promoted at the expense of the more primitive and natural vitality. For those who can read the body, it holds the record of our rejected side revealing what we dare not speak, expressing our current and past fears. The body as the shadow is predominantly the body as “character,” the body as bound energy which is unrecognized and untapped, unacknowledged and unavailable.

1 What don’t you like about your body? What specific features or parts? 2 What does you body say about you that you would prefer to hide? What specific areas? 3 What is the shadow side of you? How is your shadow reflected in your Body? …………………………………………. 1 Are you grounded? How can you tell? What keeps you from being grounded? 2 Do you have “standing”? To whom, where, when? 3 Are you often lost “in your head” spacey? 4 Are you aware of your sexuality? In what ways? 5 Do you have a strong, average or weak sex drive? 6 In what ways are you not oriented toward pleasure? 7 How badly do you want to get off the planet? Were there times in your life when you felt very alien and strange? 8 Do you let down? When, how often? 9 What have you failed at? How do you keep yourself from failing? 10 How do you hold yourself up? ……………………………………………………… 1 Mostly are you proud of yourself or ashamed? 2 Do you have a strong sense of yourself or is your “self” shaky? 3 To what extent and how is your sense of Self reflected in your body posture? 4.What is the difference between the upper half of your body and the lower half? 5 What is the difference between your left and right side? 6 Under what circumstances are you graceful? 7 What parts of your body feel disconnected, uncoordinated, stiff, foreign, unknown? ………………………………………………………………………. 1 In what ways are you armoured? 2 How do you defend yourself against the world? 3 How do you stay out of contact? 4 How do you make contact? 5 How would you describe your defense structure, your character? Does it work as protection? How does it fail.?