The Shadow

An essay on the Jungian concept of the shadow, psychedelics and the difference between being good and being whole.

A very interesting thing happened around the middle of the 19th century (other than Moldavia and Wallachia being united to form the brave country of Romania, which is what you were also thinking of, I’m sure).

The Brothers Grimm, whose stories you’ve probably grown up with too, were republishing their famous collection of stories from 1812, with one significant shift: several of their mother characters had been turned into step-mothers.

There are many reasons that suggest why they would’ve made this change. One is the high mortality of childbearing women at the time, which explains the presence of the step-mother. But there’s a deeper, far more intellectually titillating reason, which has to do with the society’s need to preserve the pure, unconditionally-loving, saintly aspect of the mother (and also misogyny and patriarchy, but let’s not ruin a perfectly fine day by discussing that).

As Leslie Jamison highlights in her beautifully vulnerable essay Daughter of a Ghost, “the figure of the stepmother effectively became a vessel for the emotional aspects of motherhood that were too ugly to attribute to mothers directly (ambivalence, jealousy, resentment) and those parts of a child’s experience of her mother (as cruel, aggressive, withholding) that were too difficult to situate directly in the biological parent-child dynamic. […] The shadow figure of the fairy-tale stepmother is a predatory archetype reflecting something true of every mother: the complexity of her feelings toward her child, and her child’s feelings towards her.”

So wise and well put-together, so often we struggle with our own complexity. We have a hard time accepting our darkness, but also embracing our true, best qualities. We blame some for our own shortcomings, and idolise others for the beauty we can’t seem to find in ourselves. You could say we’re our worst enemies - but what if we didn’t need to be?