Summary Of Robert Johnson's Owning Your Own Shadow

For all my life I’ve known my cousin to be overweight. His mother, my aunt, would not address this issue even though it has been brought up many times at various family gatherings throughout the years. She would continue to feed him anything and everything he wanted. I think personally it had something to do with her being overweight herself. Is this some type of vicarious life she is trying to live through her son? Or is she projecting something negative about herself onto him so that she doesn’t have to deal with that negative thing? In Robert Johnson’s Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, he writes about what he believes everyone is in possession of. The shadow. He describes the shadow as a “curious dark

Like a mirror image of ourselves. A doppelganger if you will. He gives the example of when Goethe was confronted with the vision of his doppelganger. Johnson writes that Goethe’s vivid experience of the vision of his doppelganger (shadow) happens to few, but nonetheless your shadow is always there. Like a mirror image of yourself that always follow you. Your light is everything that is good in you or everything that is opposite of your shadow. Johnson compared this to a dream he had. He dreamt that he was in a wind storm at night trying to protect this small light that was cupped in his hands. He saw a big black figure behind him that was terrifying. He realized that that big black figure that was following him represented his shadow. Also he realized that the small light that was cupped in his hands needed to be protected from that shadowy figure. He is conveying that his dream is a metaphor for how we should keep our light safe and away from our

About his mentor, he wrote “Jung had gone through a highly refined enculturating process, from his childhood in a rigid Swiss Protestant home to the severe discipline of his medical training. Long hours of concentrated attention gave him a very focused personality. But this was at the cost of ignoring the dark and primitive aspects that appeared in his dream. The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side” (p21). He is saying that it is dangerous to only focus on the good side of your personality and ignore the bad side. Keeping those two sides balanced is the key to being holy (standing at the fulcrum of the seesaw). “To own one’s own shadow is to reach a holy place— an inner center— not attainable in any other way. To fail this is to fail one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life”. Johnson wrote about what I think is my aunt’s affliction. To lay your shadow upon someone else, be it negative or positive, is what Johnson calls shadow projection. He writes “unless we do conscious work on it, the shadow is almost always projected; that is, it is neatly laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it” (p34). An example of this is my aunt and her son’s situation. Since she is overweight herself, I believe she projected her negative eating habits onto her son. Even though the shadow is often seen as a negative thing, there