Everyone Carries a Shadow
The Shadow-Work Journal and what Carl Jung actually looked like
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One morning a few weeks ago, I received several texts and emails from friends with a link to the same New York Times article before I’d even had my tea. “Have you seen this?” each one asked. “What do you think?”
The link was to a profile on Keila Shaheen and her self-published book, “The Shadow-Work Journal”, which sold over a million copies after becoming a TikTok sensation. The article chronicles her remarkable success and shares that the 25-year-old has since signed a seven-figure, five-book deal with Simon & Schuster, including a highly unusual (if not unheard of) 50/50 profit share.
The term “shadow-work”—upon which Shaheen is quickly building an empire—was derived from classical Jungian psychology and coined in the early ‘90s by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams “to refer to the continuing effort to develop a creative relationship with the shadow.”
In examining the personal shadow, the goal is to reclaim the parts of ourselves formerly deemed unacceptable, either by parents, schooling, friends, or society. We learn over and over in small ways and large what to diminish within ourselves and what to elevate to be accepted and survive. By seeking to reclaim these excluded parts of ourselves as adults, we take ownership of our own lives. We can quickly enhance our quality of life, improve our relationships, and regain stifled creative energy. As anyone who has survived depression or waded through grief knows, a remarkable amount of gold can be found in the least likely of places. There’s a great deal of collective value in owning our shadows too, first because of that reclaimed creativity: we might offer up beauty to the world where there was previously only pain or emptiness. But there is also potential for diminished conflict through increased consciousness.
This withdrawal of the projected shadow is one significant element of Jung’s understanding of a truly ethical life and how to deal with evil in the world. We can’t ever possibly hope to know everything about ourselves, but we can seek to make the unconscious conscious.
“Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote. “But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness.” (CW 11, para. 131)
The more we’re able to see our big reactions (hatred, anger, loathing, disgust, envy) toward others as projections of our own disowned and festering selves, the more we may be able to inoculate ourselves against future, unnecessary fighting and wars. Jung wrote in The Red Book:
Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, and one lays the blame on the other. …If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother. (p.200)
So that morning, tea in hand, I wrote back to those who’d messaged me to say that I had seen the article. I already had a copy of the famed Shadow-Work Journal on my shelf too. I have mixed emotions about it all, I typed. But mostly, I think, I’m happy for Shaheen’s success and for the work she’s helping to popularize.
Our goals align: to bring Jungian psychology and a relationship to the unconscious to a younger population who are too often fed quick-fix solutions and diagnoses to explain their pain. Our world provides few containers for soul. Even when we go to therapy or approach doctors for support with our inner worlds, we’re rarely met with attempts to understand the callings of the soul and the soullessness of the world. There is so much more we can understand about the unconscious, its power over us, and its potential. I’m grateful to know that Shaheen may, hopefully, continue to bring this wisdom and support to the masses.
Shaheen is not a therapist, but I can see that someone with more experience wouldn't have created what she did. A journal made by a long-time clinician would likely have become overly complex and unnecessarily weighed down by exercises and introductions and attempts to prove their expertise. Shaheen eloquently expresses in a video posted by Simon & Schuster, that she created this journal to support people to learn about themselves after she struggled to write on blank journal pages. As so many of us do, she created what she needed. And when it took off, she was surprised and overwhelmed by the unexpected success.
What I also wrote my friends is that I am, of course, also a tad wary about a journal on shadow-work becoming so popular without any formal education or expertise to back it up.
I’m going to assume that the journal has since been fact-checked for the new, expanded edition. But in the self-published version that I own, inaccuracies abound.
Early in the workbook, readers are introduced to Carl Jung with a sweet attribution and photo. The Father of Shadow Work: Carl Jung. I appreciate that intention to ground the journal in the history of the field and provide credit where credit is due.
Except, it’s not a picture of Jung…
A quick image search on Google tells me this is a photo of Carl Schurz, a German-American revolutionary and politician. It’s a strange mistake since there are so many photos of Jung online and I, for one, have never heard of Carl Schurz.
A couple of pages later, there’s a statement about Jung’s impact:
Jung’s theories have been highly influential in the field of psychology and have been further developed by other psychoanalytic theorists, including Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein.
While I rather appreciate this Jung-centric take on who influenced whom, the statement is entirely inaccurate. Jung and Freud’s friendship had ended before Jung developed the vast majority of his theories; I don’t think any Freudian, or Jungian, would say that Freud developed Jung’s theories in any way. And while there are some beautiful parallels between Melanie Klein’s work and Jung’s, Klein was, by all accounts, herself a Freudian.
And then there are the quotes.
The workbook opens with this quote from Jung—or, at least, we’re told it’s from Jung.
Unless you learn to face your own shadows, you will continue to see them in others, because the world outside of you is only a reflection of the world inside of you.
I have no reason to think that Jung didn’t say this. It’s a very reasonable, Jung-esq quote. Except that it strikes me as a bit too on-the-nose and it’s not a line found anywhere in Jung’s Collected Works. I’ve not seen any other source to back it up. It just seems like something Jung might have said. I haven’t bothered to look at the other quotes and find their sources.
But, honestly, I can’t say that any of this matters.
I am far too obsessed with all of these details and the nuances of Jungian psychology to have ever created a journal like this. That’s the truth. It’s remarkably simple, providing questions for readers to write in response to, and Mad Lib sections in which readers fill in the blank part of a sentence with their chosen word. I’ve never used a workbook like this and don’t think I’m the intended audience. If it’s supporting people, I’m thrilled. Facts and photos aside.
So: Brava, Keila Shaheen! I’m happy for her. I’ll hope that her work is leading people towards a deepened curiosity about Jung’s work and the impact it can have on their lives. I’d only hope for a couple of things: That the expanded edition has been fact-checked, and that her future books incorporate insights from authors and clinicians who have been working in this space for years.
A girl can dream.
P.S. This is what Carl Jung looked like.
This beautiful illustration was gifted to me and The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies by the astoundingly talented Nina Bunjevac. Buy her Tarot deck!
Have you used The Shadow-Work Journal? What did you think? What do you think about all of this?
I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, and director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, The New York Post, The Tamron Hall Show, Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, Literary Hub, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast.
Is it possible that we are appalled when facing our own shadows…which appear when seeing a person express her ideas -even get reviews in NYT-without the credentials you might expect behind a published work? I have found this shadow aspect in myself many times and I don’t like her because she exaggerates the importance of the expert, and diminishes free will, even when I needn’t defer to her views as educated.
Satya-Thank you. I was immediately afraid for the integrity of the work and began projecting all kinds of things on Ms Shaheen. And then you calmed me right down with your easy acceptance of the potential broader impact of her journal. Your credibility to me as a Jungian expert is impeccable, but almost more importantly, your capacity to demonstrate compassion and generosity rather than judgment is again, for me, a very welcome and refreshing example.