“The Shadow and the Child” – An Appreciation of Patricia Berry’s lecture

Newsletter; Vol. 20, No. 4, January 1995

“The Shadow and the Child” – An Appreciation of Patricia Berry’s lecture

Patricia Berry’s recent presentation to the Society reflected all the advantages to be gained by an archetypal approach. With its shifting perspectives and interplay of darkness and light, it led us, not into increasing abstraction, but into concrete reality, into life, into the dichotomies of a rapist’s awareness and that of his child victim in the poem which marked Berry’s conclusion.

Berry’s opening discussion focused on one of those paradoxes which typify so much of Jung’s thought. “The ego,” in his words, “is the most unconscious part of the personality.” How could this be possible—that the centre of consciousness in the personality was the most unconscious part?

In reply, Berry drew on her own experience of an alien culture, in her case, Switzerland, when she was in her early twenties. For the first time she began to question all her assumptions and certainties and to begin to know what was meant by the phrase “ugly American.”

Until we can see ourselves from another perspective, we remain consciously unaware of what we are and are not. Painful as this loss of identity may be, shadow awareness is necessary to any enlargement and enrichment of the personality.

In contrast to the emphasis placed on shadow work and the unconscious by Jungian psychology and the other schools of depth psychology, contemporary psychotherapy is concerned with ego-strengthening or empowerment with the result of a vast increase in unconsciousness. Empathy, relationship, connectedness and the capacities to listen, let be, and relate in a mutual non-hierarchical way remain neglected and undeveloped in the shadow of developmental psychology.

Among the Japanese, the child is viewed as a stranger at birth and its development becomes one of increasing connection to its family, its institutions and the state. Merger, fusion, joining in western society represent negative values. Our child begins in a state of merger and moves toward increasing independence. Rather than the separation implied by this development, Berry would advocate differentiation, a process originating within the child.

In collective consciousness, this is the age of the child. Yet, in place of the powerful child of Freud’s thought, or Jung’s child who had the support of the archetypes, the mundus imaginalis, today’s child in current therapies is seen as an innocent victim of events, of abuse and incest. Its shadow is the child as omnipotent.

As Jungians, our collective is not collective consciousness, but the collective unconscious. Recognizing the shadow of collective consciousness, we neglect our own shadow, that is, the collective, familial, common and ordinary. With our focus on inner work and transformation, we have lost the actual events and people of childhood. Behind the too many transformations remains a lost child, a child who may be helped only through literalism, although the literal itself is an illusion.

The therapist should imagine the story of abuse as more literal than may be the case and go from the literal to the more literal. It is the coagulation of the alchemical process. None of this is achieved through shadow awareness but by reductive questions which go straight to the child. Getting in touch with the child gets us in touch with the feeling of abuse and with the abused child’s body where the feeling of abuse is experienced.

Jungians, in Patricia Berry’s view, with their century long tradition of the various depth psychologies, have a sophisticated psychological awareness that may be lacking among other practitioners in the field of mental health. They are aware that everything that exists has shadow possibilities.

Fittingly, we are left with the caution that we keep our awareness of the shadow of shadow awareness. This, our speaker reminds us, has been the leitmotiv of all that she has said.

—Alice Johnston