the boy can see the man's true shadow, but the man cannot

Cut-paper collage created for Kollage Kit theme: "Shadow"

This piece, a collaboration between Tim Lukeman and myself, was inspired by Tim's and my mutual interest in all things Jungian. C. G. Jung's concept of the Shadow, which one writer describes as the bulky bag we drag behind us, is that we push out of consciousness all the fearful, angry, violent, suicidal, sexually perverse, and other "unacceptable" aspects of our psyche. We relegate them to the Shadow.

This is not healthy. As Jung writes, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."

A timely notion indeed, since the winning Presidential candidate in the recent U.S. election spewed a lot of xenophobia during his campaign. The intensity of his invective, his overt hatred for the Other, in whatever form, is typical of what happens when someone shoves all their negative emotions into that long black bag. The President-Elect appears to be unaware of how crazy he sounds, how boorishly he behaves, when those emotions come flying out.