Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2003, 48, 29–46

Encountering the shadow in rites of

passage: a study in activations
Ann Casement, London

Abstract: Jung’s concept of the shadow is explored in this paper through his writings on
its realization and assimilation in which he says the shadow may be experienced as the
regressed and denied ‘other self’ in each individual. However, this is not the whole pic-
ture, and he also points to the fact that the shadow contains more than something merely
negative. While in no way treating them as ‘patients’, the paper will also touch on the
experience of the anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, and the writer, Joseph Con-
rad, in their personal encounters with the shadow. All three encountered the shadow
whilst going through rites of passage of their own and each owes much to the Romantic
Movement. In this context, attention is directed to the writings of the philosopher and
theologian, Johann Gottfried von Herder, who discovered a deeper understanding of his
destiny in the course of a sea voyage.

Key words: collective shadow, Conrad, evil, Herder, Jung, Malinowski, rites of passage,
shadow.

The anthropologist and psychiatrist, Roland Littlewood, writes that ‘a malign

shadow or double had been a common preoccupation of Romantic and Sym-
bolist writers . . . a schema which was to be elaborated most fully by Jung’
(Littlewood 1996, p. 9). This phenomenon had long been the subject of Roman-
tic literature as witnessed in the writings of Goethe, Poe, Hoffman, Shelley,
Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, Wilde. Jung was acquainted with these
writers and certainly alludes to the Jekyll/Hyde story – amongst others – in his
writings on his own concept of the shadow.
According to Jung, the shadow is experienced by the subject’s ego as the infer-
ior, base and primitive side of the personality – one’s own dark side. As he
points out, however, this is not the whole picture, as contained in the shadow
are potentialities of the greatest dynamism. It depends on the preparedness and
attitude of the conscious mind whether the ideas and images connected with
them will be experienced as constructive or catastrophic.
A great deal of the work in Jungian analysis involves coming to terms with
the shadow and both Freud and Jung contributed to the uncovering of the split
between the light and dark sides of the human psyche. Their predecessor, Janet,

0021–8774/2003/4801/29 © 2003, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
30 Ann Casement

was interested in it in the context of pathology and noted parallels between

conscience double and spirit possession as well as witchcraft accusations from
the middle ages. He also studied methods applied to its treatment, ranging from
popular healing to psychotherapy.
Jung’s own thinking about the shadow derived in part from neuro-psychiatrists
like Janet in relating it to the phenomenon of double consciousness, in which two
different personalities co-exist within a single body. However, as with everything
in his metapsychology, he had to experience the phenomenon himself before it
became incorporated and this applied equally to the shadow. The time of his
encounter with the latter was the rite of passage that followed the break with
Freud during his ‘fallow period’ from 1913 to 1918. This was a time for Jung of
intense preoccupation with the images of his own unconscious, and the prepara-
tory work for Psychological Types (Jung 1971) took place during this period.
The book is devoted to an exploration of the shadow although the term itself
only appears sparingly within its pages. As Jung says about it: ‘This work
sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed
from Freud’s and Adler’s’ (Jung 1971, p. v). His definition of the shadow in this
book equates it with the unconscious as follows:
For the sake of understanding, it is, I think, a good thing to detach the man from his
shadow, the unconscious, otherwise the discussion is threatened with an unparalleled
confusion of ideas. One sees much in another man that does not belong to his con-
scious psychology, but is a gleam from his unconscious, and one is deluded into attrib-
uting the observed quality to his conscious ego.

(Jung 1971, para. 268)

In another work, Jung goes on to say:

. . . it fares with us all as with Brother Medardus in Hoffmann’s tale The Devil’s Elixir:
somewhere we have a sinister and frightful brother, our own flesh-and-blood-
counterpart, who holds and maliciously hoards everything that we would so willingly
hide under the table.

(Jung 1966, para. 51)

Elsewhere he writes of the dangers of identification with the shadow in relation

to Nietzsche’s bitter feud with Wagner.
A whole man, however, knows that his bitterest foe, or indeed a host of enemies, does
not equal that one worst adversary, the ‘other self’ who dwells in his bosom. Nietzsche
had Wagner in himself, and that is why he envied him Parsifal . . . Therefore Nietzsche
became one stigmatized by the spirit . . . when the ‘other’ whispered the ‘Ecce Homo’ in
his ear. Which of them ‘broke down under the cross’ – Wagner or Nietzsche?

(Ibid, para. 43)

Elsewhere I have pointed to certain difficulties inherent in Jung’s view of

Nietzsche as a result of his projections into the latter and it is as well to note here
that both men wrote of the declining power of Christianity as a world religion.
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 31

In Jung’s approach, the personal shadow is identified with the contents of the
personal unconscious, which have been repressed because they are unacceptable
to the individual’s ego. The contents of the personal unconscious are, in turn,
linked to those of the collective unconscious. This paper will explore how
shadow contents from both realms may be activated at the time of a rite of pas-
sage in an individual’s life. When this happens, the result may be an encounter
with evil, which, as Jung says, is a psychological reality in opposition to good.
Evil, according to Jung, expresses itself symbolically in religious tradition as
well as in personal experience.
He describes an important encounter with the shadow in a dream he had at
the age of twelve.
I was in the rather gloomy courtyard of the Gymnasium at Basel, a beautiful medieval
building. From the courtyard I went through the big entrance where the coaches used
to come in, and there before me was the Cathedral of Basel, the sun shining on
the roof of coloured tiles, recently renovated, a most impressive sight. Above the
Cathedral God was sitting on his throne. I thought, ‘How beautiful it all is! What a
wonderful world this is – how perfect, how complete, how full of harmony’. Then
something happened, so unexpected and so shattering that I woke up. From his
throne God ‘dropped’ a vast faeces on the Cathedral and smashed it to pieces

(Bennet 1961, p. 16)

For Jung, this was the revelation of the shadow of the Christian God. Another
example quoted by Jung of the shadow as compensatory to a consciously held
attitude is contained in a dream of Nebuchadnezzar from the Book of Daniel.
At the height of his power, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream which foretold disas-
ter if he did not humble himself. It showed him degraded to the level of an animal.
Daniel interpreted the dream correctly but Nebuchadnezzar refused to listen
and fell victim to a psychosis. As Jung says:
Wholeness is not so much perfection as completeness. Assimilation of the shadow
gives a man body, so to speak: the animal sphere of instinct, as well as the primitive
or archaic psyche, emerge into the zone of consciousness and can no longer be
repressed enough by fictions and illusions . . . Recognition of the shadow is reason
enough for humility, for genuine fear of the abysmal depths in man.

(Jung 1954/1966, para. 452)

The role of the shadow in Jung’s approach

As has already been indicated, the concept of shadow plays a central role in the
Jungian approach. When its contents are closely allied to those of archetypal
shadow in the collective unconscious, they are marked by strong affect, which is
often obsessional and possessive. Above all, shadow contents are autonomous
and usually represent all those aspects of an individual that they prefer not to
know about – the weak, inferior, regressed parts. All these attributes can coalesce
to form another personality in opposition to the conscious ego personality.
32 Ann Casement

Jung appears to have borrowed the term shadow from poetry as evidenced
by the following:
. . . the ‘realization of the shadow’, the growing awareness of the inferior part of the
personality, which should not be twisted into an intellectual activity, for it has far
more the meaning of a suffering and a passion that implicate the whole man. The
essence of that which has to be realized and assimilated has been expressed so trench-
antly and so plastically in poetic language by the word ‘shadow’ that it would be
almost presumptuous not to avail oneself of this linguistic heritage.

(Jung 1960, para. 409)

Jung goes on to say that confrontation with the shadow is an ethical problem of
the first magnitude, which is experienced by those who are faced with the necessity
of assimilating and integrating the personalities of the unconscious. It is this
ethical – he often calls it religious – aim of confrontation with the shadow that dif-
ferentiates Jung’s approach to it from Freud’s. This ethical problem often presents
in a pathological way through, for instance, a neurosis, when the individual is
forced to take responsibility for his psychic condition. At other times, there may
be a long gestation in the unconscious before ‘bursting point’ – William James’s
expression – is reached and there is an eruption of shadow into consciousness.
The shadow is the humanizing part of every individual and cannot be
avoided. As Jung says: ‘The shadow is a living part of the personality and there-
fore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or
rationalized into harmlessness’ (Jung 1959a, para. 44). As has already been
touched on above, the evolution of a classical Jungian analysis proceeds along
its course by first concentrating on assimilating into consciousness aspects of
the shadow and then to a relationship with the anima/animus. ‘Integration of
the shadow marks the first stage in the analytic process, and that without it a
recognition of anima and animus is impossible’ (Jung 1959b, para. 42). Jung
says that if the encounter with the shadow is the ‘apprentice piece’ in an indi-
vidual’s development, that with the anima/animus is the ‘master-piece’ (Jung
1959a, para. 61).
A paper by John Beebe and Donald Sandner illustrates the demonic charge
of the return of the repressed shadow. Dissociation and possession are too often
the responses of a weak ego to eruption of shadow personalities. Possession
tends to produce what Jung called ‘a shadow government of the ego’ (Jung
1966, para. 196). As Beebe and Sandner express it in their paper:
Working through any split requires not only disidentification by the ego from the
more familiar pole of the complex, but also affective recognition of the contrary pole.
Such recognition requires immersion in the side that has been unconscious’

(Sandner & Beebe 1995, p. 345)

This paper is important in helping to bring insight into possession of a weak

ego by shadow aspects – a Jungian way of looking at the current phenomenon
of multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder. Beebe and Sandner are
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 33

rightly critical of those who ‘have denigrated the ego and its defenses as mere
identification with the hero archetype’ (Sandner & Beebe 1995, p. 345). Instead,
like Jung, they point to the necessity for a strong centre of consciousness as well
as the watchful and containing presence of the analyst as the prerequisites in
being able to assimilate shadow contents as they emerge during analysis.

Jung, Malinowski, Conrad

In seeking to explore the link between the shadow and rites of passage, this
paper will examine the dual aspect of the anthropologist, Bronislaw
Malinowski, and the fictional – but based on personal experience – account of
Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Malinowski goes into his night sea jour-
ney with an ego strong enough (just) to withstand the encounter with the
shadow. His public face is represented in works such as Argonauts of the West-
ern Pacific (1922), which text will be used in the present paper; his shadow, on
the other hand, was hidden from public view in his secret diary until his widow
published it after his death in 1967.
The fictional character Kurtz, for his part, is not able to withstand the
encounter with the shadow and becomes possessed by it. Conrad’s description
of his death goes as follows:
Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before,
and hope never to see again . . . I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent.
I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven
terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of
desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete know-
ledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry
that was no more than a breath, ‘The horror! The horror!’

(Conrad 1995, p. 111)

Conrad, like Jung and Malinowski, takes psychology as his starting point,
although with Malinowski this would be behavioural psychology. The latter
was interested in testing universal theories, hence his long dialogue with Freud
and Ernest Jones about the applicability of the Oedipus complex in a matri-
lineal society such as that of the Trobrianders. The latter are inhabitants of
a group of islands near New Guinea in the Pacific, where Malinowski did his
fieldwork during the First World War. He challenged the social and psycho-
logical context of the Oedipus complex amongst these people and said that the
sister, not the mother, was the focus of incestuous desires; likewise the focus of
hostility was the authoritarian mother’s brother and not the father.
Above all, Conrad, Jung and Malinowski were empiricists and, for the latter,
this was expressed in the way that he saw the function of different phenomena
in the context of the society in which they were embedded.
Malinowski would no doubt have used a functionalist approach if he had
turned his attention to multiple personalities. As for Jung, we know that he was
34 Ann Casement

drawn to the study of phenomena such as multiple personalities, for instance,

in his work on complexes where he refers to them as ‘splinter psyches’ (Jung
1960, para. 203). He also makes another point:
The tendency to split means that parts of the psyche detach themselves from con-
sciousness to such an extent that they not only appear foreign but lead an autono-
mous life of their own. It need not be a question of hysterical multiple
personality . . . but merely so-called ‘complexes’ that come entirely within the scope of
the normal.

(Ibid., para. 253)

Two short quotes from Jung on double consciousness will suffice for the
moment: ‘Doubtless it is hardly possible for two consciousnesses to express
themselves simultaneously in a single individual in a blatantly recognizable
way. That is why these states usually alternate’ (ibid., para. 351). Also: ‘Such
a dissociation . . . is an originally conscious content that became subliminal
because it was repressed on account of its incompatible nature’ (ibid., para.
366).

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942)

The anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneer of anthropological
fieldwork, was himself a Conradian character who embodied the characteris-
tics of the lone, intrepid ethnographer immersing himself in ‘exotic’ cultures.
This paper attempts an exploration of Malinowski’s journey and of the trans-
forming power on his ego personality through his immersion in another culture.
This journey was a literal, concrete one, but it is plain to see from his secret
diary the effect it had on him at a psychological level.
Malinowski’s own conversion to anthropology came about by chance. He was
originally a physicist who, during a prolonged illness, read Frazer’s The Golden
Bough, which led to an interest in and eventual change to anthropology as
his career. At the beginning of World War I he was a research student of
C. G. Seligman, the founder of anthropology at the London School of Economics
(LSE). At the time of the outbreak of hostilities, Malinowski was attending a meet-
ing of anthropologists in Australia. The question of his internment became a press-
ing matter as, although Polish in origin, he was technically an Austrian subject.
As with so many other heroic journeys undertaken unwittingly this one came
about by chance. In order to avoid internment, Malinowski, aided by an
enlightened Australian administration, set off to do fieldwork in the South Sea
Islands. To be more specific, he set out to study the extensive and highly com-
plex trading system carried out amongst the archipelagos off the eastern coast
of New Guinea. This is known as the Kula and Malinowski’s research into it
has inspired numerous contributions from anthropologists since then. In order
to conduct his research, he based himself on the Trobriand Islands, and we will
allow his own words to set the scene for the beginning of his heroic journey:
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 35

Imagine yourself suddenly set down, surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical
beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails
away out of sight . . . Imagine further that you are a beginner, without previous experi-
ence, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you. For the white man is tempo-
rarily absent, or else unable or unwilling to waste any of his time on you. This exactly
describes my first initiation into fieldwork on the south coast of New Guinea.

(Malinowski 1922, p. 4)

This beginning is a far cry from Frazer and from the sort of accounts of what
were referred to as savages at that time. There were, of course, precursors of
Malinowski, like Haddon, Rivers, Seligman and Myers who went out into the
field. This writer recently attended a conference celebrating the centenary of the
Torres Strait Expedition carried out by the above-mentioned group of anthro-
pologists and psychologists. The tone of the proceedings was at times tragic
with many of the participants lamenting the split that took place between the
two disciplines shortly after that joint venture. The ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’, as
the object of anthropological study was referred to, held a double role in the
subjective minds of those pursuing the research. On the one hand, the ‘savage’
was regarded as the result of an inferior form of socio-cultural development as
the evolutionary model of society prevailed well into the 20th century. This
model had ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ placed on the lower rungs of the evolu-
tionary ladder in the place of shadow to western culture, which in turn was
placed at the top of a pyramid-like structure in its superiority to everything that
had gone before. From that vantage point, it was thought that immersion
amongst ‘savages’ was guaranteed to activate that side of the white man who
was then liable ‘to go native’, part of what Conrad was attempting to describe
in his portrayal of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.
The evolutionary model of historical stages had no place in Malinowski’s
schema and his approach pioneered instead the idea of the anthropologist in the
field totally immersing himself in the here-and-now of the culture that was
under scrutiny. Consequently, he threw himself energetically, both psychologic-
ally and physically, into village life. His ‘functional’ method was essentially one
that acknowledged that every custom or ritual in a given social context served
a purpose however seemingly bizarre or incomprehensible.
In the course of the two years that he lived amongst the Trobrianders,
Malinowski culled some of the great ethnographic classics, including Argo-
nauts of the Western Pacific. These stand as monuments to his ‘scientific’
method of enquiry and to himself as the man of science whose labours gave
‘a new vision of savage humanity’ (Malinowski 1922, p. xv). Jung would surely
have resonated with this scientific approach as may be seen from the following
by Malinowski’s illustrious foreword writer, Frazer:

It is characteristic of Dr. Malinowski’s method that he takes full account of the com-
plexity of human nature . . . He remembers that man is a creature of emotion at least
as much as of reason, and he is constantly at pains to discover the emotional as well
36 Ann Casement

as the rational basis of human action. The man of science, like the man of letters, is
too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting . . . a single side of our complex
and many-sided being. Of this one-sided treatment Molière is a conspicuous
example . . . All his characters are seen only in the flat: one of them is a miser, another
a hypocrite, another a coxcomb, and so on; but not one of them is a man. All are dum-
mies dressed up to look very much like human beings . . . Very different is the presen-
tation of human nature in the greater artists, such as Cervantes and Shakespeare: their
characters are solid, being drawn not from one side only but from many.

(Malinowski 1922, p. ix)

We see from this introduction that we are not going to be presented with a flat
treatise on Stone Age economic man’s calculations of profit and loss, and
Malinowski’s account of the Kula is indeed one that takes equal cognizance of
emotional and aesthetic needs. A short summary of this will now follow to give
a flavour of his whole approach.
Let us start as Malinowski does by giving a brief description – in the here-
and-now of the ‘anthropological present’ – of the peoples and surroundings of the
South Sea Islands. The Papuo-Melanesians who inhabit the coastal regions of
these islands are expert navigators and traders, using large sea-going canoes to
ply their trade or for raids of war and conquest. Alongside these activities there
exists an extensive and highly complex trading system known as the Kula and
this embraces within its circuit a part of New Guinea itself, as well as, the archi-
pelagos that lie to its east, including the Trobriand Islands. It is a ‘total’ system
in the sense that it is paramount in the lives of all the islanders and encapsulates
their ambitions, ideologies, desires and practical considerations.
Malinowski’s description of the ‘proper conditions for ethnographic work’
involves the utmost commitment on the part of the fieldworker. For instance,
he advocates living close enough to a white man’s compound for access to
stores and a refuge in times of sickness and need for company. But it must be
far enough away for the fieldworker to immerse himself in the culture and in
that way become familiar with the people and customs that are inherent in that
culture.
In comparing this with what happens during the course of an analysis, there
are several rituals that the two have in common, viz. the withdrawal from the
familiar world into one that feels strange and often uncomfortable; the entry
into an alien culture – that of the unconscious realm and the slow acclimitiza-
tion that comes about through increasing familiarity with that realm. In other
words, as one increasingly learns to live amongst the shadow parts of one’s per-
sonality, the more one can withstand the lure of the retreat to the safety of the
known ego conscious part.
Malinowski goes on to describe how the slow mutual acclimitization of
fieldworker/indigenous to each other’s presence leads to each feeling in touch
with the other, which is the prerequisite for successful working together. It is
by immersing oneself in what Malinowski calls ‘the imponderabilia of actual
life’ that the fieldworker in time gets at ‘the full body and blood of actual native
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 37

life [and] fills out soon the skeleton of abstract constructions’ (ibid., p. 18).
What Malinowski is pointing to here sounds very close to what Jung says about
‘the collaboration of conscious and unconscious data’ (Jung 1960, para. 167).
Jung goes on to say that only by going forward freely to meet the depressed
or disturbed states of mind through fantasy can the challenge from the uncon-
scious be met. An individual in analysis may often wish to find relief from this
discomfort and retreat back into the conscious realm, but it is only, as Jung puts it:
In the intensity of emotional disturbance itself lies the value, the energy which he
should have at his disposal in order to remedy the state of reduced adaptation. Noth-
ing is achieved by repressing this state or devaluing it rationally.

(Ibid, para. 166, Jung’s italics)

In the same way that Malinowski expresses the tension that existed for him in
having to adapt to life amongst the indigenous so Jung points to the tension
between the conscious and unconscious realms and says that they ‘seldom agree
as to their contents and their tendencies’ (ibid., para. 132). Further ‘the uncon-
scious behaves in a compensatory or complementary manner towards the con-
scious. We can also put it the other way round and say that the conscious
behaves in a complementary manner towards the unconscious’ (ibid., para.
132). ‘The tendencies of the conscious and the unconscious are the two factors
that together make up the transcendent function’ (ibid., para. 145).
Malinowski’s psychological approach to ethnography can be summed up in
his own words as follows:
Neither aspect, the intimate, as little as the legal, are to be glossed over. Yet as a rule
in ethnographic accounts we have not both but either the one or the other – and, so
far, the intimate one has hardly ever been properly treated. In all social relations
besides the family ties, even those between mere tribesmen and, beyond that, between
hostile or friendly members of different tribes, meeting on any sort of social business,
there is this intimate side, expressed by the typical details of intercourse, the tone of
their behaviour in the presence of one another.

(Malinowski 1922: p. 19)

He goes on to say:
Out of such plunges into the lives of natives – and I made them frequently not only
for study’s sake but because everyone needs human company – I have carried away a
distinct feeling that their behaviour, their manner of being, in all sorts of tribal trans-
actions, became more transparent and easily understandable than it had been before.

(ibid., p. 22)

A central area in Malinowski’s approach that has tended to be neglected in the

analytic one is the importance of socio-cultural factors in forming individuals.
Let us look at two examples from the ethnographic literature to show how
mental states receive a certain stamp by the institutions in which individuals live
and by the vehicle of thought, namely language. One example is that a man
38 Ann Casement

living in a polyandrous society cannot experience the same feelings of jealousy

as a man living in a society which values monogamy, even though he may well
experience some elements of those kind of feelings. Likewise, an individual
living within the sphere of the Kula cannot become permanently attached to
certain of the objects that are involved in this system of exchange, in spite of
the fact that these are the very objects that are most valued.

The Kula
As this paper has made frequent mention of the Kula, a short description of that
system and its significance for the various anthropologists who have made it an
object of study might be useful. For Malinowski, it represented a prime example
of a system of gift exchange based on reciprocity brought about through social
pressure. The gifts in this system were non-utilitarian, but highly symbolic, cere-
monial necklaces and arm shells that circulated between men of high status
within the Kula circuit. In a network of ritual exchanges between permanent
partners, they were exchanged only for each other, some pieces being so valu-
able that they had individual identities. The principal gifts were of two kinds:
arm shells (mwali) made from conus shell and worn by men as bracelets for the
upper arm, and necklaces (soulava) for women, made of strings of spondylus
shells. In general, these articles had no value outside their significance in the
Kula, but the possession of a fine mwali or soulava, each with its own name and
history and traditional associations, enhanced the prestige of the owner and his
village. The articles were not kept permanently but sooner or later were given
in exchange for ones of comparable importance.
Kula expeditions were made more or less regularly between specific com-
munities by fleets of sailing canoes, which often covered great distances.
Members of a visiting expedition exchanged only with their own recognized
partners in the host village, and established ‘trade routes’ were followed. The
life of the tribal groups of this area was closely bound up in the institution of
the Kula as it affected to some degree almost all the activities of the participating
communities.
What Malinowski’s work in this area tried to show was that by establishing
relationships between givers and receivers, prestation is central to the social
construction of the person. In other words, the more exchanges, i.e. partners a
man has, the greater his social status. Malinowski’s psychological approach to
this system attempted to show why magic played such a central role in the
Trobriand preparations for the Kula in helping reduce anxiety aroused by the
departure for hostile environments and situations and the dangerous voyages
across treacherous seas.
Durkheim’s nephew, Marcel Mauss’ later analysis of the Kula concentrated
on the obligatory nature of reciprocity that was a central feature of this system
of exchange. His basic thesis centred on the concept that the spirit of the donor
was contained in the gift and that this would be alienated from the former if
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 39

there was not some form of return made. He went on from this to advocate a
pre-capitalist system of values which would represent a collective basis for
moral action and the restoration of unalienated human social relations.
Lévi-Strauss took this thesis further in stating that gift giving forged alliances
between groups and turned potential enemies into allies. For him, the classic
example of this was the exchange of women between groups. Furthermore,
according to him, this exchange was based on incest prohibition, which thus
became the ultimate foundation of all human society.
To return to Malinowski, his study of the Kula was an attempt to replace
Durkheim’s theory of collective consciousness with a ‘new humanism’. Thus,
for Malinowski, the functional explanation of the Kula and, by extension, all
such systems of exchange fulfilled the need to give for the sake of giving. How-
ever, subsequent anthropological research into this system has emphasized the
political implications of power and hierarchy that are an inherent part of it.

A diary in the strict sense of the term

A short summary of the writing of a diary by Malinowski, its subsequent loss and
discovery and the decision to publish it would be in order here to set the stage for
the shadow side of the ethnographic accounts that he submitted for publication.
Malinowski was in the United States when the Second World War broke out
and he decided to stay on there and accepted the post of Professor of Anthro-
pology at Yale. As a result, he asked for some of the material he had left at the
London School of Economics to be sent to him, but a great deal of the rest was
kept in storage at LSE.
In 1942, he died suddenly of a heart attack and his widow eventually dis-
covered several diaries that had been kept by him, written almost entirely in
Polish. In 1960, she talked to one of Malinowski’s publishers about the diaries
and they jointly took the decision to publish them. His widow, Valetta, felt that
this should be done in spite of the fact that the diaries are of a strictly private
nature and would reveal the personality of the man behind the public work by
which he is known.
This decision was a controversial one and the anthropologist, Raymond
Firth, in his introduction to the diary expresses his own reservations as follows:
‘It is very interesting to have these side lights on his personality. But how far his
innermost personal feelings should be exposed must always remain a question’
(Malinowski 1967, p. xix). Firth goes on to talk of the brutality, even degrad-
ation, which the record shows, but advises any who wish to sneer to first be
equally frank with their own thoughts. Malinowski was a complex personality,
and some of his less admirable traits, viz. his shadow, are on display in the
diary. They are in shocking contrast to the high aspirations expressed in
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, where he writes that the study of ethnology
can foster the acquisition of wisdom and enable an understanding of the stu-
dent’s own nature to make it finer, intellectually and artistically. To quote
40 Ann Casement

Malinowski’s own words: ‘The study of Ethnology . . . might become one of the
most deeply philosophic, enlightening and elevating disciplines of scientific
research’ (Malinowski 1922, p. 518).
He was one of the key founders of social anthropology and a deep thinker
who tried to relate his discoveries about human nature and society to the broad
issues of the world around him. The diary covers the period of his life when he
was carrying out field research amongst the Trobrianders and the other island-
ers in the area, a period of approximately nineteen months from September
1914 to August 1915, and then from October 1917 to July 1918. The diary
reveals the darker side of the relations of an anthropologist to his human mater-
ial in its use of derogatory language where he writes as follows: ‘The niggers
were getting on my nerves, and I could not concentrate’ (Malinowski 1967,
p. 284). The term ‘nigger’ recurs at other places in the diary, as do crudities like
‘Kiss my arse’. There is also his hypochondria and growing dependence on
iodine and quinine, interspersed with occasional doses of arsenic.
Both Malinowski and Kurtz have to leave the woman they love behind in the
‘civilized’ world when they set out on their respective journeys. For each, this
enforced parting results in severe separation anxiety, exacerbated in
Malinowski’s case, as he was still emotionally involved with another woman
and suffered pangs of guilt and self-reproach. ‘I am still in love with [T], but
not consciously, not explicitly . . . but physically – my body longs for her’ (ibid.,
p. 15). He is torn between this longing and his love for another woman ‘E. R. M.’
(Elsie R. Masson), who became his wife in 1919. She seems to represent his
spiritual anima and he turns repeatedly to her in the diary for guidance and
absolution. His constant erotic lapses – both physical and mental – tortured
him, and it is to E. R. M. that he turns for solace. A telling line of his goes as
follows: ‘All the time I feel grief and desperate sadness such as I felt as a child
when I was separated from Mother for a few days’ (ibid., p. 293).
Most significantly of all there is an autoerotic dream recorded early in the diary:
‘I had a strange dream; homo-sex, with my own double as partner, strangely
autoerotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth like mine to kiss,
a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine . . .’ (ibid., p. 12).
This dream indicates a merger of shadow and anima, but there is also a sym-
bolic homosexuality in some of the Trobriand practices, which might point to
Malinowski’s unconscious identification with these aspects of indigenous cul-
ture. This is what may be manifesting in the dream along with an archetypal
homoerotic aspect of material associated with ‘the double’.
On the one hand, the outpourings in the diary must have enabled
Malinowski to continue to function, but it also meant that shadow aspects,
through lack of relationship, could not be integrated into his conscious person-
ality and remained, instead, split off and undifferentiated. Throughout the first
half of the diary, shadow material is in abundance and continues to be so in the
second half in spite of his attempt to overcome the metaphysical regret of what
he expresses as: ‘You’ll never fuck them all’ (ibid, p. 114).
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 41

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine of a Polish family. His original name
was Korzeniowski. The two names are significant for a man who had two quite
distinct personalities: one energetic and steadfast, who had proved himself by
qualifying as a British master mariner. The other, known only to his wife and
friends, was given to frequent bouts of suicidal depression, which may indicate
a serious mood disorder with biological involvement.
A brief summary of the events that led to the writing of Heart of Darkness,
is called for before embarking on an account of the shadowy figure of Kurtz,
who lies both at the heart of the story and of the interior into which the narra-
tor, Marlow, ventures to find him.
Korzeniowski/Conrad became a sailor at the age of 17 and first landed in
England in 1878 when he would have been 21. In 1890, Conrad was engaged
by the Belgian Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo to take
command of one of the Company’s steamers in the Congo. Marlow’s bizarre
experiences as detailed in the story are taken from life and for Conrad the jour-
ney was a total disaster. He was disgusted by the ill treatment of the natives and
the corruption and scramble for gain on the part of the whites. In his notebook
he detailed many of the awful sensory experiences he encountered: the smell of
a dead body, the sight of a skeleton tied to a post, the lack of water, the heat,
mosquitoes, noise and constant drumming.
Conrad’s journey into the interior took him to Stanley Falls where the
steamer picked up a fatally ill company agent called Georges Antoine Klein.
Like Kurtz, Klein died on the return journey. In the manuscript of Heart of
Darkness, Kurtz is initially called Klein. At the end of this journey, Conrad fell
ill with fever and dysentery and returned disgusted to England. Its horrors
haunted his imagination for many years after and he never forgot what he saw
in the Congo of human degradation and indescribable evil. Much of this is
expressed in Heart of Darkness, where passion and reason, savagery and civil-
ization are juxtaposed. The title itself is ambiguous as it could imply that there
is a vital heart at the end of the journey that Marlow discovers as an antidote
to the superficiality and conventions of Western Europe. Or it could point to
the opposite – that his quest will end in an ultimate blackness in which lies the
source of the brute origins of human nature.
The narrative itself points to Marlow/Conrad’s journey into this ambiguous
darkness as he starts to tell the story of Kurtz on the Nellie, a cruising yawl
anchored on the Thames. The narrative oscillates between light and darkness –
the light of civilization at times being portrayed as a benevolent force that
enlightens an inferior primitive state of human development. This is exempli-
fied in Marlow’s recollection that in Roman times England itself was a place of
darkness, where the Roman legions confronted the savage origins of their own
being. However, the reader is made aware that the darkness is not only something
to be overcome, but also that it retains its own potency, to which abomination
42 Ann Casement

civilized humans may easily succumb. Kurtz, like Milton’s Satan, may be a devil
difficult to resist.
In the story, Marlow/Conrad goes to Brussels to sign on as the Company
skipper. Brussels reminds him of a white sepulchre, but two women knitting
with black wool guard the Company office. They guard the entry to darkness
like the Fates. From there he sets off on his voyage to hell to the final confron-
tation with the devil incarnate, Kurtz himself. The only way Marlow can sur-
vive the horrors he encounters in the Congo is through work – the simple task
of repairing the battered vessel that is to carry him into the interior.
In his first encounter with the sick Kurtz he refers to the latter as ‘that
Shadow – this wandering and tormented thing’ (Conrad 1995, p. 143). And
again: ‘I did not betray Kurtz – it was ordered I should never betray him – it
was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to
deal with this shadow by myself alone – and to this day I don’t know why I was
so jealous of sharing with anyone the peculiar blackness of that experience’
(ibid., p. 141).
So much of what Conrad writes is dredged up from the depths of his own
psyche, but in Heart of Darkness, one of the great psychological masterpieces,
he is pointing to an experience of shadow at its most profound – an encounter
with the darkness which will never reveal the ultimate source of its mystery.
There are glimpses in the narrative of Kurtz’s diabolical existence in the inter-
ior where the natives worship him as a god. By the time of their encounter, Kurtz
is fatally ill. He and Marlow spend a short time together on the return journey
out of the heart of darkness on the rusty steamboat until the moment of Kurtz’s
death when he cries out: ‘The horror! The horror!’ (Conrad 1995, p. 112).
It may be that what Conrad is portraying in this powerful drama is in part
the essential experience of any individual who embarks on the inner journey.
Perhaps it is only through this confrontation with absolute darkness that one
can release potential sources of energy that are otherwise repressed by the
illusions and conventions of society.
However, there is a collective shadow in Heart of Darkness, which may be
thought of as that which aggressive colonization has called out in indigenous
people that is not just about individual shadow. King Leopold II of Belgium was
the ‘owner’ of the Congo Free State – where Heart of Darkness is set – from 1885
to 1908. He was responsible for what Conrad called ‘the vilest scramble for loot
that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’ (Hochshild 1999, p. 142).
The story of that time is one of rampant collective shadow and is a grisly mix
of greed, lies and murder. About 10 million people were wiped out – roughly
half the population of the Congo – in little over a decade. This was reported by
Roger Casement, who was a diplomat in the Congo at the time, aided by scores
of missionaries and dissident officials in the King’s service. (Casement himself
is a strong contender as the model for Kurtz). The story in brief is that entire
villages were forced to tap rubber and those who failed to collect enough would
have their hands cut off. Thousands of others died of exhaustion and hunger.
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 43

Forced labour was used to build roads and railways, the quicker to extract the
loot to build sumptuous palaces in Brussels and Ostend.
Other writers have found something primeval and sinister at the far reaches
of the Congo River. Graham Greene wrote of fear in the throbbing night and
V. S. Naipaul of a seizure of dread. The reality of the place is that in the thick
forests of central Africa there is a singular sense of immensity and timelessness
combined with a rapid and often violent cycle of birth and death which can
induce a profound metaphysical terror. Recent history has compounded its
mythic identity as the ‘heart of darkness’ as it has come to be known as the
scene of the Katanga uprising and the birthplace of AIDS. At the end of Heart
of Darkness, Marlow returns to Brussels, the sepulchral city, broken in health –
both physically and mentally – by the heart of a conquering darkness. This mir-
rors Conrad’s experience; he seems never to have been able to expunge the
horrors of the Congo from his imagination.
Evil, as Conrad well understood, dwells in the heart of every human and part
of what the story portrays is the intruder’s discovery of evil within himself.
Around the turn of the century, in the depths of the Congo, the bonds of
humanity were unbound and the trappings of civilization cast aside, releasing
something diabolical, which exists potentially within everyone.

Humanity’s black collective shadow

Jung was only too aware of the reality of evil as a force in its own right and was
in disagreement with the Christian view of evil as a privation of good known
as the doctrine of privatio boni. As he warns: ‘None of us stands outside
humanity’s black collective shadow’ (Jung 1964, para. 297). He goes on to say
that the lack of insight into our own potential evil deprives us of the ‘capacity
to deal with evil’ (ibid., para. 297; Jung’s italics). It is important to note here
that Jung equates what he calls ‘black collective shadow’ with evil so that
shadow and evil are not of a different order from each other. In particular, he
accuses the European of having committed crimes against the coloured races in
the process of colonization and says:
In this respect the white man carries a very heavy burden indeed. It shows us a picture
of the common human shadow that could hardly be painted in blacker colours. The
evil that comes to light in man and that undoubtedly dwells within him is of gigantic
proportions . . .

(ibid., para. 296)

The two writers whose work is under consideration in this paper were undoubt-
edly affected by this collective shadow. In Malinowski’s case, one sees evidence
of his shadow side revealed in the diary he kept throughout his sojourn in the
Trobriands. One can imagine the powerful impact the positive aspects of the
Trobriand culture had on him at a time when the so-called advanced cultures
were demonstrating their catastrophic failure at civilized relations with each
44 Ann Casement

other. As a result of this, Malinowski had to endure being rejected and treated
with suspicion as an enemy alien who was in danger of being interned. Instead,
he found amongst these so-called ‘savages’ an intimacy and respectful mutual-
ity in relationship embodied in the Kula system, which was in stark contrast to
the horrors being perpetrated by the ‘civilized’ nation states back on the West-
ern Front. The profound envy that this discovery may have engendered in him
is portrayed in the disparaging comments encapsulated in his diary. His own
failings and that of western culture were highlighted in comparison with the
Trobriand Islanders, and it is this unintegrated shadow as well as his exploitative
sexuality that he pours into his diary.
The white colonialist, Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, is confronted instead with
the Colonial Ego’s tyrannical control and exploitation of the Congo and
becomes totally identified with it. This is a sort of psychic inflation that can
overcome anyone who is exposed to powerful forces in the environment, which
can then activate the darkest recesses of shadow in the individual’s unconscious.
By enacting rather than integrating his shadow, Kurtz unleashed deeply
destructive forces both in himself and in the community he created. The Congo
was rendered savage by the colonialists who exploited it and who unleashed
evil by the projection of their collective shadow onto it.

Conclusion
The three remarkable men, Jung, Conrad and Malinowski, whose work is
touched on in this paper, shared many cultural sources, including the German
Romantic tradition, as inspiration for their writing. There is space to mention
only one briefly, Sturm und Drang (Storm and Urge), a late 18th century
German literary movement that exalted nature and individualism over the
Enlightenment’s extolling of reason and was the collective shadow of its time.
This movement was stamped by its Promethean and irrationalist motifs whose
harbinger was Johann Gottfried von Herder, a German critic, philosopher and
Lutheran theologian. In 1769 he set out on a sea voyage from Riga to Nantes
which was to completely change his life.
His Journal of My Voyage in the Year 1769 bears witness to the change that
this voyage effected in him in bringing him a deeper understanding of his destiny.
He saw himself as a groundless being, who had left the safe shore and was jour-
neying into an unknown future and whose vocation was to unveil that future
through insights gained from the past through his study of folk tales and songs.
According to Herder, it was in such unrefined forms, which exist in every cul-
ture’s pre-civilized period, that genuine poetic utterance is to be found, which can
reveal hitherto-hidden aspects of humanity. His influence made its mark not only
on the three writers featured in the present paper but also on others such as
Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and the philosophers, Hegel and Dilthey.
Jung constantly warns of psychic inflation if the ego becomes gripped by the
powerful instincts and images that may be activated in the unconscious, and
Encountering the shadow in rites of passage 45

this seems to have been the terrible fate that befell Kurtz. Malinowski used his
diaries as a safe container for his shadow which became activated through the
confrontation with his own failings and that of western civilization that were
highlighted in comparison with the Trobriand Islanders. Kurtz found no such
container and did immeasurably more damage because his ego became totally
identified with the collective shadow by which he was surrounded.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Le concept d’ombre de Jung est exploré dans cet article à partir des écrits relatifs à sa
réalisation et son assimilation, écrits dans lesquels Jung dit que l’ombre peut être vécue
dans chaque individu comme «L’autre soi» dénié et régressé. Il y a dans le tableau un
autre élément pointé par Jung; le fait que l’ombre contient plus que quelque chose de
purement négatif. L’article étudie aussi la rencontre personnelle avec l’ombre et le vécu
de cette rencontre décrite par l’anthropologue Bronislaw Malinowski et l’écivain Joseph
Conrad, sans tralter ceux-ci d’une quelconque façon comme des «patients». Pour chacun
des trois la rencontre avec l’ombre s’est faite alors qu’ils étaient en train de vivre un rite
de passage personnel. Chacun doit beaucoup au mouvement romantique. Dans ce con-
texte, sont aussi regardés les écrits du philosophe et théologien Johann Gottfried Von
Herder qui lors d’un voyage en mer est rentré dans une compréhension plus profonde de
sa destinée.

Jungs Konzept des Schatten wird in dieser Arbeit untersucht anhand seiner Schriften
über dessen Verwirklichung und Assimilierung; er sagt dort, daß der Schatten erfahren
werden kann als regrediertes und verleugnetes ‘anderes Selbst’ in jedem Individuum.
Jedoch ist dies nicht das ganze Bild, und er weist auch auf die Tatsache hin, daß der
Schatten mehr enthält als etwas lediglich Negatives. Ohne sie in irgendeiner Hinsicht als
‘Patienten’ zu behandeln, wird die Arbeit auch die Erfahrung des Anthropologen Bronis-
law Malinowski und des Schriftstellers in deren persönlichen Begegnungen mit dem
Schatten berühren. Alle drei begegneten dem Schatten, während sie durch eigene Über-
gangsriten hindurchgingen; jeder verdankt viel der romantischen Bewegung. In diesem
Kontext wird die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Schriften des Philosophen und Theologen
Johann Gottfried von Herder gerichtet, der ein tieferes Verständnis seiner Bestimmung
im Verlaufe einer Seereise entdeckte.

Il concetto junghiano di ombra viene esplorato in questo lavoro percorrendo gli scritti
sulla sua comprensione e integrazione nei quali egli sostiene che ogni individuo può fare
esperienza dell’ombra come di un ‘altro sè’ regressivo e rinnegato. Tuttavia questo non
è il quadro esaustivo e Jung sottolinea il fatto che l’ombra contiene in sè qualcosa che
non è eslusivamente negativa. Pur non considerandoli affatto come ‘pazienti’, questo
lavoro parlerà delle esperienze dell’antropologo Bronislaw Malinowski e dello scrittore
Joseph Conrad come esempi del loro personale incontro con l’ombra. Tutti e tre incon-
trarono l’ombra mentre individualmente attraversavano riti di passaggio e ciascuno di
loro deve molto al movimento Romantico. In tale contesto viene poi diretta l’attenzione
46 Ann Casement

al filosofo e teologo Johann Gottfried von Herder, che raggiunse una più profonda com-
prensione del suo destino nel corso di un viaggio per mare.

En este trabajo se explora el concepto de Jung sobre la Sombra a través de sus escritos
sobre su realización y asimilación donde él dice que la Sombra puede ser vivenciada
como el “otro ser” reprimido y negado en cada individuo. De cualquier forma, ello no
representa la totalidad de la situación y el apunta al hecho de que la Sombra contiene
algo más que lo puramente negativo. Este papel, si bien en ninguna forma tratándolos
como a pacientes, estudia las experiencias de el antropólogo, Bronislaw Malinowski, y
del escritor, Joseph Conrad, en sus personales encuentros con la sombra. Los tres se
encontraron con la sombra mientras experimentaban Ritos de Pasaje (de Iniciación?) en
ellos mismos y que deben mucho al movimiento Romántico. Es en este contexto que dir-
ige su atención a los escritos del filósofo y teólogo, Johann Gottfried von Herder, quien
descubriera un sentido mas profundo a su destino en el transcurso de un viaje por mar.

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[MS first received November 2000; final version July 2002]